This morning I noticed that Coda 1.6.3 is out and I got the update which includes a lot of bug fixes. Among the many things are a raft of changes to SVN usage and how it interacts with SSL and the uploading process. Nice to see, as I've been reading about that in the Coda mailing list for a while. There also seems to be just a bunch of little things all cleaned up. It's turning out to be a sweet little tool. I'm glad to see it.
I'm not a big peer-to-peer downloader, in fact, I think I've downloaded just two things - a couple of Eddie Izzard tracks that we owned the DVDs for, but I wanted just the soundtrack. But when I needed to get that, I got Acquisition, and it's done a fine job for the limited used I've had for it. Today, I saw that they have released v2.1, and it includes Sparkle support and a few design tweaks and connectivity improvements.
So if you need something like this, I can say it works, but can't say it's all that much better than the other things out there. I just haven't had the need to look around that much.
When I started using the Safari 4 Public Beta, the changes in the NSAttributedString caused VoodooPad Pro to not render text properly all the time. So when a new version was available, I upgraded and the problem went away. Now the guys at Flying Meat Inc, have released the official update to VoodooPad and I got it.
There are a few additional changes in the package, but the vast majority were in the pre-release I was using for the last week or so. It's a great place to put all those little notes, etc. that might otherwise find their way to post-its that could get lost, etc. Great tool for organization.
This morning I read about Amazon released an iPhone/iPod Touch app called 'Kindle for the iPhone' and I have to say I'm pretty darn pleased that they did. While the screen on my iPod Touch is not as big as my Kindle (1.0) screen, it's still nice that I can take a book or two or 50 with me on my iPod and read. The iPod screen is bright, easy to handle, and you really can't beat the convenience of having two ways to read my books.
I'm guessing they use the WiFi to talk to Amazon and permission the reader - not bad. I see that an iPhone would be a lot better at this, but that's not what I have, nor do I plan on getting one now. But it's a nice app, and I'm certainly going to try it out and see how it goes.
Good job, Amazon.
UPDATE: after downloading a few of my books from Amazon I'm really quite pleased with the interface. It's clean, easy to read, and a real treat. Not something I'd use all the time, but it's really not bad. Again, if I had an iPhone then it'd be great. The Kindle has the EVDO link, as does the iPhone, but my iPod is a little more limited with it's WiFi. But still - it's nice to have.
It seems that the changes to WebKit, and it's ramifications to the rest of the system are really quite profound. This morning I read a tweet from Gus M. of Flying Meat Inc, and it's about a bug introduced by Safari 4 Beta into the NSAttributedString code for VoodooPad. Bummer. I can (unfortunately) relate all too well to this, and while it lies squarely at Apple's feet for not informing the users (and the developers) of the impacts of these changes, it's the developers (and the users) that have to live with the consequences.
In this case, there's a new pre-release version of VoodooPad out there that fixes this issue, but it's pre-release, and unless I end up hitting this bug, I'll stick with the regular releases as I think it's reasonable that he'll have 4.1 out soon. It certainly sounds like 4.1 is close. Good enough for me.
[3/3] UPDATE: I decided that I needed the update to 4.1 as I was having issues with the app and I wasn't going to get rid of Safari 4 - it's just too nice.
While it's not a major update, there are a lot of bugs in the version I was running, and so Daniel J. released an updated version of MarsEdit that addresses the biggest offending bugs he's come across in the past few months.
I think I'm going to like a few of these features on the preview pane, but I'll certainly be looking forward to the next big release with lots of cool, new features.
I was reading Slashdot this morning and saw this post about Microsoft and Windows 7 pricing models - their low-end "Starter Edition" is going to limit the user to running three applications at once. Yikes! I suppose that's OK if you're gaming, but that's a really really small market.
Their research says that the average consumer has just over two applications running at once. Maybe... but I'm not buying that line. Make it 10. What's the problem? Someone working at home and needing the "real goods" is going to up-sell anyway. I just don't get it when they cut these numbers. It makes no sense.
Be the Good Guy, not the Cheapskate.
So today I was digging into the custom language code of a vendor's package that was customized by the vendor's consultants for us. The language is designed to be simple and fast to update - everything is based on function calls. Everything.
I can see the advantage - it's a simple function call graph. If there's a value in the tree that doesn't change, then there's no need to make the next level call because nothing is going to change. Seems reasonable, until it's taken to extremes. Like this code.
If you're going to base a language on functions, then you need to have functions that can handle if statements and conversion of variable types: boolean to integer, for example. That's kind of obvious. What this vendor did was to make the bare minimal set of functions that can be used to derive most other things, but there was not care put into it to make the language easy to use.
And they took advantage of that.
Case in point: using a max() function to find the only non-zero value in an array. Why do that? What happens if your assumptions are wrong and there isn't only one non-zero value - say there's two. What then, Sherlock? Yeah, it breaks. Why not be a little smarter and filter out the data and then call the function on the one object you want. Seems pretty simple to me.
But that's not how it was built. It's like they planned on doing a lot of extra work and then "making up for it" in volume, or something like that. It's crazy. No filters means that you have to filter on each value and then pick the max() of the set. What a waste.
Sure, I got it done, but had I been able to write it in a more expressive language, it would have been far easier, and I probably would not have had to go in and fix it in the first place. The original author probably would have gotten it right the first time.
So I spent an hour in Function Land, and I can't say I'm a better person for it. I know it's not the last time I'll have to do this, but I'm hoping that as time goes on I'll be able to remove this horrible code and make it simpler. Like basing it on the non-function-based scripting language they use for everything else. Yeah, it'll be slower, but it will be 100x more maintainable.
I was looking at trying to clean up a few digital recordings I'd made back on my old NeXTSTEP turbo Color Slab, which is now gone to the great computer room in the sky, as there was a lot of noise in the samples and it seemed like a simple thing to do - filter it, baby. High-pass filter to be more precise. So I started looking around to see what I had to work with.
Unfortunately, when I sent an email to the Fission creators, it was clear that Fission was going to be a time-slice editing tool - lossless editing in their marketing terms, and I can certainly respect that. It's far more likely in this day and age to have access to a good digital master than the crummy digital master I have now. But be that as it may, it was clear after emailing them that I wasn't going to be able to use Fission for this - I had to look elsewhere.
The next thing I saw was Audacity 1.3.7, a free audio editor. It looked like it had decent capabilities, including a lot of plugins that got installed into the system at /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/ so that they might be used by many different audio editing applications. While I liked the capabilities of Audacity, it just wasn't getting done what I needed. However, it did point out to me that these plugins might be useful by other apps, and that was very helpful.
The next thing I found was something I'd hit on before - Wave Editor 1.4.4. This was a very nicely done audio editor, and while it was $79, I'm not against paying for a good tool when I see it. What I was able to see when I started playing with it, in depth, was that it had the tools to filter out the noise pretty effectively. I was still a little concerned that it suppressed the volume as much as it did when I applied the HPF, but that's probably something I can deal with in the app as well.
It had the nice tools like a spectrum analyzer and lots of ways of looking at the data - very much as I might have written it - from a math and engineering standpoint. Pretty nice. I also like that they have a complete support system built right into the app so I can ask a question if I get stuck on something. Pretty nice for a tool like this that there's a steep learning curve on.
So I'm going to see if I can't fix up these old files and clean out the noise. Sure do hope so.
It looks like the guys at Bare Bones software have been busy working on BBEdit 9.1.1 which seems to be just a fixes release. No new features at this time, but plenty of bugs fixed - some even crashers. Nice to see that the updates are still coming.