It's been a while, but this morning I'm happy to say that the crew working on MacVim have been able to put together a new update of the fantastic editor for the Mac - Snapshot 46. There are quite a few changes including NetBeans support and a new logging/debugging facility so that should we have any issues, it's much easier for the guys to debug the issue.
Fantastic editor. If I only had one, it'd have to be Vim.
This morning I saw that Bean 2.3.1 was released with the one minor bugfix of:
- fixed UI glitch: Bean Preferences > Style > Line Spacing now assigns line spacing correctly (user reported)
which could be a pain, but it hasn't been an issue for me - yet. In any case, it's nice that they are responding to issues from users, and I got the update.
Marc Liyanage has once again published a build of PHP - this time 5.3.0 final, and it's a great little way to include it on a stock Mac. I've been using this guy's builds of PHP and PostgreSQL for years, and I've always been happy with the packaging he's done. It installs and works, how can you beat that?
[7/8] UPDATE: Marc updated the package with a different MySQL driver - supposedly a better one, so I got that and installed it as well. Good enough for me.
[7/13] UPDATE: Marc updated the package with a fixed PDFlib - the previous one was broken, so I got that and installed it as well. Good enough.
With the new release of FireFox 3.5, the plugin authors have been working to get their code to be compatible with the new release, and this morning I noticed that Firebug had an update. I use this at work to look into the failing JavaScript code I (sometimes) write and be able to see what's really happening. Excellent tool.
This morning I saw that the Mozilla crew finally released Firefox 3.5! This is great news as I have been waiting on this for a long time for work. I'm hoping to see the performance of Firefox 3.5 on Windows to be up to snuff and capable of handling my web pages without crashing. The initial results seem to indicate that it's possible that this version of Firefox is far better at memory usage than the previous versions - and even better than Google Chrome! That would be great.
Even if that's not the case, it's nice to see Firefox making a big move in the JavaScript area. Very much appreciated.
This morning I decided to upgrade Firefox on my laptop to 3.5 RC 3 just to see how it goes. I don't use it as much on my laptop as I do on other machines, so it's a perfect testbed to see how it runs. I will say the icon is subtly new, and that's nice, but I'm really more interested in the JavaScript and rendering performance as that's where a lot of my work is now focused.
Well... more when I know more.
Camino 1.6.8 is out today with a few fixes that are certainly needed, but with the latest news of Firefox 3.5 and what's happening with the other browsers, I wonder how long Camino will stay an active project. It's already showing signs of lagging - very much like Firefox 3.0 did.
Only time will tell.
This morning, Adium told me that 1.3.5 was out and it fixes connection issues with Facebook, Yahoo, and MSN, as well as updating the version of libpurple in use. It's a nice upgrade, but I haven't really noticed any serious connection issues with these guys, but maybe I'm just lucky.
Anyway, the bet IM client on the Mac... gotta love that.
I have been working in an inherited codebase that uses the Google Collections library to extend the Collections in Java 5. I have to admit, they have done the set of classes that I'd have expected from Google - fits in with the existing objects, but adds those classes that can really be quite handy from, say, C++ and STL.
Multimap is one, missing in the JDK, but picked up by the Google Collections and implemented pretty nicely. They have the standard interface and then several implementations, each with it's particular plusses and minuses. I look at this very much in the same vein as the visualization library that I've been using for a while - very nice, but clearly done for something they had planned.
Not bad. I may spend a little more time looking into the library now that I've had to find it. Could be a nice addition like the visualization library.
I was reading one of my sites this morning and ran across this study of memory footprint usage by Chrome 3.0, Safari 4.0, Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5. I have to say that I'm impressed with Firefox 3.5's numbers. I have been using Chrome 2.0 for a while and very happy with it in terms of minimal memory footprint for my web application, but if the new Firefox 3.5 is going to best it, that will be even better.
I'll have to see what happens in real-life tests, but it's really encouraging to see this kind of progress in the Firefox line. It's been sitting on 3.0 for a while as others have jumped ahead. It'd be great to see Firefox retake the lead for a while.