This morning I saw that iTerm had been forked and someone was working on it again. It's been stale for quite a while, and with the additions to Mac's Terminal.app, there's reason to believe they just stopped work on it. But others picked up the torch.
I like the changes they have made in the fork, and we'll see how it goes in the coming weeks. But good enough. Gotta love the open source possibilities.
Today I got a tweet that Unison 2.1.1 was released, and truth be told, I knew this as I've been beta testing all the Unison 2.x releases for the great guys at Panic. It's got a few nice crashing bugs, and even a few really nagging UI issues all solved. It's just getting better and better.
Great to be a part of great software.
Well... I found out that iOS 4.1 is out for my iPhone and it includes a lot of the nice little things that we've all been hearing about for the last several months: Game Center, the improved proximity sensor, lots of bug fixes and the new camera features.
While I certainly can remember my life before the MacBook Pro and the iPhone, I can't imagine going back to that old world of desktop computers and cell phones that I turned off and only made calls on. It's a different world, and I like where it's headed.
The update isn't going to be quick, I'm betting there are thousands upon thousands of people trying to get that 500+MB file from Apple right now, but I can wait. It's enough for me to know that it's coming, and it'll all take care of itself in time.
Far be it from me to say Google shouldn't try new things. I wish they'd try not messing with Verizon on the net neutrality, or maybe just not being so overt about the complete and total lack of privacy from it's upper management, but today they released, in a very haphazard way, Google Instant, and I hate it.
OK, in my book there were a few reasons that people switched from Yahoo! to Google in the early days - one was certainly the search results, but in the beginning they weren't that much better - it still had a lot to do with the terms you asked for, and the best "search engines" were browsers that would hit a dozen search engines for you and bring it all together.
The other big driver - and certainly this was a biggie for me, was the simplicity and speed of the Google homepage. You typed into a box, hit enter, and got answers. You didn't have to wait for Yahoo!'s "portal" to load - measured in seconds, and you didn't have the distractions of the entire page. Simplicity was the rule of the day, and it was wonderful.
This morning Google has been rolling out, in fits and starts, their new offering - Google Instant. Now when you type, it immediately jumps to the answers and updates them as you type. While this may seem like a real time saver, to me it's at least a distraction, and at most, a horrible time waster.
If I need to type in a series of key words, or maybe my search criteria is more than 15 characters. The fact that it starts "searching" for me after four or five is a waste until I get to 15. I'm not done, I'm not liable to stop, and I wanted to get the search string in there. They already do "predictive searching" on the search string, which is nice to a point, because if there's a hit there, I can save myself the time, but there's no way showing me the entire search results is a time-saver. Not a chance.
I was worried that it was ON, and there was nothing I could do about it. But after a few hours, it became clear that it's something that I could turn off. I did so immediately and without a single reservation.
Guys... first, make your rollouts a little smoother - No, make that a lot smoother. There's no need for this to take an entire morning and have so many people wondering what's going on with no way of stopping it.
Next, make sure it's clear how to turn the crud off. You should have learned from Wave, and the full graphic homepage, but I guess that wasn't enough. Here... take the lesson... make it obvious how to disable the new crap. Lots of folks just want what you're good at.
I'm still shaking my head...
This morning I noticed that DrawIt 3.10.6 was out - with the ability to read/write Sketch files. Now I hadn't heard of Sketch, and I'm not sure I need to dig into it as DrawIt does all my vector drawing needs - and if it didn't, ZeusDraw does, but it's nice that they are moving in that direction. More choices and better apps are always nice to see.
This morning I noticed that I had updates from Apple - Safari 5.0.2 and iWeb 3.0.2. Very nice! I looked at the skimpy release notes with Software Update, and there are a few things for Safari - like the extensions being updated over SSL now, but for the most part, both of these are the "security and stability" update category. Someone reported the holes, and they responded by patching them.
Seems reasonable.
This morning I noticed that they had released another update to Cyberduck: 3.6.1. The 3.6 update was a few days ago, and I got it, but hadn't the time or inclination to write about it. It's now got a "nag tag" in the title bar, and while I don't begrudge anyone the ability to do what they want with their own code - especially if it's free, I do realize that I'm far happier with Transmit 4 given it's new design. It's all about file transfer, but I just enjoy the interface of Transmit 4 more.
So I got it, and then the 3.6.1 update as well, but I'm not sure I'm going to be doing a lot with them in the near-term future.
Well... the 'media event' was interesting to me primarily because it was a wonderful example of streaming done right. The stream was very fast to start, and while there were a few hiccups in the middle there, it was, by and large, a fantastic display of Apple technology, and I loved it.
Am I going to buy a new iPod? Nope. But I did like the new Apple TV, and at $99, am honestly considering getting one for the movie and TV rentals. It also supports Netflix streaming, so I can see that they are getting to the point that it's more of a display device as opposed to a gateway to the iTunes content. Nicely done. Add Hulu and you're in business.
I'm interested in the addition of 'Ping' to iTunes, but I'm not sure how many "friends" I'll have, or who in the world would be interested in what I've got in my library, or what I'm listening to. But there are certainly aspects of the public that are all about this - I know of three - all teenagers. So that's nice.
In all, an interesting keynote, and I'm looking forward to the new iTunes 10.
The second nice update on the browser front this morning is that Google Chrome dev is now at 7.0.503.0. This represents the jump of the major version number after the release of Chrome 6.x to "beta". While I'm not unhappy with 6.x, I think the major updates the Chrome Team puts into the browser will be in the 7.x branch now, so I'd like to stay on the 'dev' branch as long as it's even reasonably stable. It's good to see them pushing forward.
This morning was a banner morning for open source browsers. Starting with Camino 2.0.4. Today's update has quite a few nice things about it - an updated Java plugin, fixed Flash issues, latest Gecko engine... it's a good update. Now, I'm still not sure I'd use it day-to-day, but that's because Google Chrome and Safari are the best two I've seen today, but it's nice to see Camino stay up to date and push the rest to not get complacent.