If I’m late on this, it’s because my normal source for Apple news is Ars Technica, but I only ever get error messages from that site anymore.
Xcode 3. I don’t really care about the IDE, since I don’t use Xcode for my own projects, favoring Ruby anyway, and using Rake and Vim even for things that are using Objective C. But if Interface Builder will be nicer in 3, that’s good, since I do use Cocoa and IB for my stuff.
The big thing though on the developer side is going to be Objective C 2.0. I’ve never really sat down and learned how Objective C memory management works, so having garbage collection available will make me very, very happy.
Spaces. Woohoo! I use Desktop Manager to get a virtual desktop setup here on Tiger, even hacking it up a little myself in order to keep it from hogging half my menu bar (with two 1280×1024 monitors and 8 virtual desktops, it was getting wide, so I set a limit to the width). But this setup has limits because there’s zero OS integration. Apps aren’t aware of it. That should change with Spaces, the virtual desktop manager coming with Leopard, much to my delight.
And that’s all I can find on the Apple website that interests me about Leopard. And that’s fine: At some point the rapid revolution had to slow down. Things are settling in.
I just hope Leopard won’t bring more gray into the Apple world. I hate the amount of gray that already exists in this OS.
Major League Baseball’s basically been trying to kill fantasy baseball by bullying small players out of the market, and then extorting large cuts of profit from the few big players, but the courts have ruled against them. If they’re going to publish stats in newspapers across the country, then people get to use those stats, including the player names.
Good news for people just looking to have some fun with the sport, and for anyone who wants interest in the sport to stay up. This judge just might save MLB from its own nearsightedness.
The Fed’s been creeping up its interest rate by a quarter point (25 basis points) after every meeting of its Open Market commitee with regularity for some time. But at last, the Fed has stopped, and decided to leave things where they are a 5.25%.
It’s a tricky decision, and they really could have gone either way. On one hand, rising oil prices are pushing inflation to higher levels than we’ve seen in quite some time, as seen in recent CPI hikes. On the other hand, rising oil prices are threatening our prosperity, as seen in recently disappointing employment growth rates.
Some people wish that Fed Chairman Bernanke would push us right into a recession in order to whip inflation, but I’m glad he won’t. Let the oil shock run its course first, I say, so our economy doesn’t have to suffer both pressures at once.
Repeating a story as old as Europe, European soccer is singling out Israel for sanctions. Specifically, the UEFA won’t let the Israelis host any matches.
It’s sad that this isn’t even surprising.
The PrBoom launcher on the Mac is getting an overhaul for the next version. The Wad loading is revamped, along with the whole UI:
Drawers should make things easier on people, as will separating out the debugger-oriented options from the user-oriented ones.
There will be no full recount of the Mexican Presidential election. Andrés Manuel López Obrador has lost, even if he won’t accept it, what with him calling himself the President and all:
President-elect Felipe Calderon will have some troubles to deal with, though, judging by this BBC quote:
Mr Lopez Obrador said “peaceful civic resistance” would continue and urged people to take part in a further protest on Sunday.
Supporters chanted “Vote-by-vote!” and blocked the entrance to the tribunal.
“If there is no solution, there’ll be revolution,” they shouted.
But gee, I thought PRI was the Institutional Revolutionary Party, not AMLO’s party.
Alright, time to start watching again. After losing 13 of 14 games, dropping from a second place 46-42 on July 9 to a fifth place 47-55 (6.5 back) on July 26, the Dodgers have rattled off 8 straight wins and climbed back into a third place 55-55 (2 back) with the win last night.
One more thumping of the Marlins will give them an actual winning record again, imagine that!
Clayton took down Red State Friday night in order to make the move from Scoop to the customized Drupal version by Monday morning. He’s moving over the database and presumably making all the old URLs work too. He’s looking at probably hundreds of users, thousands of articles, and tens of thousands of comments to port from one database to the other in about 48 hours.
Gee, and it took Rob and I HOW long to move SA from Rob’s code to mine?
Looks like the Olympic bronze has reawakened USA Basketball after all. Jerry Colangelo has done his job well, even if he’d say his job isn’t done until after Berlin, er, Peking.
“One World, One Dream,” one China? Bah.
Cheers to the NBA Board of Governors for fixing up some rules:
- The three division winners in each conference, plus the best record among the rest of the teams, will be seeded by record. That way there’s no more incentive to lose like the Clippers did. Some people publicly keep talking about Mavericks/Spurs, but the incentive to lose for home court advantage has to be the primary concern here, because it threatened the integrity of the game.
- Playoff rosters will now be as large as regular season rosters, as well as working the same way as in the regular season. I like this change; limiting the playoff rosters as has been done in the past only served to increase the luck factor of playoff injuries.
- In the last two minutes of regulation or in overtime, if you’re down to two full timeouts, one of them becomes a 20. You can no longer take a 20 into overtime. In overtime you only get two full timeouts and a 20 instead of three full timeouts. The goal here is to speed up the ends of games and I guess that’s good; full timeouts feel like they take FOREVER during the ends of close games, especially if teams go back and forth using their last timeouts, such as before Derek Fisher’s 0.4 second shot.