What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I got a tweet from MarsEdit that 3.1.4 was out with a "major memory meltdown" that was causing a significant memory leak in MarsEdit. Daniel seems to have taken Bill B's advice and looked for the retain/release mismatch on the WebKit windows and was able to track it down. Very nice work.

I was noticing this but wrote it off to the same memory growth in Safari and Unison - all of these guys are using WebKit, and they all grow to enormous sizes, but that's just the way of things for now. Hopefully this will trigger Apple and Panic to double-check the memory usage as well. Who knows? Maybe they'll all be trimmed up soon.

The first work day after Thanksgiving is always a great day for me. This year I was a day late, but I got there... it's Christmas Music Time! Yup, that's when I pull out the Christmas music playlist on my iPhone and get to listening to some of the greatest music of the whole year. It's also the time of year when we all are a little nicer, a little kinder, and everyone tries to put on their best face. It's a great time of year.

I remember being in a choir room of a rather big church in Indianapolis when I was in high school, and there was a picture on the wall with a quote:

For the common things of everyday,
God gave man speech in a common way.

For higher things men think and feel,
God gave man poets, their words to reveal.

But for heights and depths no words can reach,
God gave man music, the soul’s own speech. - Anonymous

Every time I read it I tear up. It's perfect.

I read a lot about this over the weekend, and the more I read the more it made me smile.

The foundation upon which this project is base comes from the GNUstep community, whose origin dates back to the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Computer Inc (now Apple Computer Inc.). While Apple has continued to update their specification in the form of Cocoa and Mac OS X, the GNUstep branch of the tree has diverged considerably.

Yeah... they've diverged only in that Apple's Cocoa has moved forward and GNUstep is still using the OPENSTEP guide as it's reference point. And there's nothing wrong with that. OPENSTEP is fantastic... it's just that Apple has decided to keep moving and GNUstep hasn't. Sony isn't content on sitting still either:

We depart somewhat from the GNUstep adherence in that our goal is to thoroughly modernize the framework and optimize it to target modern consumer electronic (CE) devices. These modern conveniences include such features as touch displays and 3D graphics.

I use WindowMaker as my X11 desktop of choice. It's all about GNUstep. I think it's fantastic that Sony is picking this up. It means that GNUstep is going to be getting a much needed shot in the arm with all the added interest. Really great news.

NeXT was right. Took a long time, but they were right. Fantastic.

Well... it's here! I saw on the familiar sources that iOS 4.2 was released to iTunes 10.1 and initially I was pretty disappointed that they didn't release 4.2.1 - as I know they were working on it before the release, but when I installed 4.2 it was actually reported as 4.2.1!

Sweet.

I haven't used the new stuff, but I'm sure I'll get around to it. I'm guessing that with the news that iOS 4.3 coming out next month, I'll probably find out in that time-frame. I'm pretty busy now with work and the house.

Who knows... maybe I'll get an Apple TV? Might be fun.

Seems that Apple has released Safari 5.0.3 which fixes several things including Flash content coverage, JavaScript-intensive pages, pop-up blocking and more. Sad that I have to reboot to get this, but it's far too important not to.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 9.0.587.0 was out, and the release notes point to quite a few nice fixes:

• GPU Related Fixes
• Crash Fixes
• Instant Fixes
• [r65953] Move click-to-play to about:flags. (Issue: 62091)

Not a lot of detail about what each of these mean, but I'm encouraged by the GPU fixes as it's possible we're getting closer to that elusive super-browser where things are really exceptionally fast. Here's hoping...

I got another tweet this afternoon saying that Unison 2.1.3 was out with a couple of fixes. It's already an exceptional news reader, and I do enjoy their news feed, I just wish I had more time to read the news. I used to... but that was grad school.

This afternoon I got a tweet that MarsEdit 3.1.3 was out with a few little fixes. I find that I like the HTML editor far better than the WYSIWYG - in fact, I've been thinking about using BBEdit as an 'external' editor as it's even better. I'd love it if Daniel got something like SubEthaEdit like the Panic guys did. Then it'd be a monster first-class editor.

Anyway... it's still nice to see the update.

I noticed this morning that iTerm2 Alpha13 is out with a ton of really neat features. The searching, the playback - Holy Cow! These guys are taking the terminal to places I never even thought about. What an amazing piece of work. And it's slick. Very slick.

Excellent work.

This morning I noticed that Adium 1.4.1 was out, and that's a major surprise. The blog post says what it's all about:

While the primary purpose of this update is to fix ICQ authentication[1][2]

[1] For those that are unaware, ICQ is no longer owned by AOL. The breakage that users may have experienced was due to the change-over to the new authentication servers. (login.oscar.aol.com – > login.icq.com)

[2] Users of Mac OS X 10.4 using Adium 1.3.10 can change their server setting to “login.icq.com” in the “Options” pane of their ICQ account’s settings.

I didn't know that ICQ had broken off of AOL, but so it goes. I was able to maintain the SSL connection to AOL even though the SSL connection to ICQ is now gone. Not bad, I guess.

It's nice to see the improvements.