What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning the Flying Meat guys released VoodooPad Pro 4.0.1 with lots of little crashing bugs fixed and with the tag line: the inevitable .1 release. I believe there must be people hitting this a lot harder than I am, but then again, that's probably not that hard. In any case, it's out there, and get it. I like what he's done with the UI changes, and the scripting support is nice as well.

Gotta support the indie Mac developer group.

Apple seems to have gotten a ton of issues about the stability of Safari 3.2 so this morning they had something fun for all of us on Software Update - Safari 3.2.1. While I'm sure there are reasons for this, it comes a week after 3.2, so they really must have been bad bugs. I didn't notice anything, but then again, I don't hit a ton of sites, but I hit enough. Well... anyway, it's out there and it's a reboot to get it.

Gotta do it.

The guys at MacVim have fixed up the forking issue and updated the latest fixes from the Vim core code, and have packaged Snapshot 39. It's something I expected them to do, given the fact that they had discovered it right after creating Snapshot 38.

Just one of the best editors on the best platforms ever.

HandBrake is without a doubt the easiest way to get a DVD onto my iPod Touch (and iTunes). You put in the DVD, it gets all the structural information off the DVD and you can then optimize the destination format and type in the chapter titles and then rip the DVD. It's smooth, fast, and effortless. After it's ripped, you just import it into iTunes, add the album artwork and the info for the title and you're ready to go.

The news is that they have released 0.9.3 and removed the DVD decryption from HandBrake. Instead, they look for VLC's libraries in the Applications directory, and use that. You need to have VLC 0.9.x or better to have this work, and because I had the older 0.8.5 I had to update it as well.

Interestingly, the latest VLC is a lot less invasive than the previous version. I use Perian for most of the content viewing, but it's nice to have it be less intrusive, and I had to get it to make HandBrake work. It'll be interesting to see what's different about the experience of ripping.

The guys working on MacVim have released an update to the project - Snapshot 38. There have been some annoying error messages related to the forking of the processes for tabs, and the guys have been hard at work getting to the bottom of them. Based on the comments in the mailing list, I think Snapshot 38 still has some issues, but the next snapshot will have them all cleared up. Excellent news for the coming days.

Still, it's nearly the perfect implementation of Vim. The only thing it's lacking is the beautiful temporary zoom on a find that Safari and SubEthaEdit do. BBEdit still doesn't and it's not strictly necessary, but it is beautiful to watch.

This evening, I took the time to update my NetGear WNR3500 GigaBit Router to the latest firmware 1.0.29NA. I'm not sure if there are a lot of significant updates - they had no release notes, but given that this the the portal to the internet for all the machines in my house, it's a good thing to keep it up to date and make sure it's not been compromised.

It's odd, but when I upgrade the router, it always seems like I have to power-cycle it to get things working again. I'm not worried about it. I know the upgrade worked, and I only do this every few months, so it's no big deal, but you'd think they had that put into the restart properly after the upgrade. Odd...

Today I was looking at a weblog and saw a pointer to Base 1.0.2 by a single indie Mac developer for dealing with SQLite3 databases. These are the databases of CoreData, and in that sense, very interesting to work with - when I get into the CoreData game more. Right now, I'm thinking that I need to get into it (CoreData) a little more. However, it's got a lot going for it and I want to support the indie Mac developers. They have a hard enough time, and they deserve the support when they make something good.

After I updated iTunes this morning I synced all the updated iPod Touch apps, and then found that version 2.2 of the firmware for the Touch was out. I had to update. Safari is updated as is Mail, there are WiFi improvements, and the Home button is really home now, and the general stability and security fixes.

Nice to get, and I have to say I don't miss not having a phone in it. It's perfect just as it is.

The Mozilla Group has released Camino 1.6.5 today with the standard stability and security fixes as well as the latest Gecko rendering engine. They biggest annoyance to me is the buttons on the web sites. Why is it that Camino seems not to be able to do those right?

I understand their desire to be a Mac-like browser, but then they need to be smarter about what they do for the rendering of the buttons. I'm sure it's not high on the list of bugs to fix, but it's a style point that makes it easy for me to place it third out of three for browsers on OS X.

This morning I noticed that Software Update had an update for iTunes to take it to 8.0.2. Seems the improvements were in the integration with VoiceOver, and a problem with third-party MP3 files (Amazon store?), as well as the standard stability and security fixes.

Nothing much changed, but it was nice to see they were moving forward with updates in light of Snow Leopard's release in a few months.