I got a notice this afternoon that Adium 1.4rc2 is out and they fixed several memory leaks. Excellent! Not a lot else, however, and that's good news, too:
- Fixed several memory leaks
- Improved performance when signing on and when joining large group chats (including #14402)
- Fixed an exception which could cause Adium to become nonresponsive (#14229)
Still the best little IM app out there. Fantastic!
I was reading the ZeroMQ IRC channel this morning and they talked about the changes to their web site, and so I decided to check them out. They had a post about using ZeroMQ with Clojure, and I decided that it was worth checking out. What I found was a wonderful article about using it with Java on Mac OS X.
I know that we're not targeting Mac OS X - yet, but it's nice to know that there's help out there if and when we start to move there - or I move there myself. Very nice.
I saw that Google Chrome dev 8.0.552.18 was released, and it appears that it's just a round of stability and polish features. The release notes are pretty sparse:
The Chrome Dev channel has been updated to 8.0.552.18 for all platforms. This release addresses a number of stability and polish issues found in the previous release. It also has moved the work on 3D acceleration back to about:flags.
now I like that the about:flags reports the GPU-based acceleration, as I've been wondering if it's active for my build, so that's nice, but the rest is really more polish. Nice, but not earth-shaking new features.
I was watching the ZeroMQ IRC channel today and hear mention of an interesting alternative to Google Protocol Buffers - MessagePack. I'm not making any claims here, but the wealth of the client libraries for MessagePack is quite impressive. Additionally, while Google Protocol Buffers is working really well for Google, the marketing fluff for MessagePack seems to indicate that it's got a few features that Google's offering doesn't.
Also, they are as focused on speed as the Google folks.
I'm not sure what's going to become of this knowledge, but I do know that our in-house Broker is doing a lot of the same things, and it might be time to look at an alternative to the home-grown cross-platform serialization schemes. Maybe.
This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 8.0.552.11 is out, and the release notes say the changes are minor - with the standard stability fixes. There is still the graphics rendering issues when scrolling in a zoomed view, and without a fixed zoom level, I'm stuck with 83% as the first zoom level "out" from 100%. I would like to be able to say 85% or 90% - but no such luck.
But I'll keep hoping that someday soon these things will get fixed.
This morning I noticed that Apple updated the Java deployment on OS X to 1.6.0_22 to bring it current with the latest offering from Sun/Oracle. There have been a lot of little improvements and security fixes for the JVM and it's very nice to see them kept up to date on the Mac.
Like it or not, Java is here to stay and it's an important part of my daily life.
UPDATE: This is not a good development:
As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.
This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products.
Now I can understand the "Back to the Mac" idea of not putting Flash on the newly shipping MacBook Airs, but that's easily fixed - just install it if you want. They aren't trying to stop you on your laptop. But this... this is bad news. I've been using Java on the Mac for a lot of years, and it's been a fantastic platform for that. I just don't know why they'd want to ditch it unless it's about the Oracle acquisition or something.
I just have a bad feeling about this...
This morning I saw a tweet that Adium 1.4rc1 was out with a nice collection of updates that are going to polish the app and really get it ready for major release. I think I've been on the 1.4 series as long as Snow Leopard has been out, but maybe even longer than that. This is really for the rest of the users, as the vast majority of folks like me are just using the betas, and it's working just fine.
Once again, the Google Chrome guys have pushed out a new release, this one's only "release note" is: Fix minor stability issues. Some day, we'll read that this is really something akin to wiping out your hard drive, and they just wanted to downplay it so as not to harm "the brand". Like so many things in life, perception is far more important than reality.
Still, it's nice to see it getting better. I'd really like to see the OpenGL accelerated rendering and playback in the Mac OS X port, but I can wait.
UPDATE: I'm still disappointed in the default zoom rendering. It has all the graphics in a very 'rough' state until the window stabilizes, and then it redraws it to the right scale. Annoying, and I'd have thought they could put in the default CSS, but that's not working in this version either. Oh well... I wait for fixes.
OK, color me impressed with Google Chrome. I've been using it for quite a while (except for those few days when I got really sick of Google's duplicity with Motorola) and have been pretty happy with it, but have always wished there were a CSS file - like there is with Safari, that would allow me to "zoom out" all the pages so that they aren't as big as they might normally be. Unfortunately, while there seems to be hints on the net about that, the ones I tried all didn't work.
I was left wishing that I could do what I wanted, but realizing that until Chrome got more advanced, I was probably just stuck with what I had. There's supposed to be a fix in Chrome that allows a user style sheet, but every time I tried to get it to work I failed - miserably.
Then this morning I read about a site-specific zoom setting - and it's persistent! I just had to try it. Sure enough... once I went to a site - even if I had multiple tabs open for that site, a zoom change in one effected all, and survived restart! That's sweet.
What it means is that until I get the global user stylesheet in a way that I can actually get it to work, I at least have the ability to set up my environment and have it look nice after restarts. That's sweet. Very nice.
But guys... really... would it kill you to have the user stylesheet? It's already in WebKit. All you need to do is really use it.
This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev had a significant version jump to 8.0.552.0, and while the release notes said there are stability fixes, I think the bigger reason is that the beta channel is on 7.0.517.0, or something like that, and they wanted to keep a full major release number ahead of that. I'm not buying that there are major, significant changes that just didn't make it into the release notes.
But that's OK, I just think it would have been a little more honest to be up-front about the renumbering.