What's it all about, Alfie?

I've been holding onto this for quite a while, but it's a really nice component of Mail.app on Mac OS X. If you have entries in your Address Book then Mail.app puts their picture in the corner of your mail messages. It's a neat little way to "see" the people that are emailing you. But what if you have a lot of mailing lists, or stuff like that? You don't want to have them in your Address Book. Well… you don't have to.

This posting reminds us that we can simply create a directory of images, and with properly named TIFF files, we can give Mail.app all the information it needs to match up images to senders. Simply:

  $ cd ~/Library/Images
  $ mkdir People

then, for every email address you want to have associated with an image, make a file in that directory with the name: email_addr.tiff. So if you wanted to have an image for everything coming from yoyo@gimme.com, you'd place a TIFF file in the People directory named yoyo@gimme.com.tiff. Simple.

Restart Mail.app and it'll see the images and you're in business. Very slick.

This morning I noticed that once again, Google Chrome dev was update - this time to 17.0.938.0 and this time, it looks like the big changes for me is the new V8 Javascript engine to 3.7.6.0 which includes the new garbage collector. The release notes post indicates that downloads might be broken for some, but thankfully, that's not the main usage I have for Chrome, so I'm safe - for now. I'm happy to see Google keep moving forward on Chrome, it's about the only thing I'm positive about when it comes to Google. The engineers aren't running the show anymore, and it pains me to see the "Do no evil" corporation do such horribly bad things.

Sigh.

But at least Chrome is going well.

I remember years ago, Cabel S. writing about the nice little Javascript and graphics snip called FancyZoom that allows you to easily put thumbnail images on your web site, and then with a click, the full-size image is displayed. It's really pretty amazing. I downloaded it, and started messing with it a bit. I can understand the directory structure he chose - it's common for him, but for me, it was a little different, and that's OK fine with me. I was able to easily move things around a bit, get the links right, and it fit right into Liza's home page.

I remember it being a lot smoother back when it first came out, but now that machines and browsers are so much faster, it almost flashes up. Pretty neat, in my book. So I need to run it past Liza and see what she thinks, but I'm pretty pleased with it. What I need now is a lot of Liza's artwork and then we can get to organizing it in folders, etc. and then making thumbnails of the images, and we'll be ready to go.

I'm not sure if we'll end up needing to back-end this with a real service, but if we do, there's more than enough capability in PHP, should we need it, and I can even put up a little database to hold the information for the pages.

Pretty sweet.

As expected, Google Chrome dev 17.0.928.0 is out, and with it are a few big ticket items: the new V8 Javascript engine is at 3.6.6.3, there are additions to the incognito windows, and several changes to the linux version to speed it up. Nice work. I read in the comments to the last release that Google is trying to make the release cycle six weeks. It's something to strive for, but I think that's a little arbitrary as there's no way to know what the next six weeks will bring, and how that will impact the ability to release significant changes to the code.

More likely, it's an arbitrary scale to just "change the numbers" and the third number, 928, is really the number to watch. Still, it's nice they are trying to have something out regularly. It's a nice goal to have.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 16.0.912.21 was out, and while I'm still expecting 17.x any day now, it's nice to see that they are still looking into the finer points of the codebase. The release notes for this version are pretty tame - nothing amazing, but it's progress nonetheless.

This morning I noticed that the Growl Team had updated the Growl Version Detective to version 1.2, and with it, they changed significantly the interface and it's capabilities. In recent days, the Team had released the 1.3 SDK and the new version of the Growl Version Detective gathers together all the known Growl-based applications and lists their version of the Growl.framework. It then allows you to upgrade the app to version 1.3 of the framework, which is a nice new feature.

I was able to see that Colloquy was on 1.1.2, I think, and after trying to upgrade it to 1.2.2 myself, I didn't hold out a lot of hope that 1.3 was going to fix things. Silly me! I punched the button and restarted, and things started popping up in the proper style just like magic. Amazing. Clearly, they have done a lot of work on the 1.3 SDK, and then to put that into the Growl Version Detective was really a wonderful idea. Brilliant, in fact.

So I'm now just waiting for Colloquy to get an update. It's in the offing, waiting for the 1.3 SDK to become final, and then they should be able to update the codebase and release something. Looking forward to it.

Daniel released MarsEdit 3.3.5 with some nice support for right-to-left languages. Pretty nice internationalization, actually. I'm not sure I'm interested in doing that level of work, but I'm sure glad someone is. MarsEdit is a wonderful program and I use it every day that I'm not overloaded. It's something that's really enabled high quality postings on my journal. Very nice work.

This morning Google Chrome dev 16.0.912.12 was released and I picked it up. When I went to the release notes site, I saw that Google Chrome 15.0.874.102 was released to stable which just blows me away. That means that stable and beta are both 15.x.x.x and dev is on 16.x.x.x - that's not going to stay that way for long. I'm guessing dev is jumping to 17.x.x.x pretty soon. Additionally, there were no release notes for 16.0.912.12 at the time the code was available. So maybe it's coming sooner than later.

Always interesting times.

[10/28] UPDATE: don't blink - they just released 16.0.912.15 with typically sparse release notes. That's less than a day after the last release. Yup… it's about to jump to 17.* soon…

One of the things that I haven't liked about Colloquy and Adium is that for the sake of accuracy, they have all the join/part and connect/disconnect messages. The problem is that on busy IRC channels, or even some days when my friends on Adium are in and out, those messages are the vast majority of the messages I see in the window. That's not the ideal situation for me, so I was looking for a way to clean those messages out.

Unfortunately, there is no option on either app to remove these messages. Luckily, I found this in a conversation in the Colloquy chat room. It's how to change the CSS for the join/part messages so that they don't show. Neat idea! You just have to Option-Click on the Apperance button in Preferences and it'll pull it up in an editor, and you can add:

  .event {
    display: none;
  }

and then a quick /reload style in Colloquy and the join/part messages are gone!

With this, I decided that it might be worth trying it on Adium as well. After all, I know from my own hacking on the Adium themes that they are CSS and HTML driven as well. In Adium, you need to get to the theme in question and then add:

  .status {
    display: none;
  }

to that file, and restart Adium and you're done!

These two changes are great! They allow me to keep more of the conversation in the window without scrolling. What a wonderful change!

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 16.0.912.4 was out, and includes the new V8 engine 3.6.6.5 as well as quite a few nice Mac improvements including OpenGL. It's getting faster on the redraw, that's for sure, so I'm happy about that. Keep them coming, guys!