What's it all about, Alfie?

Seems with Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) there's an issue with the color mapping of icons. Specifically, icons made on 10.6 with Photoshop, saved to a file and then loaded into Icon Composer. The Panic Guys have figured this out.

Seems when exporting (using 'Save for Web') in Photoshop, you need to set the 'Destination Space' in the color profile to "Generic RGB Profile", and then export the artwork as a Generic RGB .png file, which can then be loaded up in Icon Composer and everything will be OK.

I say 'everything', but in fact, the icon will now look dark on 10.5 because of the exact same reason. Can't please everyone.

I noticed this morning that because of Safari 5.0, the CodingMonkeys have had to update SubEthaEdit 3.5.3 and it's available now. The list of fixes is really very targeted to the Safari fixes, but they seemed to have worked on a few other things as well.

If it weren't for the "jump scrolling" of SubEthaEdit, I'd probably use it as my number two editor behind BBEdit on the Mac. It's good, there's a lot I like about it, but that jumping is just a little too harsh for my mind when scrolling, and so I stick with MacVim.

Still... I'll support the guys with new upgrades because I believe they may make it smoother in the future, and deserve a chance.

This morning I saw that VLC 1.1.0 was out, and thought I'd give it a look-see to see if they had picked up enough Mac OS X developer support to be able to build a 64-bit VLC on Mac, as I'm a huge fan of Handbrake, and it needs the libdvdcss that's included with VLC - but I needed the 64-bit version. Up till now, I've been using the last 64-bit build of VLC which is the 1.0.4rc release - quite old.

So this morning I downloaded 1.1.0 - which claims to be 32/64 on the web site, and then open up the app wrapper, and look. Holy Cow! it's got the FAT binary for libdvdcss which is now i386 and x86_64! Incredible! I'm able to replace 1.0.4rc with the latest shipping 1.1.0 and still keep the 64-bit Handbrake.

What a luck break for me! Super glad I checked.

I saw that iOS 4 was finally on iTunes, and was able to upgrade my iPhone 3GS! I'm excited about all the new features, and then the iPhone 4 that's supposed to be steaming it's way to me in the very near future. Very exciting times!

I'm expecting a slightly sluggish response on my iPhone 3GS, but it shouldn't be too bad. It's supposed to be capable of handling all the features, and there's not a ton that's really taxing on the new OS right now... but we'll have to see.

UPDATE: as I've been using the new iOS, I've noticed that my 3GS is not nearly as responsive as it used to be. The camera app, specifically, has had major delays in processing. Now I don't know exactly why this is, but it's not something I'm really happy to see. Kind of a let-down.

[6/22] UPDATE: I power-cycled my phone this morning, and ran a few critical tests. Additionally, I've read several other reports, and it seems that my initial problems really were transient, and it's far better now. Glad to see the rebound.

Well... Panic beat the weekend rush to deliver an update to the problems with importing Transmit 4 Favorites with Coda 1.6.12. It's not something I've done a lot with, but I have moved to Transmit 4 more, and put in all my favorites there, so it's really nice to see that they will be easily imported when the time comes.

Nice. Nothing earth-shaking, but it's nice.

OK, this is a little funny, but I just saw that there's another release of Google Chrome (dev) for the Mac! Amazing. There's nothing new on the release notes, but that's not a total surprise. There seems to be some issues with crashing, but I've honestly not seen a group as big as Google move this fast in a very long time. There must have been something really wrong with the 6.0.437.2 build.

So it goes. I'm glad to know that it's auto-updating just fine now, which is a big relief.

This morning I noticed that WordPress 3.0 was out (I had seen that it was in the final beat testing a little bit ago), and glad to see that SimpleScripts at HostMonster already had it ready to go for me. As usual, every upgrade went very smoothly, and in just a few minutes, I had everything upgraded - including the WP Super Cache plug-in. It is really nice to have access to such a great hosting service. Things just run exceptionally smoothly.

So there we have it - WordPress 3.0... I wonder if I'll even notice the difference? Maybe.

Interestingly, I read about this and still my 6.0.427.0 didn't see it as an update... so I went to Google's site and got the app directly from them to avoid any possible issues with trojans, etc. In any case, there are a few nice things in this release:

• Detach Reload from omnibox, combine with Stop, and eliminate Go.
• Implemented initial version of extension syncing. (Issue with instructions on how to enable)
• The onChanged event is now working in the extensions experimental cookies API.
• Faster scrolling on 10.6
• Fix a bug where menu items would be disabled if no windows were open.

And it's the faster scrolling that interests me most. Good enough. Up to date from the source. I hope this doesn't keep happening, it's a little creepy and I start to suspect someone's gotten into the code.

I've been really pounding away at some code that I'm writing to replace big sections of code in the Magic School Bus, and it's getting pretty close. There's a lot to look at when you have to make a class library for a 277,000 line header file. I've built a few classes, but I want to have a really good approach before I bring it to the rest of the Team.

Not bad so far. Pretty decent.

[6/18] UPDATE: having talked to the group, it looks like I'd have more luck getting Microsoft to adopt OS X as it's core for Windows 8 than getting these guys to look at a massive re-write of the codebase. It's almost hopeless. Very bummed.

Today I got a tweet about MarsEdit 3.0.3 being out, and while I'm not using the rich text editor, it's always a good time to remove memory leaks. The update list is small:

• Fix functionality of Copy & Cut commands in rich editor
• Fix handling of relative e.g. "/index.html" URLs in rich editor
• Fix a few memory leaks

but it didn't take long to upgrade, and it's always good to be cleaner in the memory footprint.