What's it all about, Alfie?

After installing Snow Leopard, I checked all the critical software I use, and was really pretty surprised that Marc Liyanage's PHP 5.3 was not Snow Leopard 'ready'. In fact, it would crash the apache thread every time. I went to his discussion boards, and sure enough, I wasn't the only one. I ended up enabling the PHP 5.3 that ships with Snow Leopard, but this doesn't have the PostgreSQL support that I really want to have.

I'm sure he'll put out a new version when he gets Snow Leopard and gets his stuff upgraded.

Bjorn posted a note saying that he had a build of MacVim that was 32-bit on Snow Leopard only. He hasn't had time to handle the regular packaging and he hasn't even run a lot of tests, but he says it's the build he's using on Snow Leopard, and that's good enough for now. It's going to have to be.

While it's not explicitly stated in the release notes, there's a new release of the fantastic IRC client - Colloquy, out. Version 2.3 has over 60 bug fixes and should be ready for Snow Leopard, but we'll have to wait and see.

It's not exactly clear what the problems might be with Adium 1.3.x on Snow Leopard, but in case it's really bad, there is a 1.4 beta that's available for Snow Leopard. It too, has issues with the font rendering, it seems, but maybe that's not so bad, given the problems 1.3.x might have. Too early to tell, but if I upgrade to Snow Leopard, and Adium 1.3.x is unusable, I have an option.

UPDATE: this compatibility list says that Adium 1.3.6 is OK for Snow Leopard - good to know.

Not surprising, as I go through the compiled lists of Snow Leopard compatibilities, I find that OsiriX has upgraded to 3.6 and is now Snow Leopard compatible. Nice. What remains to be a little puzzling is the fact that they give out a 32-bit version of the program and not a 64-bit version. Yet all the code is GPL. So, presumably, it's just a matter of compiling it.

Now I'm not that stuck on 64-bit land, as there will certainly be things that remain 32-bit for a while, but it's odd that they don't ship the 64-bit as free to show off Snow Leopard. Maybe it's still a revenue source for them. If so, good enough.

OK, they have been working on it, and it's not a release, but a beta of Growl for Snow Leopard - 1.2b1 is available from the Google Code site for Growl. I'm not sure I'm going to grab it yet - I still have time before I need it as I won't be able to get to the update for another few days, but it's nice to know it's there should I find the time sooner than I expect.

The folks working on Cyberduck have released a beta: 3.3b1 that is Snow Leopard ready. This is nice as I often use Cyberduck for file transfer and the previous version wasn't ready for 10.6. Not a major deal - still waiting for Growl and Dropbox, but getting a little bit closer with each release.

Well, I'm happy to read that Sparkle, that amazing updater for Mac OS X, is now being hosted at GitHub. While it doesn't mean all that much to many, I do believe that the choice for me of Mercurial or Git has ended up being right.

There are just too many things about Git that are nicer than Mercurial.

But hearing serious developers came to the same conclusion is also reassuring.

Well... I see the first reason not to update to Snow Leopard this weekend - Growl is not ready, and from the messages I've been reading from the authors suggests that they won't even start discussing it - or committing code to the repository until Snow Leopard ships. Their concern, and I understand it, is their NDA with Apple, and not getting sued.

But if that's the case, can't they have one box that had the Snow Leopard code working? I can't believe they have the Snow Leopard betas (hence the NDA) and aren't at least trying to get their code working. Sure, they can't release it, but they can get it ready on a branch - waiting just for today when it's released, they can check it all in, and it's ready to go.

In any case, this is going to have to wait. Crud.

UPDATE: The latest word is that they are looking to have Growl 1.2 out today. They aren't sure if they'll make it, but that's what they are shooting for. If they get it, I'll be very pleased.

Once again, a round of security and stability fixes for a browser - in this case, it's Camino 1.6.9. The release notes state that in the update:

Camino gets a Mozilla Gecko 1.8.1.23 update, which includes critical security and
stability fixes and also improves Flash and ad blocking features.

so there's really more than a simple round of security fixes. That's nice.