Recently in Open Source Category
Just incase someone who reads my blog does not actually read Slashdot, Movable Type is now Open Source.
(Via Slashdot.)
One of the most sought after features for Camino has been RSS feed handling similar to Firefox's live bookmarks. Well, finally we're getting our wish. I've had my eye on the ticket on bugzilla for a while and saw a few days ago that a patch was in. Tonight I grabbed an updated nightly build and lo and behold, RSS feed handling! So if you follow nightly builds and haven't updated in a while, now seems like a good time!
Standard disclaimer. While I encourage folks who have an understanding of the development process to download and run nightly builds and contribute to bugzilla, those who cannot deal with possible bugs or instability, or who don't really know what any of that means, should avoid nightly builds. If there's going to be a problem with software, that's probably where you'll find it.
MacLibre is a cool new piece of software built for the Google Summer of Code. Basically it's an open source package manager for Mac OS X software with a pretty GUI to it. I'm a little bit fuzzy on just what applications will be featured, or more to the point whether they'll feature applications that aren't open source, but any way you twist it this is a great idea.
Some of you may be thinking that this is related to Fink. Not so. Fink is more oriented toward command line applications whereas this seems to be oriented toward cocoa and aqua apps. It's geared a bit more toward the power user than the UNIX user, as far as I can tell.
It think it's nice to see an application like this come out for OS X, and I hope that developers will start releasing to it.
[via TUAW]
OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
This news fills me with disapproval. I just don't know how else to put it. As far as I know, Adium is the only chat client for OS X that is primarily based on Gaim (using libgaim).
And now they're planning to use joscar in their 1.0 release. Of course they'll have to keep libgaim around for anything that's not AIM, ICQ, and .Mac. The reasons are a little bit painful to me, and a little on the lazy side.
First of all, I remember months ago - or maybe even a year ago now - reading a post on their forum from one of the lead developers saying that they'd never break away from libgaim, and that adding joscar or something similar on top of libgaim was unneeded bloat. I agreed.
What features will joscar bring to Adium? The two cited in the blog post are file transfer and Direct IM for the oscar-based services, and "a cleaner codebase," and that they say it's faster.
Allow me to pick this apart piece by piece. First, let's address the speed. I, personally, don't think it works that way - a faster library isn't really going to mean much when it adds bloat to the application. And, frankly, libgaim is plenty fast!
Cleaner codebase is legitimate, but also a little silly. Why? Well, if they need to modify code in one library they're probably going to have to do the mod in both. Now they have to understand two libraries instead of just one, modify two libraries instead of one, update two libraries instead of one, keep track of two libraries instead of one. Doesn't this seem like an awful lot of extra work just to get a cleaner codebase?
And on to everyone's favorite sore spot - file transfers and Direct IM. I'm afraid I'm going to call foul on this one. Gaim 2, and libgaim 2, which are now in their third beta release, include this functionality.
So, Adium developers, what's the real reason you want to switch to joscar? And make it a good one, or don't do it!
Oh blogosphere, how I love thee. Thy divine ability to create hype is truly, uh, divine.
So yesterday we started seeing some posts on several sites, who I will spare the linkage, that announce Firefox 2.0 Alpha has been released to the public. I don't know where this rumor started, though I can tell you that it's gone as far as Slashdot - which, for once, is not the first place I saw the news. Fortunately, Slashdot has quite a few astute readers who note the truth in their comments.
The truth, however, is that they've simply made the branding change in CVS but have not made a release. In his post on mozillazine.org, Asa Dotzler says, "When we make a new release, we'll say so." In other words, if you don't see the news on Mozilla.org or Mozilla.com, it's not news yet.
Something tells me this is the product of people always feeling the need to be the first to report something.
Many people, myself included, have held held back on moving over to Thunderbird because it has no integration with OS X's address book. Frustrating, isn't it? Well, the first step toward built-in integration has been taken. Peter Van der Beken has developed a patch to provide that integration. You still have to be savvy enough to compile it yourself, but if you are you get a sneak peak at the future. Bear in mind that there is still no AppleScript functionality, and that there are plenty of other reasons people like me stick with Mail.app (including the sometimes irrational hope that Apple will take IMAP a little more seriously some day), but if this is what you've been waiting for, wait no longer. Vafer.org has it working with the latest version of Thunderbird.
[via HawkWings]
Last night I wrote about iTerm, and how much I was enjoying using certain features including text dragging. Unfortunately, the latest release, 0.8.1, isn't very good with the text dragging. Wanting to support the app, I decided to take a look and see if it had been reported as a bug yet. It had. A person by the name of vinc17 left a comment noting that version 0.8.2 has better text dragging support. I went ahead and tried it out (see their cvs section) and found that it's true, but with an exception.
I poked and prodded and the conclusion I came to is that text dragging seems to work great until you have enough in your buffer to have a vertical scroll bar. Then the functionality seems to work poorly.
So it's at this point that I suppose I should point out that we're talking about an open source app that's in development. It can't be expected to be perfect, but it's nice to see that even a little progress is being made. Yay for progress!
Senuti is another iPod "manager". I can hear the groans a mile away - there are so many iPod managers out there. Hell, my other favorite is called "Yet Another iPod Manager." I'm not sure, exactly, how they made that into YamiPod, but that's another post.
One of the things that sets this one apart is that it's open source. That's right, I said open source. Not just free. Open source projects are one of my weaknesses. I love watching them grow and contributing when possible in whatever ways I can.
The other aspect of Senuti I love is that it's lightning quick. It uses the iPod's own database, which means it's always got the correct information and never actually has to figure out what a song is. Since it's got no need for locking files, you're free to run iTunes at the same time if you so desire.
It's light-weight, which is a blessing and a curse. It's got no bells, whistles, or frills which is part of what allows it to run so quickly. However, it's lack of said bells, whistles, and frills makes it less of a one-stop-shop. I love one of the features YamiPod maintains - the ability to generate a human-readable song list. I'm a big fan of the iTunes-like interface, but leaving out the ability to browse by genre, artist, and album sort of seems like a cop out - especially given the functional search bar. But all in the name of speed.
This is the sort of application I would gladly keep on my workstation at the office for quick imports. It's also something I'll keep around at home for big backups of my entire iPod. But if you're a person who needs bells and whistles this isn't the app for you. Try YamiPod. One of the two is sure to suit you.
Oh, and sorry, folks, this one's OS X only. If you're looking for Windows or Linux, again I say try YamiPod
Well, folks, this is what we've all been waiting for. For a long, long time at that. Mozilla has released a preview of Firefox 1.0! Yay!
Reaction #1: Marc still wants the mac specific theme back. If anyone knows where to find it, please please pretty please say so!