What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I checked and iTerm2 Alpha 10 was out, and the release notes for this update are impressive:

The focus of this release is bug fixes. It also features a major performance improvement as well as better internationalization support. This is the first 64-bit release.

• Rewrote drawing code for up to 10x speedup.
• iTerm2 is now a 64-bit binary!
• Improve text rendering by making baselines always line up when mixing fonts and in IME.
• Input method editor improved.
• Bold selections have proper foreground color (bug 106).
• Fix bug where cursor remains I-bar in title (bug 88).
• Resynchornize properly after invalid utf-8 sequence (bug 73).
• Fix bug where opening a tab changes window size.
• Fix race condition when toggling full screen and a draw occurs.
• Fix drawing bugs.
• Fix some minor memory leaks.
• Fix bug where tab bar would not draw correctly after window resize (bug 167).
• Fix bug where one-word commands in a bookmark didn't work (bug 166).

I'm most pleased with the move to 64-bit and the speed-up of the rendering code. Fantastic work!

This morning I finally finished off the query/subscription system for my ticker plant and it's client. The finishing touches are all in the details - of course, and some of the Broker changes of yesterday are biting me in ways I hadn't expected. Seemingly working then not working. It helps to just get a fresh pull of the code and make clean. No doubt.

The nice thing is that it's working just like I had hoped - it's pretty darn fast, and while I need a lot of data to support this configuration, it's going to be very nice to get it all loaded up and rolling in a solid, complete, dev environment. But there's a lot to go before that's ready.

I'm pretty pleased that the queries are fast. They don't have to be especially speedy, but it's nice that they are using the lockless data structures and we're using the boost asio library to get it from the Broker and it's service (the ticker plant). Not bad, I have to say.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 7.0.536.2 was out, and the release notes look a little better than the last few updates:

The Dev channel has been updated to 7.0.536.2 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame

All

• Fixed saving passwords containing non-ASCII characters (Issue 54065).
• Accelerated compositing and support for 3D CSS transforms enabled by default (Issue 54469)
• WebGL support enabled by default (Issue 54469)
• Regression fix: keep the download shelf visible when multiple sites are saved. (Issue 54149)
• Add a lab for the Page Info Bubble for Windows and Linux; Mac coming shortly.

Mac

• More keyboard shortcuts for Tab Overview.(Issue 52834)
• Add sqlite and javascript memory columns to task manager

So it looks like they are back on getting new features into the code - as opposed to security fixes, etc. Nice to see. In a related note, I also saw that they took the 'beta' channel to 7.0.517.24 which is the first time 'beta' has seen a 7.x release. Nice confidence in the code, guys. Keep it up.