njr 3.0

Just released ICeCoffEE 1.3.3. As the 0.0.1 version number increment may indicate, there aren't any earth-shattering changes, but some useful refinements, bug fixes and minor new features. I haven't pushed the release out to MacUpdate because I need to sleep, so I'll do it in the morning.

I'm really feeling pressure to get the current stage of my research finished soon, not to mention it's actually getting rather interesting. So while I'd really like to get back to Pester, the most I'm likely to do in the near future is finish writing the man page for the release of launch 1.0.

Here's a rundown of the most interesting changes in ICeCoffEE 1.3.3:

Sven-S. Porst contributed some features I had been meaning to add myself for some time. The Services contextual submenu now follows the proper guidelines for contextual menus, in existence since Mac OS 8: inapplicable items are removed, not disabled. (The standard Cocoa NSTextView contextual menu flaunts this guideline, of course…) Submenus with a single enabled item are collapsed into their supermenus, and the Services item disappears completely if no services are available for the given context. He also added a German localization, and pointed out some issues with wording in the process. There's no better way to pinpoint where your writing is unclear at a microscopic level than for a translator to pore over its colloquialisms and idiosyncrasies.

Mac OS X 10.2's Terminal offers a lot of welcome improvements, but its drag-and-drop behavior is downright infuriating. Dragging selected text by only two pixels will duplicate it inside the window, causing chaos if I'm on IRC or using vi or some similar single-letter-sensitive app. It's akin to the accidental middle-button mouse click on X11, but even easier to accidentally trigger. ICeCoffEE 1.3.3 requires the option key be held down to duplicate text within a Terminal window, and fixes the option key's incorrect toggling behavior when dragging between Terminal windows (in violation of Apple's Aqua HIG). The only casualty is that self-drag target highlighting no longer works as well as it did, but I noted other problems with incorrect target highlighting, and most Cocoa apps don't even highlight the drag target in the first place (again, despite the HIG's admonitions to the contrary).

Some life-related comments for a change:

The weather here has been wonderful recently—almost eerily so. Tonight I and a few friends watched My Neighbor Totoro; the rain outside started and stopped exactly matching the first rainfall in the movie. I've become addicted in the past few weeks to sitting outside on the balcony in the late night or early morning, working on my PowerBook, listening to the sound of wind rustling the leaves of the trees a few feet from my balcony. I'd work outside more often if I had a faster network connection at home than my current modem—that will wait for my future roommate to move here in August.

To say my parents' recent life has been hectic is an understatement. They're finally finishing up renovations on their house in Boston, tending to their place in New Hampshire every weekend among the voracious biting insects, and have been up to their respective ears in work otherwise. My mother got back from visiting her mother in Australia a few days ago, then moves from Boston to Seattle this weekend to start a new job. She's in corporate housing for a month; once she finds a permanent place to live, I'll have to see about setting her up with a cable modem or DSL and possibly videoconferencing. I'm waking up in three hours to set up her PowerBook for a dialup connection in Washington. Then my parents leave to spend the day in New Hampshire, and return by 6 PM for my mother's cross-country flight.

(Update, 5 AM: they're not leaving after all; I can go back to sleep…)

2:28 AM | Radio