njr 3.0

Steven Frank writes about small developers who have to compete with Apple's iApps.

Mike Pinkerton is thinking about quitting work on Chimera.

I don't know what I can say to urge the Chimera folks onward. Competition is good. Safari is not and never will be entirely open source. Safari's rendering won't catch up to Gecko overnight, and it may never have support for some of the cutting-edge standards that Gecko supports. Nor will the interface necessarily work the way I want. I like and use Chimera, many hours a day, every day. Please keep going, and try to get others involved. Making Chimera more approachable for programmers would be a start—I've tried to make and suggest changes several times, and even submitted patches, which have been mostly ignored.

8:10 PM | Radio
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Modeling Framework is an EOF-inspired object-relational bridge for Python. A bit late for my current Python project, but certainly something to take a closer look at later.

6:58 PM | Radio
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Sven is an in-development Cocoa Subversion client.

3:38 PM | Radio
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Oracle released a preview of JDeveloper 9.0.3 for Mac OS X today. JDeveloper is Oracle's Java IDE, though it's quite suited even if you're not writing database-centric applications. If you've used an earlier version, this one is no longer based on JBuilder. Will Crawford was raving about it when I saw him last year, and since he does Java development for a living, I figured it was worth a look. I've been trying to get a decent environment for hacking on Zoe, and after the pain and suffering I went through on Sunday attempting to import Zoe into Eclipse, almost anything would be an improvement.

JDeveloper doesn't work on the Java 1.4.1 developer previews yet, according to the docs. It's packaged like a real Mac OS X application, and installing it is as simple as dragging the app package from the disk image. The icon in the Dock is ugly as sin; it uses a MDI-ish interface, and there's no Quit or Exit command (close the parent window to quit).

I've had some window layering problems and other visual anomalies; the UI uses Swing, so it's not exactly what you call responsive, but it is usable. In particular, I'm used to long new-window times in Cocoa applications; it's surprising that a heavyweight Java app such as JDeveloper will open windows faster than Project Builder will.

Back to research—been dealing with some Metakit portability issues today, and I need to move my testing environment since we're taking our beefier cluster down for a much-needed OS upgrade (unfortunately still with Red Hat because of various external dependencies…)

8:43 PM | Radio
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iCommune is a very neat idea, taking advantage of OS X's built-in Apache WebDAV server, WebDAV filesystem and iTunes' device plugins to provide simple peer-to-peer music sharing between computers. The iCommune “server” produces an index of the ID3 tags, which the client reads via HTTP—that way the client doesn't have to scan the entire hierarchy manually, yet has all the metadata needed to fill out the iTunes listing. You don't even need the WebDAV server to be a Mac—included is a Python tag indexer which works virtually anywhere.

I've already got it set up between my PowerBook and desktop G4—so far, so good. (I also meant to go home an hour and a half ago!)

10:32 PM | Radio
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