What's it all about, Alfie?

It seems like the VLC group got the Mac support it needed to make a solid Universal app with support for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. It's been in most of the releases of late, and while I still check, I think it's likely that it's always going to have this kind of support. Good news.

I'm not a huge fan of VLC per se, it's Handbrake that I use, and it needs the libraries in VLC to read the DVD. It's simply the most convenient way to get the libraries.

I noticed today that Acorn 2.6.2 is out with a few fixes and a new plugin API for developers. Very nice. In fact, I used it today to make a nice background image for Adium so I didn't have to look like Colloquy. Much better.

This morning Google Chrome dev was updated to 9.0.572.1 with a new version of Flash. OK... seems fair, and as long as I don't have to have any other Flash in my system, I'm OK with that.

I was reading this piece by John G on Daring Fireball, and it got me to thinking - it probably was a little more honest to disable Flash completely. I mean, it's still on my box, just not in my Safari or Firefox plugins. And with Google Chrome right on my desktop, I can see Flash if I really need to.

I think I'm going to like it a lot more... I've certainly given it a lot of thought.

Seems there was a little more unrest in the latest update to NetNewsWire. The SParkle update notes said only:

Fixed a crashing bug related to NSURLConnection -- by switching back to NetNewsWire's previous http client.

It's tough to see such a rough release after having years of seamless updates. It's just that, though - a little bump in the road.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 9.0.572.0 was out - quite a step for the Googlers, but it's only release note is that it includes a new version of Flash. Hmmm... how nice. It's not that I'm against Flash as a concept, it's a language - a bad one, and it's a bad build environment, but it's also that it's just not really all that useful in terms of what can be done today in HTML, JavaScript, CSS and the like. It's just a crutch. Anyway... that's the update: Flash. Yippee.

This morning I noticed that Apple has posted an update on Software Updates to iPhoto that ships with iLife '11. THere's a new feature called Calendars, and I'm not exactly sure what that is - other than something that probably shows pics by date. Sounds OK... but I'm more interested in the other existing views. Still... it's nice they are still working on it.

This afternoon I saw a tweet that Transmit 4.1.4 is out, and so I did the upgrade. They were pretty honest in the tweet - it's not got a lot there, but the opening of the external editors to the front is a nice touch. Still... it's a very slick app, and it's great to see that they are paying attention to all the details that make something really spectacular.

This morning I see that the release of NetNewsWire 3.2.8 was a bit shaky and already there's 3.2.10 (I guess I missed 3.2.9 yesterday). This guy sports the following changes:

• Fixed (probably) a crashing bug related to favicon caching.
• Made it so that Flash should work again for people running OS X 10.5.x. On those systems, the app runs in 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit. (But it's still in 64-bit mode if you're running OS X 10.6.x.)

But I can't even find these release notes on their web site - only in the Sparkle update notes. So I guess it's a very fast moving target. I'm OK with that.

I checked this morning and the iTerm fork called iTerm2 released a new update and it was chock full of a lot of updates and bug fixes:

Alpha 12

Featurepalooza! And bug fixes, too.

New features:

• Instant Replay: This feature makes iTerm2 behave like TiVo. You can press cmd-opt-b to step back in time and cmd-opt-f to step forward in time. If something is erased from the screen, it's no longer lost forever. This feature can be turned off in Preferences as it does take a bit of extra memory and has a small performance impact (less than 1%).
• Paste History: When you copy or paste text in iTerm2, it is now saved in the paste history. You can pop up a window at the cursor with cmd-shift-h which shows the last 20 strings in the clipboard. The list is searchable Quicksilver-style.
• Mouseless Selection: Do you often copy-paste text within the same window? Now you can do it without using the mouse. Open the findbar with cmd-f and search for the text you wish to copy. When part of the text is matched, use the tab key to expand the selection to the right by a full word and shift-tab to expand it left to the previous word boundary. It's automatically copied to the clipboard, or you can use opt-Enter to paste the selection immediately.

Enhancements:

• Findbar appearance improved.
• Add undo/redo to edit menu.
• Add zoom shortcut for cmd-opt-=.
• Read larger chunks from the network for better performance.
• Idle CPU usage reduced.
• Refresh rate adjustment removed, dynamic refresh rate added.
• Input Method Editor wraps at end of line, scrolls window if necessary.
• IPV6 support for Bonjour.

Bug fixes:

• Memory usage growth when Bonjour enabled (hopefully, 43).
• Toggling Bonjour takes effect immediately (89)
• Make resize look better (98)
• Restore colors on exit of Vim (99)
• Make bookmark window resize properly (114)
• Select name field when copying/creating/editing bookmark (127, 128, 181)
• Scroll by selection in fullscreen window (133)
• IME improvements (163)
• URLs with i18n chars can be selected now (174)
• Tab lables updated when toggling compact tabs (196)
• Better multi-monitor support (201)
• Set localization vars better (204)
• Fix return to default size (223)
• Improve i-bar cursor appearance (235)
• Numeric shortcuts displayed properly (241)
• Prevent 100% transparency because it doesn't focus (250)
• Fix bugs with AquaSKK (263)
• Fix bug where page scrolling sometimes broke.
• Fix creeping window size when toggling fullscreen.

Quite an impressive list. I'm excited to see how it plays out.