What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 13.0.782.1 was out with some nice incremental features. I'm not a big printer, but I'm sure there are a lot of folks are, and that's important to them. Certainly, the comments are excited about the printing. Also the 2D acceleration looks to be nice - can't hurt, that's sure. It's nice and fast, which is what you'd expect from a peck of engineers, and as long as it keeps moving in that direction, that's great.

[3/3] UPDATE: that didn't take long. Already 13.0.782.4 is out. Must have been a pretty serious problem to issue a new release so soon. Well... glad they responded so quickly.

This morning I saw a tweet that Acorn 3.0.2 was out, so I downloaded the update right away. There are quite a few nice features in this release, mostly bug fixes and performance enhancements, but hey, those are nice too. Still the best alternative to the heavyweight Photoshop there is on the Mac. Love it.

I got a tweet today that MarsEdit 3.3 is out with some very nice little improvements. I like the ability to set the size of the font in the main window - smaller is always better for me. And the full-screen mode is nice for those professional writers that need to remove all the distractions. I guess that's not me, but that's OK too.

Great app. Great tool.

This morning I noticed that WordPress 3.1.3 was out, so I headed over to HostMonster and upgraded my installations with SimpleScripts. It's really an amazingly easy way to keep things up to date. Wonderful choice I made back in the day - HostMonster has been wonderful, and WordPress has been more than I could have imagined. Great.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 13.0.772.0 was out and the release notes show some nice progress. The latest V8 engine (3.3.8.1) as well as print preview are both nice. It's great to see them making progress.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 13.0.767.1 was out with a few nice updates, and something I hadn't noticed in the past - significantly better restart rendering performance. I mean Wow! When I restarted 13.0.767.1 the first page was there. This is in start contrast to taking a few seconds to get that first visible page up. Now I don't know if it's just cached, and that's OK, but either way, the impression is that it's UP, and fast. Very nice UI choice.

Since it's post-Google I/O days for Chrome, the boys at Google Chrome have released an update to the dev channel - 13.0.761.0, and this morning I picked it up. It seems to handle remembering page passwords better than the previous cut - maybe that's a fix, or just a different fork of the code. There's no release notes up (yet), but I'm guessing this is just the next in the series. Good enough for me.

This morning I saw another very interesting graphical equation editor for the Mac from chocomoko. I had used something like this back in my days at Auburn, and it was very nice, but Brisk seems to really be a step above what I had used. To be fair, that was 20 years ago, and on Mac OS System 7, but at the time it was awesome. I looked up the package a few months ago to see if they had been keeping up, and in a sense they were - but not in the UI - just the platform.

Brisk is a different way of doing it, and I have to say, it's an interesting take on the same problem. It's using LaTeX (I believe), but it's also completely drag-n-drop for the graphical editing, so it's possible to get into this easily and then use the LaTeX out of it for papers, etc. Not a bad idea. But it retains the complete Mac GUI with pasteboard access, etc. Nice touches.

If I have to write papers again, this is something I'm going to look into to be sure.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 12.0.742.30 was out and the release notes say the only difference in this release is that they updated to the latest version of Flash. I'd forgotten that Chrome was using an embedded Flash, and dropping the embedded H.264 decoder. Two sad points, but it's their choice to include it or not. I wonder if there's a plugin that does the H.264? Anyway, still polishing up the product.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 12.0.742.12 is out and it's still basically a polish release, but there's one rendering bug in the Mac version that's fixed as well. That's nice to see, but I hadn't hit that issue - yet. I'm guessing they are only a week or so away from releasing 13.0, and calling 12.0 the 'beta' release.

Progress.