What's it all about, Alfie?

Today I found another bug in the Google Visualizations AnnotatedTimeLine widget. Basically, if you set the graph setting legendPosition to sameRow, the legend at the top of the widget will start on the same row as the date/time of the point you're currently highlighting. If you have it set to newRow, the legend will start on the line below the date/time. The sameRow looks like this:

and the newRow looks like this:

What you can see is that on the sameRow, the legend starts out right, but it never wraps to the next line. On the newRow version, it wraps nicely, but you loose a complete row, and in the case of large legends, that row is important.

So I posted a question to the Visualization group and got this answer:

Hi,

Please open a feature request from the link at the left side menu, and we will try to get to this.

Regards,
VizGuy

So that's exactly what I did. I'm hoping that they get to this as soon as possible.

I'm not a big Flash fan, in fact, I use ClickToFlash to keep from seeing it displayed on most of my web usage, but there is one notable exception: the Google Visualization widgets. I use these extensively in my web work to assist in the visualization of the data. In order to run these guys, I need Flash. So it makes sense to keep up with Flash for this reason alone.

This morning, Adobe updated the Flash player for Mac OS X to 10.0.42.34, and I needed to pick it up. Not thrilled, but until Google moves from Flash to something else, this is what I have to do.

This morning, another release of OmniGraphSketcher 1.1 (this time: beta 2) was released. It's getting more full-featured with every release, and I have to say, it is fast approaching my favorite visualization tool - DataGraph.

I think OmniGraphSketcher is focused on the Keynote-style graphs, and DataGraph is focused on the scientific journal market. Still, they are getting closer, and that's great news.

This morning the Panic guys released Transmit 3.7 but rather than it being a major release, the release notes simply state:

• Fixed an encoding bug that could cause issues with both international filenames and WebDAV.

which seems a little anti-climactic, but so it goes. Still, a great app by a fine bunch of indie Mac developers.

Today I got a tweet about a new release of BBEdit being out - 9.3. The release notes are extensive and shows this to be a significant update to the system. Wow. Pretty impressive.

I'm not sure about a lot of the new stuff, but the "maketags" argument is great as it means I don't have to worry about making my own ctags file. Very nice of them.

I saw a tweet this morning from OmniGraphSketcher about the release of 1.1 beta 1 with several interesting new features. I think I'm going to give it a whirl and see how it works. Beta, yeah, so I'll understand the limitations, but still might be nice.

This is an interesting development. The Amazon S3 system has been online for quite a while, and clients like Transmit and Cyberduck already talk to S3. But it's an object-database. Nice in many regards, but not exactly what someone building an application might be looking for. There are just way too many applications that need a general, reliable, relational database - like MySQL.

While I haven't used MySQL a lot, it's pretty much on par with the other open source databases - DB2, PostgreSQL, etc. It's a filesystem database where it's easy to backup the database by simply copying a few files. Nice, compact, and pretty good performance from what I've heard. I've used it in WordPress installs in the past, and it has always worked very well for me.

What is interesting is that Amazon seems to have broken down the costs so that you really are only paying for what you use. Be it CPU cycles to do the queries, or I/O to get the data to/from you machines. It's a pretty wild idea. If you couple this with the EC2 machines where you can bring up a linux box with your software on it, run whatever it is you need hitting this MySQL database with all the data your app(s) need. They even have a reduced I/O rate for transferring between their servers so that if you really can run the application on their end and have a minimal interaction with it, you're liable to be able to get away with a very inexpensive I/O cost.

Of course, this means that you're paying for the CPU cycles on their end... there is no free lunch. So it's an interesting option. If you need to have a cloud MySQL database, this is the only one I've seen. But the question becomes, do you need it? That's tougher to answer.

This morning I noticed that Panic had updated both Transmit 3.6.9 and Coda 1.6.6. The single note in the Transmit release notes indicates a bug in the replacing of folders. The Coda release notes are a little more extensive with fixes for Snow Leopard as well as a few FTP issues and "minor visual fixes".

In all, it's rare to see these guys push out two updates, but I'm happy they did. It always makes me smile to look at Coda - I'm going to be using it more as I move to Mac-based development of these AJAX web sites, and I'm looking forward to it.

Wow! I missed the final release of LaunchBar 5.0! This morning I noticed that LaunchBar 5.0.1 was released and I got it right away. There's so much in this app that I don't use, and should... the clipboard history is incredible... the search in Google Images is sweet... there's a ton of stuff that's sitting in this little app that I feel it's something I need to spend about a month on to really find all the value in it. Until I have the time, I'll just use it as I do, and be very happy.

[10/22] UPDATE: it turns out that I didn't miss the final release of 5.0 - this was the final release. They just didn't let 5.0 see the light of day. Interesting. I don't feel nearly as bad about this.

Transmit 3.6.8 was updated this weekend with much improved Snow Leopard support. While it's not my favorite FTP client, it's a good one, and built into Coda, an excellent web site development tool. I still like to keep it around as it's got capabilities that are far more than simple FTP, and when you need those, it's usually a panic situation and you really need them. Good tools to have.