What's it all about, Alfie?

While it's not explicitly stated in the release notes, there's a new release of the fantastic IRC client - Colloquy, out. Version 2.3 has over 60 bug fixes and should be ready for Snow Leopard, but we'll have to wait and see.

Today I started adding several new fields to an application that is targeted for a re-write, but we still need to get many more miles out of it before that point in time. The problem is, it's very brittle in the sense that I'm still not sure what touches what within the code. Sure, I'm getting closer to having a good understanding, but this level of change makes me more than a little nervous.

Still... if I take it slow, and make sure I make all the changes in the interfaces, and the factories, and the classes and the output, I should be able to get this done in one pass. That's my goal anyway.

It's not exactly clear what the problems might be with Adium 1.3.x on Snow Leopard, but in case it's really bad, there is a 1.4 beta that's available for Snow Leopard. It too, has issues with the font rendering, it seems, but maybe that's not so bad, given the problems 1.3.x might have. Too early to tell, but if I upgrade to Snow Leopard, and Adium 1.3.x is unusable, I have an option.

UPDATE: this compatibility list says that Adium 1.3.6 is OK for Snow Leopard - good to know.

I noticed that ZeusDraw was updated to 1.3.3, but that it's still not Snow Leopard ready. Something about the resolution of saving an image. The update is scheduled for net week, and I can wait for that as I don't use ZeusDraw all that much.

Not surprising, as I go through the compiled lists of Snow Leopard compatibilities, I find that OsiriX has upgraded to 3.6 and is now Snow Leopard compatible. Nice. What remains to be a little puzzling is the fact that they give out a 32-bit version of the program and not a 64-bit version. Yet all the code is GPL. So, presumably, it's just a matter of compiling it.

Now I'm not that stuck on 64-bit land, as there will certainly be things that remain 32-bit for a while, but it's odd that they don't ship the 64-bit as free to show off Snow Leopard. Maybe it's still a revenue source for them. If so, good enough.

OK, they have been working on it, and it's not a release, but a beta of Growl for Snow Leopard - 1.2b1 is available from the Google Code site for Growl. I'm not sure I'm going to grab it yet - I still have time before I need it as I won't be able to get to the update for another few days, but it's nice to know it's there should I find the time sooner than I expect.

Today I've been doing a little Snow Leopard tracking - following all those folks that got Snow Leopard on the opening weekend and reporting their successes and failures. I'm really surprised that I have as much 'unusual' software as I have - Growl and Dropbox are the holdouts to be sure, but a ton of apps have released 'Snow Leopard' releases. Great for me, I'll try to upgrade this coming weekend.

I was also facing a tough update cycle with an application I'm working with. I needed to change the source app so that it published more data that could then be read by the 'receiver' app and presented to the clients. I didn't want to have to go through two QA and release cycles, but there didn't seem to be any alternatives.

Then, while talking to my manager about the issue something popped into my head - clever configuration! Currently, my 'collector' app looks at the data received from the 'source' - a URL-referenced web server, serving up XML files. It parses this data and then works on it. But what I really wanted to do was to have the additional information in the parsing. However, it's also valid to think of adding that in the configuration of the 'receiver'.

What I decided to do was to add optional, additional, configuration to say "for this URL, here's the 'overrides' for the values you'll be reading". With this, I was able to very easily set up the additional information I needed without the need for the release of the other 'source' application.

I'll still add in the additional information to the 'source' application, but there's no need to wait for it and this opens the door for other overrides in the future. Pretty neat.

The folks working on Cyberduck have released a beta: 3.3b1 that is Snow Leopard ready. This is nice as I often use Cyberduck for file transfer and the previous version wasn't ready for 10.6. Not a major deal - still waiting for Growl and Dropbox, but getting a little bit closer with each release.

One of the neat things I had hoped about the MacBook Pro with the two GPUs was that once OpenCL was in the OS (Snow Leopard), we'd be able to take advantage of both GPUs not just one as with the graphics display. I had wondered why someone in Apple's position would have wasted the space, power, heat, to put a second GPU without some idea that it would be useful to the user in the future. And it is.

This article talks about the benchmarks done with Snow Leopard and the OpenCL performance - and it's indeed using both GPUs. This is fantastic news, as it means that Apple is going to be pushing processing tasks into OpenCL, and we'll all be able to benefit from them.

Fantastic news. I just need to get Growl and Dropbox to be Snow Leopard compatible and then I can update and see the sweetness.

Well, while I'd heard it was running OK with Snow Leopard, LaunchBar 5 RC4 is out with the single release note:

• This version is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

so I'm glad that I was able to get this before I updated to Snow Leopard. I'm still holding off for Growl and Dropbox, but they should be fixed up any day now.