What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 14.0.797.0 was out, so I updated to see what's new. It seems that there's a new V8 engine (3.4.4.0) as well as improved print performance and a few Mac-specific things with the text areas and voice over. Nice, but nothing really amazing at this point in the game. Sad to say, but the browser has pretty much stagnated - with the exception of HTML5 and JavaScript, it's pretty much the same things it was a year ago. Nice to see things mature, but it takes a little fun out of it when the major browsers are all really the same.

This morning I saw that Skitch 1.0.6 was out, so I went to my Skitch app and hit "Check for Updates...". I was then told "You're on the latest version - 1.0.4". OK, something's not right. So I went and did a little digging. It seems that the free version is crippled now, and the good version I had was no longer available in that format, so I had to purchase it again for a "mere" $25. Even though, it said on the web site it'd be $10. Hmmm...

OK, I like Skitch, and I'd probably have bought it without a grumble if I'd read about it in some email from the Skitch crew, but that's not how it happened, and I can't help but feel a little miffed at the way it was done. No warning, I'm stuck on an old version and not getting updates. No upgrade path, no continued support. Kinda bites.

I'm sure I'll get over it. I'm still a huge fan, but this is liable to prompt me to send them a letter and say "Hey guys... not nice. Try harder next time."

Hard to believe my second kid is getting a learner's permit. Yikes! I'm sure there are plenty of 49 year olds that have grandkids, but I'm not rushing anything, thank you very much. She's a teenager for certain now... frustrating and amazing all at the same time. I'm lucky to know her.

This morning they 'jumped the version' and the Google Chrome team put 13.x into 'beta' and started the dev series with Google Chrome dev 14.0.794.0. This guy is supposed to have the latest V8 javascript engine - 3.4.3.0, and quite a few fixes on different platforms. It's the inevitable march of progress for Chrome, and it's getting a little boring, to be honest. There's nothing really new coming out of that group, and in a way, that's OK. Browsers are OK to be boring - they are supposed to get out of the way and let the user to their thing. So OK... I'll give them boring.

This afternoon I saw that Twitterrific for Mac 4.2 was out with a nice list of features, improvements, and bug fixes. Unfortunately, among them is not my bug with the graphics-mode switching. It seems that this guy is still not smart enough to properly detect this and cope. Kinda depressing. I'm still having to stay on integrated graphics or deal with a broken Twitter client. Not like it's the only one, Twitter's Official client is just as bad.

Sad.

Over the lat few days, it's been clear that there's been a problem with Adium 1.4.2b2 and ICQ. Basically, ICQ is saying there's no connection, or the developer ID is wrong - lots and lots of problems. I checked earlier today on the Adium IRC channel to see if they knew this was going to be fixed in an upcoming release. What I found was that ICQ is big in Germany - who knew? Anyway, 'yes', it was going to be fixed in 1.4.2 final, and I just needed to hang on.

I then asked if they had even an estimate on when that might be released - as I'm really tired of all the errors and alert klaxons going off. They said that they hoped to release it today. Very nice!

Sure enough, a few hours later, I got a tweet that Adium 1.4.2 was out, with a pretty nice list of updates. The lone problem was that the version of libpurple (old 'gaim code') had a few nice MSN features, but in three areas, it slipped backward. The Adium developers decided to go for the greatest good for the greatest number, and use the new libpurple, and slip on the three features. Evidently, it made some MSN users less than happy.

I can understand their concern, but at the same time, I can see why the Adium developers did what they did. They didn't write libpurple, and they have to take it as-is and use it. They then just have to decide which version to use, and to them, the greatest good was in moving forward, and the unfortunate consequence was that a few things slipped.

I'm sure it'll be updated soon to 1.4.3 with a new libpurple, and that's OK too. It's what the group needs to do. I just don't see people getting that upset about it. But then again, I don't see a lot of things...

This morning I was looking to see if anyone had updated the Gist Vim plugin to support the other functions that I haven't yet gotten time to check on. I found the someone had put it up on GitHub, and checked to see if their repo had the fix I made to the plugin yesterday. He hadn't. But that got me to thinking - Why don't you fork it, and fix it yourself? So I did.

I've now got a repo at GitHub for my fork of the Gist Vim plugin that does a few things that the original didn't:

• Pulling a Gist doesn't split the window - it takes the whole buffer
• Pulling a Gist works with the new API v3 GitHub spec

I pushed it up - worked like a charm, and now I've got a place to keep this bad boy up to date. I still haven't had time to look at the other functions, but I will, and I'll fix them, if needed. The scripting language is pretty nice, and I can't imagine I'd need anything it doesn't support.

It's silly, but this is my first fork on GitHub, and I'm really pretty giddy about it. Jazzed, even.

Today I was trying to use the Gist Vim plugin and noticed that it was a bit broken. In fact, it wasn't even close to working. I was getting HTML redirection messages, and that's not good. So I decided to take a few minutes and see if I could get it back working again. I looked at the site and noticed that it hadn't been updated recently, so it was going to be up to me.

What I figured was that it was in the URL for getting the Gist from GitHub. That's in this code:

function! s:GistGet(user, token, gistid, clipboard)
  let url = 'https://gist.github.com/'.a:gistid.'.txt'
  let winnum = bufwinnr(bufnr('gist:'.a:gistid))

and after a bit of time reading the GitHub API site, and fiddling around with the URL, I was able to see that the correct URL is really:

function! s:GistGet(user, token, gistid, clipboard)
  let url = 'https://raw.github.com/gist/'.a:gistid
  let winnum = bufwinnr(bufnr('gist:'.a:gistid))

So I changed that in my copies, and I'm good to go. For a while.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 13.0.782.10 was out with an updated version of Flash included. Since it's the only Flash player I have on by system, it's fine that it's at least contained there. I just don't like Flash all that much. I've also read that there was a Flash Player update from Adobe recently due to some security problems, and I'm not exactly sure if this guy is that patched version, or if this is one version behind. In any case, it's the update and I've got it now.

[6/8] UPDATE: that didn't last long... 13.0.782.11 is out already with a very minimal set of release notes. From the comments, it's not clear that this was really about UI tweaks, as much as there was a real problem in one of the builds and this was a quick fix for that guy. Who knows.

[6/9] UPDATE: neither did that... 13.0.782.13 is out today and it's got the same release notes about UI tweaks and stability fixes. I guess it's nice that chrome remembers my open tabs so it's painless to restart.

This morning I decided to check and see if SubEthaEdit had been updated and sure enough, 3.5.4 was out with what appears to be just a single change: Mac OS X Lion fixes. Shucks. There were a few things that I had hoped they'd put into a new release, but I have to face facts: it's exactly what they want it to be. No big changes planned. I'm going to have to accept that this is "it".

I'm not really shocked. It is a great editor. It's just not going to beat BBEdit and MacVim. It has "jump scrolling", and that's too abrupt for me. It's method locator is nice, but it's not as nice as BBEdit's. It's find uses the nice Safari-style "jump balloon", but BBEdit is close and Vim isn't bad for a cross-platform tool.

I read an article recently where someone went through all this on the Mac and said (basically): "No free lunch. BBEdit, MacVim, Emacs - learn one." I laughed a lot at the article, and myself, because he's right on the money. If you want a really powerful editor then these are your choices. Live with it. I guess I was hoping for the SubEthaEdit upstart, but that's not going to happen. It is what it is, and they are happy with it. Great. Back to BBEdit and MacVim.