What's it all about, Alfie?

Just got a tweet that BBEdit 10.1 was out with a few interesting new features. There are several that sound interesting, and they're doing a bang-up job of getting the word out on twitter and YouTube about the speed of the search and replace, and the new features. It's just that I'm not doing a ton of Mac work right now, and so I haven't had a lot of time to mess with these features, but I'll get to it. Just a matter of time.

I'm still waiting to see them put in the vanishing Lion scrollbars, as that would be fantastic in my opinion. One of the singularly nicest additions in Lion are the vanishing scroll bars. They allow you to tell what you need to know, when you need to know it - but get out of your way when you don't. Very slick.

So it's downloaded and running - just need a little time to play with it.

Today's Apple iPhone event was, to some, a disappointment. I have to say I don't know exactly what I was expecting - other than the iPhone 4S and the iPhone 5. What I expected in the iPhone 5 I don't know. The 4S has the CPU, the storage, the camera and iOS 5, so what was I thinking the 5 would have other than a different format?

I guess in retrospect, the 4S is all I was looking for, but it makes it harder to spend the $600+ to upgrade when my 4 is doing just fine. I guess the one thing is that Joseph wants an iPhone, and so giving him my 4 makes it easier to justify the 4S.

Great products, incrementally improved. Typical Apple. Thank goodness.

This morning I saw that the Growl Team had moved off their traditional web site download system of distribution to a more commercially-viable version on the Mac App Store. The $2.00 price was really just to be able to keep things going, and I can't grudge them that. They have made some major changes - like a complete re-write of the entire codebase. They are saying that it's all about Lion now, and Growl 1.3 is Lion-only.

Additionally, there's no more Preferences Pane - it's just an app, and there's a lot of plusses to that approach to be sure. It's easier to manipulate, easier to get through Apple App Approval, and easier to update. The downside is that the new version isn't totally backward compatible, and that means that several of my apps are not exactly working 100% right with this new version.

But they'll come in time.

I have questions about iMessage in iOS 5, but that appears to be an iOS-only feature. It would have been interesting to see Apple's take on Growl-like notifications, but that seems to be off in the distance. In any case, this is a less-intrusive way to put Growl notifications in the system. Very nice.

I just hope the other vendors notice this and update their Growl frameworks soon.

They're at it again… Google Chrome dev 16.0.899.0 has been released and looks to have several nice improvements - including updating the V8 javascript engine to 3.6.4.1. It's nice to see that it's as responsive as recent builds, for there were a few in there that had issues, shall we say. Good to see progress.