What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I got a tweet saying that MarsEdit 3.1.6 is out with a few bug fixes and a few workflow changes. Should be nice, but I haven't noticed a better editor, but that's a big deal for him to tackle. It may take a lot longer to complete.

This morning I found that they have released MacVim Snapshot 57 with some interesting new features. It's an amazing port of Vim to the Mac, and the speed is just amazing. Well worth getting if you're a Vim fan on the Mac.

This morning there were a few updates, one interesting story and the worst UI make-over I've seen in ages. Let's start with the non-story. Dropbox 1.0.20 was released, and I was sure this was supposed-to auto-update itself as it saw there was new code to deploy. But it seems that I need to manually update each time. Not a horrible problem, but it's somewhat annoying. Still, it's a great app as it just works. Nice.

Then there's the story of Transmit 4.1.5 - it seems the guys at Panic wanted to have the same release schedule for the App Store version and the "buy direct" version, so they held off on releasing the update to the "buy direct" customers, like myself. When it was clear that the App Store review process was taking more than a week, they decided that in all honesty, they couldn't withhold the update from the "buy direct" customers. So they released it. It's going to be a fact of life that developers will always be able to release apps faster on their own than going through Apple's review process. But so it goes. Vendors are deciding how they are going to handle the release time differences, and trying to be fair to all. It's a tough problem.

Then there's Skype 5. I don't get it. It's a competitor to iChat, Adium, and other IM apps as well as a front-end for VOIP calls and video conferencing. It's a simple concept. They went from a somewhat large-ish window, when compared to iChat and Adium, and they Pumped It UP! It's now a monster on the screen. Why? What possible reason could they have for making this thing bigger? Make chat windows small - or able to be small, that's easy. When you're on the phone you don't need a window - that's small. WHen you have video chat, make it a separate window. They blew this. Horribly. Worst. Redesign. Ever. Amazing.

I'm sitting on the couch this morning, reading my news, the feeds, etc. - just like I do every day and I got a chat from a guy I chatted with yesterday in the ZeroMQ chat room on freenode. He was chatting me about some questions he'd had on ZeroMQ usage and I was helping him. We talked for about half an hour - until I had to leave to catch the train, and then we finished things up when I got to work.

The amazing thing is that this took place at 3:30 am my time. This guy is clearly in Europe, and we're chatting like he's in the next room. Sure, you can do this all with phones, and this technology isn't new, it's just become so pervasive. Everyone has a chat client. Everyone has an IM client. And everyone uses them.

The world has become a much smaller place. Neighborhoods are now really places of common interest, in addition to the physical street you live on. It's really just stunning to me sometimes. I can remember ARPAnet getting going. I can remember the cool tools of ftp and telnet. I can remember seeing all this grow. It's inspiring, it really is.

I can remember my Dad once saying that his Dad saw the invention of radio and lived to see it used to talk to a man on the moon. I feel just as awestruck. We live in amazing times.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 10.0.648.6 was out with just a series of bug fixes ported into the dev channel from the other channels. It's a nice little maintenance release for today.

This morning I saw that BBEdit 9.6.3 was out with a nice little list of improvements. Nothing major, but quite a few little edge case crashes that I'm sure it's nice to get out of the way for support issues. Still one of my favorite tools of all time.

Yeah, I'd like to think I'm patient, but I've realized today that I'm not. Not really. I can pretend to be patient. I can even act like I'm patient, but in the end, I'm nothing of the sort. Not even a little.

I finally got some nasty problems solved, so I start on some easy things. Unfortunately, these easy things require other people to be involved. Hardware issues, OS install issues, all these are, and should be, handled by someone other than me. But therein lies the rub - I don't like waiting for other people to do things at their pace. I want it done at mine.

I have thankfully learned that it's far better for me to just shut up, than to say anything. With my kids, with people at work. It's far better to listen, and then plan out what to say with the appearance of patience. It really helps.

But I'm not fooling myself, and I wonder if I'm really fooling anyone?

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 10.0.642.2 was released with a nice list of fixes including a new version of the V8 javascript engine. I'm pleased they are making progress, but still very disappointed that they are pulling H.264 support in the <video> tag.

But hey... it's their program. Their choice.

Today I noticed that Google Chrome dev 10.0.634.0 was out and so I upgraded. The big thing that seems to be in this release is the updating of the V8 engine to 3.0.6.1. I'm still a little sore about the plans Google has stated about removing H.264 from Chrome, but that just makes it easier to realize that Google really is going through a really bad spell, and maybe in a year or ten, they'll pull out of it. But I don't know... it took IBM more than a decade, and Texas Instruments never really recovered.

I sure hope the bad folks making bad decisions in Google get moved out. It's sad to see a great bunch of engineers used to do very bad things. Sad.

When I read this this morning I was stunned. Really. Stunned. I can't imagine what they are thinking. They include Flash in Chrome, and it's Adobe's IP, but they won't continue to support H.264 because it's what... supported by Apple? What gives? It's already there... it's already working... but they are going to take it out. I could understand if they took out all plugins or codecs. But they aren't. Just H.264.

I find it hard to believe that the engineers decided to do this. I also have a hard time believing that Google is running short on funds to support the work. And it's not like Chrome is not mature - it's polished when compared to many, and certainly in the mature category now.

Just stunning. Really.

Bad move.

[1/13] UPDATE: I could not have said it better than this post on Slashdot. Amazing. Painful.