BBC iPlayer is one louder

Does the BBC's iPlayer have the loudest volume control?

Apple open-sourcing their apps?

Shirley you can't be serious? Anyone looked the examples in Snow Leopard's Developer Tools recently?

See that one called TextEdit? Yep, that's that TextEdit application you find in /Applications. The history of changes is an interesting read in README.rtf.

I wonder why they've done this? OK, so I'm pretty sure Apple aren't going to be publishing source code to all their other apps any time soon. I'm guessing it's to give other developers a look how to do things "the Apple way".

Two posts in 2 weeks? Steady on there!

Anyway, just a thought - now that Snow Leopard has OpenCL and is exploiting the power of GPU, when will we start seeing the Activity Monitor app showing GPU Usage and GPU History??

Does anyone know - are any apps installed with SL already using OpenCL?

Photography

This post reminds me of the episode of Red Dwarf, Me Squared, where Lister tries to find out why Rimmer's last words were "Gazpacho Soup". He finds Rimmer's diary:

January 1st: I have decided to keep a journal of my thoughts and deeds over the coming year; a daily chart of my progress through the echelons of command so that perhaps one day other aspiring officers may seek enlightenment through these pages. It is my fond hope that one day this journal will take it's place alongside Napolean's war diaries and the memories of Julius Ceasar.

Next entry - July 17th: Auntie Maggie's Birthday.

(It's November 25th, by the way - Gazpacho Soup Day.)

So, here we are, a mere 8 months since my last post. It's not Auntie Maggie's birthday (I don't have an Auntie Maggie anyway); I wanted to let my faithful readership know about my new hobby - photography.

I'm very pleased with my new Nikon D60. The D60 is getting on a bit, at about 18 months old now (in technology years, positively ancient!) but feature/quality/price trade-offs made it (in my opinion) the best option for me.

I realise buying an expensive camera won't automatically make my pictures better - it's so easy to take crap pictures with an expensive camera. I should know - I have! But with a good camera in hand, it's going to give me the impetus to get out there and practice.

So feel free to browse my photostream on flickr. Constructive criticism is welcome!

I'll add more existing pictures soon, and new ones as I take them. Visit regularly, or subscribe to my flickr RSS feed.

Enjoy.

iWork and Version Control

I've been looking at the new release of iWork '09 from Apple and it's time to bring up the subject of version control and iWork documents again, after posting about it here last year.  

Maybe Apple have listened to their customers because in this release of iWork they have changed the format of Keynote, Pages and Numbers documents. These application now save your work as single files rather than document bundles. (I'd like to think somebody at Apple read my previous article, but that may be pushing it a bit!)

This is certainly good news for those with an antiquated version control system such as CVS and Subversion which, as I mentioned before, litters your working copy with version control.  To be honest, it's good news for any VCS since having to deal with one file instead of one directory. 

At igence where I work we're in the process of transitioning to git for our version control, replacing a 6 year old CVS repository. I've been getting to know git for good few months now, and I can see even it having problems with OS X bundles, especially when it comes to merging branches, since it works at the file level and would attempt to merge the contents of the bundle and most likely make a complete hash of it.

Of course, this still hasn't addressed the issue of which applications we use, but it does bring iWork back into the debate. We even have the option of OpenOffice.org as well now; the latest version of their suite (v3) is OS X native, rather than relying on the X Window System.

Thought for the day

Did Lee Majors do his own stunts when he played Colt Seavers in The Fall Guy?

Embedded comment forms

Cool. I just found about embedding comment forms in posts.

Edit your comment settings via http://draft.blogger.com/ and you should see an extra option under Comment Form Placement - 'Embedded Below Post'.  That's all there is to it.  More details here.

If you're using your own hand crafted template, this article  describes how to update it.