What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I read that the Google Visualization team has put another version into Release Candidate mode where you can ask for version '1.1' and get access to now. They expect to make it 'production' this Sunday (May 10), and want to have people test it and give them feedback.

The changes are all under the covers and when I tried it I didn't see any difference, so I'm guessing that things are working, which is really nice. Gotta test these things as I'm going to be forced to use them in a few days.

I got in on the LaunchBar 5 beta back at Beta 6, and I haven't been sad that I did. It's worked flawlessly, and I do love the addition of the clipboard history - that's a huge benefit to me and the way I work.

Now they have released LaunchBar 5 Release Candidate 1 and I had to get that, as well. The release notes say it mostly a few usability fixes and a couple of small bug fixes, but that's OK, it's getting close to done, and the polish is starting to be applied. In all my experience with Mac software, LaunchBar has been one of the best apps I've ever used. Amazing.

Today I was spending a little time looking for a simple, yet easy-to-use JavaScript drop-down menu code for my web app at work. I have a feeling that I'm going to need it with the number of pages we'll be writing, it's going to make sense to have something like we had back at my previous job. Actually, I want something a lot nicer than we had back there, so I started digging now.

What I found was a lot of JavaScript menu systems for sale. Now I can see the value of commercial software - I just didn't expect it to be this menu. One of the nicer free solutions was this guy I found. It's simple, seems to work just fine, and I should be able to make it work for what I need.

However, there are limitations. First, there's no multiple level menus. Second, the menu structure has to include a bit of JavaScript in it - not horrible, but not as clean as simple UL and LI list items. That's where this commercial offering really makes a difference.

This one takes nothing more than UL and LI lists, embedded within each other, and a few class tags, and builds a very nice menu. Very nice indeed. Different themes as well as different animation techniques makes it a very nice menu.

But it's $200. Not exactly inexpensive when all I really need will be served by the free alternative. I'm going to have to run this by the purchasing folks and see if they'll swing for it. If they do, that would be great. But I can certainly see their point if they say no. After all... the free alternative is fine for what we need.

We'll see what they say on Monday.

I noticed this morning that DrawIt has released an update to 3.7.7 with a few interesting fixes:

• Fixed a bug that crashed DrawIt when opening a contextual menu
• Fixed a bug that crashed DrawIt when vectorizing a text layer that contains multiple colors

Interestingly, they anticipated a problem in the auto-updating, and so advised that if you had a problem, go to the web site and download a new copy. I had the problem - an invalid update signature, and did the manual update. Worked like a charm.

I noticed this morning that there was a new version of Coda released a few days ago. The release notes say that there are a few things fixed - including a little better support for Git, which is very nice. Also, there's better syntax highlighting for regexo in Javascript, which is nice, now that I'm getting hip deep into Javascript.

In general, it'd be nice if they also added Tomcat support, but I understand that's not their target audience, and I'm OK with that. It's just such a nice tool.

I saw this morning that VoodooPad Pro 4.1.2 was out with a handful of fixes for little bugs that seem to focus primarily on the iPhone app interaction. Since I'm not an iPhone owner, this doesn't really effect me, but I understand that this is where everyone is right now, so I have to deal with it.

Nice to see progress.

I was a huge fan of Hotmail when it was first introduced. I loved that they started with their entire infrastructure being linux boxes - when the easy path was to choose Windows. I used it, told everyone about it, and loved the independence of it. This was years before Google was even a search engine - let alone "gmail". So the idea of a free web-based email was new. There was Yahoo, but that was limited unless you were a paid subscriber, and there was Hotmail.

Then they got bought up by Microsoft, and the slow dive began. It was clear that they wanted to show that they could build the same great service on Windows, but in the end, it was a miserable failure in the first years. I had almost given up on it. Then it started to come back. MSN IM was the first real decent thing of that old system, and then things built on that and got better. Now, it's decent, but completely overshadowed by GMail.

However, they haven't really caught up to GMail because they haven't allowed generic POP/IMAP access to the mail system. Until now, that is. Sure, there was a plugin for Mail.app that would talk to Hotmail, but that was a bit of a hit-n-miss proposition, and I never really used it because I couldn't really trust it. Now, it seems, we have complete POP capability with SSL encryption to Hotmail.

This hint really goes through most of it, but the big points are these:

• set up a POP source in Mail.app
• the POP3 Server is: pop3.live.com
• the SMTP Server is: smtp.live.com
• your 'Username:' is the complete Hotmail address: you@hotmail.com

When you're done setting it up, Mail.app will recognize that this server allows SSL (excellent!) and it'll be ready to go. Very nice to not have to have Firefox up and running to see emails from Hotmail anymore.

I was reading today that the Google App Engine now is allowing an 'Early Look' at Java. This is really interesting based on the work I've been doing with servlets and the Google Visualization API. Interesting, to be sure. I took a little time today and read up on what they are offering. It's interesting. There's an Eclipse plug-in that can do it all, you just need to write the code. It's got a test framework built-in... not bad. I'm sure the Python version is as nice or nicer, but it's a big advantage to me to be in Java for all the Java tools I already know about.

So, it's something to consider. At this point, I can't see myself using it without a really good reason. It's putting yourself at non-trivial risk, and the lack of cost isn't that big a deal right now, but it's got the Google 'cloud' behind it, and that's nice.

SOmething to consider.

My favorite image editor was updated today - Acorn is at 1.5.2 and has a spiffy new icon to boot. The release fixed a few brush issues, and a few crashing bugs, but nothing that seemed to impact me - save the icon. Still... always nice to get the latest goodies.

Excellent work.

This morning I noticed that VoodooPad Pro 4.1.1 is out with some nice changes for the iPhone sync capabilities. There's a few other things there, but it looks to be really focused on this aspect for the release. Good enough, I'm not syncing to an iPhone now, but good news for my friends that are.