Vanilla Forums 2.0
The smoothest forum package you’ll find right now hits version 2.0 (finally). I missed this when it happened on July 21st, but better late than never.
Wikipedia Is Broken In Dictionary.app
I’m not sure if this is due to Wikipedia’s new skin (with the “usability” enhancements), some other MediaWiki update, or if the problem is on Apple’s end (Update: It is a problem with Wikipedia’s new skin), but this is another good example of why Apple doesn’t want to rely on third-party vendors for anything.
The image above is what I get when looking up the word “Dictionary” in Snow Leopard’s built-in Dictionary application, and clicking Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page is very long, and should have vertical scrollbars, but there are none.
Update: Mac OS X Hints has information on how a “fix” which involves logging in to Wikipedia and setting your skin to use the previous one.
Hat tip to Shawn Medero.
Commercial MMORPG “Ryzom” Goes Open Source
This is the first commercial game I can think of taking this step while the game is still live. All of the Ryzom source including tools, client, and server codebases are fully open source free software. For more, see the FAQ. It sounds to me a lot like a MUD codebase, and that makes me smile.
I do not see this helping them in the marketplace, but I’d like to see this become a trend. I have a lot of old PC games which are no longer playable due to DRM or other online components which no longer exist.
Release Notes
Panic’s release notes for Transmit 4. Contrast with Bare Bones’ release notes for BBEdit 9.5.
The Bob Chronicles
“Save all the money on the manuals and just give me this duck to always be there and tell me what to do.”
Looking back on the 15-year anniversary of Microsoft Bob, one of Microsoft’s most famous failures.
“Made, Is Making, or Will Make?”
David Barnard on the sales fluctuations in the App Store, and how hard is it to gauge future success/sales on same.
There Is A Palm Pre App That Reboots Your Phone At Set Intervals
To combat those RAM-sucking, memory-leaking, background apps everybody wants the iPhone to support so badly.
Steven Frank on New World Computing, the iPad, and Generational Shift
The newly-Americanized Steve knocks it out of the park. There is a big shift happening under the layers we walk on, and most people won’t see it for a few years yet.
Popular Mail Scanner Spam Assassin Marks All Mail From 2010 As “Spammy”
When the software was first developed, a rule was hardcoded that marked the years 2010-2099 as “grossly in the future.”
Epic Games Releases Unreal Development Kit
The hyper-expensive and sometimes-maligned Unreal Engine gets a free / indie version. The Unreal Development Kit is free for non-commercial use, and $2500 per-seat for commercial games.
With Unity making a similar offering last week, the independent games scene is only going to get better.
“Download failed.: Could not create Temporary file”
I’ve been getting this error in WordPress, so I wasn’t using the auto-update functionality, which is a real time-saver. My problem was that WordPress was trying to write to /tmp/ which is a no-no as my host (Segpub.net) uses Safe Mode. You can solve this issue by adding a couple of directives to your wp-config.php file, namely WP_TEMP_DIR. Adding these lines to wp-config.php fixed the problem for me:
define('WP_TEMP_DIR', ini_get('upload_tmp_dir'));
putenv('TMPDIR=' . ini_get('upload_tmp_dir'));
Thanks to the WordPress forums for my answer.
la petite url 1.6
My personal URL shortener hits version 1.6. Current users will be able to upgrade by way of WordPress’ automatic update mechanism. The rest of you: Download it from WordPress.org.
Fun fact: House style is to always type “la petite url” in all lowercase.
Acorn 2.0
Flying Meat Software release a super update to their image editor, Acorn. It sports an all-new UI designed (mostly) by Brandon Walkin. Gus’ blog post sums up many of the changes. It is, interestingly to me, 64-bit and only runs on 10.6.
Preliminary Notes on Apple’s Recent “It’s Only Rock and Roll” Music Event
In no particular order:
App recommendations: Wholly necessary, but we aren’t out of the woods yet regarding App Store curation. I bet there’s a good deal of money to be made just doing that: Curating collections of apps. Boing Boing got huge during the blog boom for curating other blogs, why wouldn’t it work for applications on a still-new platform? Someone’s going to get rich digging down on serious Touch applications.
iPod Touch No camera, no mention of 3GS-type speed bump. Kinda got the shaft. I can’t think of a single good reason for not including a camera that doesn’t involve trying to trick people into buying a Nano. Surely they aren’t afraid a (not that great) camera is going to steer fence-sitters from the iPhone to the Touch? Update: It’s now come out that the 8gb ($199) iPod Touch has the older, slightly slower, hardware, and all the others in the Touch line have the upgraded “3GS” innards. You’ll notice on the “Compare iPod Models” page on Apple’s site, the 8gb is sectioned off from his higher-capcity and speedier brothers.
iTunes 9 Now with more bloat and cumbersome, non-portable, versions of the extra features that people who illegally download albums already get in more useful formats. Still a 32-bit Carbon app. Gruber was right about WebKit.
John Siracusa’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Review
If there is only one 10.6 review/recap you read, it should be this one. John is the best at this. It is part history lesson, part analysis, part commentary.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Compatibility List
Probably a good idea to consult this before you take the plunge tomorrow.
Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad
An absolutely astonishing demonstration of a vector drawing application from 1962.
Google+Growl 3.0
Waffle Software brings out a major update to it’s Google Notifier plugin. Jesper lays down some specifics in this blog post, and has posted a tech profile here. The new page for G+G is just beautiful.
