What's it all about, Alfie?

Well, this is one in the books now... Dropbox has a beta that should fix all the Snow Leopard issues. While it's not the final release, it's a good step in the right direction and over the course of the next few weeks, I expect Adium and Growl to follow suit.

Their 'event' today was certainly about the music, and the new features in iTunes 9 are pretty nice, for the little I've played with them. I like the application management, and the re-done iTunes Store within iTunes. I'm a little surprised that they changed the behavior of the "minimize button" to actually minimize the window. Now it's called the "mini View" and is a menu selection and keyboard shortcut. I suppose this is a good thing, but it is a little odd that they made this change.

Then there's the iPhone OS 3.1 which adds a few nice features and sets the stage for AT&T to actually enable MMS. I'm willing to bet there are a few holes plugged - like the tethering hack and possibly a few of the jailbreaks, but who knows. I don't do either, and don't plan to. But I got that as well, and it was nice and painless.

So a couple of nice things in addition to the new iPod Touch and Nano hardware. I have to admit, these iPods are getting really pretty darn nice. But I've got my iPhone now, and that's going to be all I need.

Today I got a notice from Comcast that I needed to get a digital receiver now for channels 23 to 77, and since I watch Comcast SportsNet every morning when I run (channel 37), I really needed to get one for at least that TV.

The problem was, when the "Digital Switchover" happened, Comcast was saying that as long as you have your TV into a Comcast cable - no converter required, you were safe. I thought that was nice, and a good way to get (and keep) customers happy. So when I saw that they were taking away 60% of these channels, I thought Yup, this is typical Comcast!, but I was being hasty.

It turns out that they are giving each customer up to two digital receivers free. This is simply stunning to see from Comcast. Our cable bill is on the high side of $200/month and includes the 32Mbps 'Ultra' Cable Modem service - which is nice (for the most part). So to think we had to pay another $10, $15, or $20 a month for the boxes was something that made us feel a little less than 'loved' by Comcast.

But they surprised us. Good for them. Maybe they're trying to repair their crummy reputation. It couldn't hurt, that's for sure.

Today was the first day back from a nice, lovely, long four-day weekend, and it was tough. It was hard to get up, hard to get in to work, and a tough day of writing code that I personally think is a mess, but the time to re-write it is still in the future, so I have to fix this version.

I left the office beat down tired. I mean really beat-down-tired.

But it was a good day.

There's nothing quite like leaving it all, and I do mean all on the track. There's no doubt in my mind that there's nothing more I could have give to the cause today. Nothing. I can walk out of here, sleep on the train home, and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's nothing I could have done more today.

It was a really good feeling to have.

A good friend tweeted about this interesting collection of objects for Interface Builder 3. There seem to be a lot of very useful widgets in the collection, and I would love to spend a little time looking at these, as it could make development of a nice GUI quite a bit easier.

Until I get the chance, we'll just use this as a bookmark for the URL.

Today I saw a tweet from Flying Meat, and VoodooPad (Pro) 4.2 (and then quickly 4.2.1) are out with a twist - the "Pro" is now folded into the "regular" so that there's only the 'Lite' and the 'regular'. I can see his point of wanting to simplify things, and maintain a single codebase, so it doesn't bother me. I'm sure at the next major update, I'll get back "off" the Pro version with the rest of the Pro users.

But it's nice to see fixes there for Snow Leopard issues - as I've taken the plunge already.

After installing Snow Leopard, I checked all the critical software I use, and was really pretty surprised that Marc Liyanage's PHP 5.3 was not Snow Leopard 'ready'. In fact, it would crash the apache thread every time. I went to his discussion boards, and sure enough, I wasn't the only one. I ended up enabling the PHP 5.3 that ships with Snow Leopard, but this doesn't have the PostgreSQL support that I really want to have.

I'm sure he'll put out a new version when he gets Snow Leopard and gets his stuff upgraded.

I was reading the lists this morning and noticed that Coda was updated to 1.6.5 to have Snow Leopard support and a few other fixes as well. Since this morning is my time to upgrade, it's a great thing they dropped this when they did.

Bjorn posted a note saying that he had a build of MacVim that was 32-bit on Snow Leopard only. He hasn't had time to handle the regular packaging and he hasn't even run a lot of tests, but he says it's the build he's using on Snow Leopard, and that's good enough for now. It's going to have to be.

Well, one of the two biggies for me seems to have a stable beta - Dropbox has tweeted that 0.7.15 should be the answer to Snow Leopard compatibility and they want a little help testing it. Fair enough, I can do that.

I'm hoping that we see something from Growl today too... a beta is OK, but a release is better.