What's it all about, Alfie?

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.

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.

Looks like Oracle and Apple have come to terms about supporting Java on the Mac. Now it looks like we'll have a standard distribution of Java from Oracle (Sun) just like the Windows and Linux builds. That's nice.

I have no doubt that it'll be more current than the versions Apple ships - they try to stay pretty stable on a single version of the OS, but Oracle (Sun) really moves regardless of the underlying OS version. I'm just not sure about the overall quality, but I guess that's going to be as good as the linux port. Which is to say, not bad.

Good enough. Glad to hear it.

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.

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.

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.

Seems this morning that the developers at Google released Google Chrome dev 9.0.570.0 and with it a significant version number change. Maybe this bodes well for the browser. Looking at the release notes, however, leaves me wondering:

Mac

• Make sure the dock icon is updated after closing an incognito window with an in-progress download (Issue 48391)

and then there are several "Known issues" with the build:

Known Issues

• REGRESSION: Windows media player for Firefox doesn't load - Issue 61603
• Regression:accelerated compositing slows down the whole machine - Issue 61520
• google.com/wave : "Page Unresponsive" dailog box appears - Issue 61533
• myspace.com : Cannot enter a character in Comments field - Issue 61513

which, to me, sounds like the major version number is really just a sham, and the third number - 570, is the one to look at. They aren't using the major numbers to indicate anything other than what they consider to be dev versus beta versus release.

Kind of disappointing...

I noticed today that Google Chrome dev 8.0.552.23 is out with some fixes for the plugins as well as disabling the accelerated 2D canvas. I'm not sure I'm thrilled with the disabling of the 2D acceleration, but I'm guessing that they didn't like the consequences of having it on, but I'm guessing they'll turn it back on soon enough.

After many moons in it's beta phase, Adium 1.4 has finally shipped. From what I've heard, it was really a mess and the new codebase - that which promises the video chat, etc. is entirely different, and solves many of the problems that have plagued Adium 1.4, and prior releases. Good news for them. Glad to see it.

It's not going to make a huge difference to me, but it's nice to see they have finally pulled the trigger and called it "shipped".