What's it all about, Alfie?

I'm a big fan of the software the Panic crew creates. In my opinion, it's a list of the very best in style, function, and usability for any platform - I'm just tickled pink it's for the Mac. Today they released Transmit 4, the latest update to their file transfer client, and Holy Cow! What an update!

Following their recent update to Unison, it makes sense that they do a completely new UI with much better features, much more usable screen real estate, and a few new GUI "extras" that make it a joy to watch working. Really. But what I didn't expect is the complete transformation of the "connected" GUI to be exactly what I've been wanting them to do: minimal footprint.

The new "connected" GUI looks wonderfully like a simple Finder window:

I've been hoping for this for a very, very long time. It's wonderful.

The connection parameters are very easy to define - but that's no news. What is news in the engine is that they claim to have made it 25% faster than Transmit 3. That's something. Very nice.

One of the other nice features is the menu bar component that allows you to mount any of the connections as a disk in Finder. This means that you can have an SFTP site or WebDAV look like any other disk drive in the system and all the applications of that system see it as a disk drive. No need to have SFTP or WebDAV in any application - with this, it's all there for everyone. Amazingly cool!

I continue to believe that these guys create some of the very best software I've ever seen. Incredible.

This morning I saw that DataGraph 2.2 was out, and while I haven't been pushing that too much, it's nice to see the significant improvements that he's been making in the application and framework as time goes on. It's also very interesting to me that a significant portion of his libraries are in C++. Interesting.

Anyway, great to see the improvements.

This morning Gruber had a re-tweet about the real take on stupidity, and the original tweeter referenced this Wikipedia page. It's priceless.

It talks about the reason that so many uneducated (stupid) people are so sure of themselves, and so many really intelligent people are not. The crux, in my opinion, is that those with more knowledge know how much they don't know. Those that know very little feel they have it all pretty much under control.

Yeah.

From the article:

The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people.

which also includes this fabulous quote from Bertrand Russell:

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell

This helps me feel much better about what I've been feeling lately. It made me giggle... it's made me feel much better about where I've been, where I'm going, and how I'm going to get there. What a lift.

This morning after I updated with the Security Update 2010-003, I noticed that Skitch said the beta period had expired and I needed to update. Yikes! I'd hate to be without Skitch, and I typically get these updates long before the beta expires. So I immediately updated and while it took a lot longer than normal (maybe a ton of people in the same boat as me?) it was back up and running.

It's far far too valuable in what I do to not have Skitch.

This afternoon, Gruber tweeted about this article from a writer I'd never heard of. I decided to read it and was stunned by the complete and utter lack of understanding about the human condition displayed by the writer.

He said:

David Brooks: Yes. I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?

I mean really? To think that the rich actually work harder than the poor? What planet is this guy on? Clearly, he's never worked manual labor on a construction site. I've done that. Not even close, baby.

Thankfully, he's shown to be the ridiculous idiot he clearly is. But still... this is the kind of slop that gets the Republicans voting for Sarah Palin. Yikes.

I read this little article from the NY Times on Slashdot this morning about how the US DOT is interested in cracking down on the "epidemic" of distracted driving that is cell phone usage in cars:

“It’s time for drivers to act responsibly, put their hands on the wheel and focus on the road,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who last year called distracted driving an “epidemic.”

Interesting. While I couldn't find the quote in the NY Times piece that they were going to be cracking down on even the use of hands-free headsets, this little quote makes that seem pretty likely:

Studies have shown that drivers talking on a cellphone face four times the crash risk of someone not talking on a cellphone, and that the risks at least double when a motorist is texting.

Pretty wild stuff. What's needed is something that allows cell phone conversations and keeps people safe. That's a seriously winning combination of technology and someone will make a bundle on it.

This morning I noticed that Cyberduck 3.4.2 was out with a few new localizations and a few little bug fixes. Nice to see. I then tried to verify that my home WebDAV server was working after I upgraded it to Mac OS X 10.6.3 over the weekend. In the past, I've noticed a little configuration updating with significant OS X upgrades, but this time, I'm glad to say, it seems to have left the SSL and WebDAV configurations intact. Nice.

However, what's a little troubling is that I couldn't connect to my SSL/WebDAV server with Cyberduck, but I could with Transmit. Now I can see that in Transmit, I'm using a given password - which is good as the WebDAV password can be (is) different than the login password, but there's no way that's getting sent to the server. I've checked the Keychain and it's not there - not that I can see.

So I'm a little stumped.

Then again, it's possible that it's just not working properly in Cyberduck, as it's clearly working just fine in Transmit. Gotta say... looking a lot better for Transmit.

UPDATE: OK, this is very odd... in the Cyberduck configuration, it I place the path: webdav/ in the More Options, Path field, I get the message that it can't connect to the server. It needs the abs_path. OK... so I tried a ton of things - finally trying: /webdav - BINGO! That got past that point, but then I get the statement that the certificates is not trusted.

So I then try a few things with the Keychain to see if I can fix that up. Nothing seems to work, and in truth, I didn't do a lot. But then I go back and try: /webdav/ and BINGO! Now we have a working WebDAV connection. Cyberduck is not very forgiving on the connection issues. Not forgiving at all.

This morning I noticed that the Flash 10.1 Release Candidate was out - 10.1.53.7. While I typically use ClickToFlash to not view Flash in Safari (my primary browser), when I have to use it, I want to make sure that it's the best and latest version of Flash. This branch of Flash is supposed to be much better performing on Mac OS X, and it's about time - the vast majority of creative professionals are on Mac, why hasn't Adobe made Flash a top-notch player on the Mac?

Well... it's here, and for all I need, it'll do nicely.

I fired up Google Chrome this morning and noticed that it seems to update itself on each start-up, if necessary. A nice feature, to be sure. The current release is 5.0.366.0 (dev) and I have to say that a lot of my previous concerns about Chrome are slowly, but surely, starting to disappear as the browser matures.

Isn't that always the case? Getting the basics is relatively easy. Getting it polished, well... that's another thing entirely. My latest concerns were really focused on the responsiveness of the browser. It seemed to take a lot longer to get the data from the server than, say, Firefox or Safari. I'm not sure if they have done anything special with the sockets, or if their "every page a process" scheme is causing some additional overhead that the other two don't have, but there was a definite lag in Chrome that wasn't in the other two.

Thankfully, 5.0.366.0 (dev) seems to have cleared up a lot of this. It's actually about on par with Firefox now. Very interesting. I may have to use it for a day or two to see what it's like in more significant usage.

This morning I noticed that DrawIt was updated with a fix to 3.10.3 (which I missed) that fixes the undo feature. I'm not exactly sure what I missed, primarily because I can't find the release notes on their web site, but in the end, it really doesn't matter. It's the latest, and that's what I'll use.