A new “bleeding edge” version of TextMate appeared this evening, featuring extensive improvements to the bundle infrastructure. (If you’re not sure what this means, read my earlier post on how bundles are the heart of TextMate’s stupendousness.) Allan Oddgaard has put a lot of thought into the balance between distributed bundles and user customizations, and has developed some really elegant solutions that allow you to benefit from improvements in the bundles (some of which move at a rapid clip thanks to motivated community developers) while retaining your specific customizations.
I got an e-mail from Steve Cook today.
For a couple years now I’ve been using a great little utility Steve wrote called Jumpcut. It’s what I call a “clipboard stack” – it records multiple cuts/copies and allows you to paste them back out in whatever sequence you wish. And it does all this without requiring you to use the mouse – essential.
(I was led to Jumpcut by a comment on this post of mine from June 2004.
So the other day I downloaded a talk from Google Video for offline viewing/listening. (It’s by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the lead developers of Django.)
I have a Mac, and Macs are great at video and stuff! Not like those dumb old Windows computers!
Hm.
No go. QuickTime (version 7.0.4, the latest) can’t do it. Twice it gives me an error dialog saying it doesn’t recognize the file type, forwarding me to a stupendously useless codecs page on the Apple site; twice it ignores the video track but manages to play a squeaky, choppy version of the audio.
Two and a half years ago I wrote a review-like essay on six weeks spent using FreeBSD and KDE as my primary desktop system – when I was between PowerBooks.
As hinted at in a recent post, I now have a second machine alongside my 15" PowerBook. It’s an old Dell Inspiron 4000 running bleeding-edge Ubuntu 6.06. This includes GNOME 2.14 with the Deskbar – which gets compared to Quicksilver but is more like a hybrid of Spotlight and LaunchBar.
It’s been almost five years since the release of OS X 10.0.0, and along the way there’s been very little to worry about in the way of malware. That changed last week with the announcement of a trojan that propagates via iChat in a semi-automated way, then a Java worm that attempts to disseminate itself via Bluetooth.
Both of these are relatively innocuous, but there’s not much standing in the way of copycat efforts with more dangerous payloads.
Here’s a very cool little open source module for Cocoa application developers: Sparkle by Andy Matuschak. It allows applications to detect, download, and install new versions automatically. It apparently can be added to a project without any glue code at all. It supports Appcast feeds. It’s got handy features like Skip This Version and Remind Me Later. It can work with .dmg files or .zip archives.
During my brief stint with Cocoa programming I really wanted something like this.
