Updaters: From Diff to Whole (and Sparkle)

This TidBITS article brings back memories for old geeks:

TidBITS Problem Solving: Tales from the Sausage Factory: Why Those Big Downloads for Simple Updates?

...And then at the end you have whole-app updaters such as Sparkle, which is what we use (see "Sparkle Improves Application Update Experience," 2007-08-20). The Mac developer community seems to have more or less standardized around Sparkle these days. I'm amazed at how often I open and app and find that it's using Sparkle to keep itself up to date. Aside from the programs where I implemented it myself, I don't recall the last time I saw an application using a more granular updater. Even Apple seems to publish monster updates for their apps. They use more granular packages for updates to the OS itself, but on the other hand there seem to be a lot of problems caused by these which are fixed by re-applying the big combo updaters they put out...

In the old days updaters were pretty small, typically diffs. Those days are gone -- the cost of bandwidth is less than the cost of the problems that arise with anything less than a whole-app update.

In my real job we still use an old data update solution that's basically a diff-type update. Nowadays whole-data is the only way to go.

Aperture 2.01 bug: retouch broken for grayscale images

This is a verified bug -- but it may be limited to grayscale images.

Apple - Support - Discussions - Retouch/Clone problem ...: "I can't get Retouch (or clone) to do anything at all. They act like they're working but nothing in the image is changed. However the Spot and Patch tool will work on these images/files."

I'm using 10.4, but it sounds like this is a bug everywhere.

Update 3/22: I exported as PNG and reimported and the tool works, so it's not broken for every file format. Then I found the "limit to 1024" PNG export is broken -- it ignores crops. Apple must punish the QA group for finding bugs.

SharePoint 2007 and non-Office documents: didn't Microsoft lose a court case for this sort of thing?

SharePoint 2007 is ubiquitous now. It's eliminated most other document management and "collaboration" solutions in corporate settings.

Office 2007 Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents work pretty well in a managed Sharepoint document repository (library).

Oddly enough, other documents don't work nearly as well. They're very much second class citizens, with an unnecessarily clumsy and error-prone workflow for check-out, check-in, versioning and editing.

Funny how that works.

I thought Microsoft got in a wee bit of trouble for these sorts of games -- once upon a time. Too long ago, perhaps. Certainly nobody in the current US justice department is paying attention now.

Google's GData OS X cocoa library now iPhone compatible: photos to Picasa, etc.

The "one more thing" reference in this Google Mac blog posting seems appropriate ...

Official Google Mac Blog: New frontiers with Google Data APIs and Objective-C

And one more thing...

The source code for the GData Objective-C Client Library is now compatible with the iPhone SDK as well. Perhaps you want your iPhone software to send photos to a Picasa Web Albums account, or keep a journal of phone calls automatically in Blogger. Maybe your iPhone application accesses a database of information from a Google Spreadsheet or from Google Base. With the Google Data APIs Objective-C Client Library, creating software for these tasks is straightforward.

If you are writing iPhone software, just drag the "GData Sources" group folder from the GData project file into your iPhone project, and use the GData APIs as you would when writing a Mac application. The Objective-C Client Library is an open-source project, so you can find links to the sources and documentation on the project page.

So those 100,000 SDK developer wannabes can now easily leverage Google's entire suite of services with very little extra effort.

Wow.

The iPhone SDK-OS is like the Palm OS -- and that's a good thing

When the SDK came out I was bemused to find similarities to the Palm OS world: No multitasking, data access limited to the application's data.

Since then we've learned that Apple's applications do multitask (if I actually owned an iPhone [2] I'd have noted that obvious fact, but I write these posts very quickly) and some iPhone partners (AOL, ?Adobe) will be allowed access to multitasking. For most developers though, developing for the iPhone OS X is rather like developing for Palm OS [1].

Fubo.org has made a persuasive case over the past few days that these are justified and measured constraints given the current state of iPhone development. The articles are well worth reading, but I particularly liked the fine way he concluded his last post:

furbo.org · More brain surgery…

...If you’re still unconvinced, let me ask you one final question: do you want to get IM notifications while you’re making a 911 call?

[1] One developer I read noted that the original Palm OS SDK had a more sophisticated 'wake me when an event matches my entry on the event registration queue' function than he found in the current iPhone SDK.

[2] Gordon's laws of acquisition mean I don't buy until my demands are met ...

iPhoto can't merge Libraries -- but neither can Aperture

What can I say?

Aperture: Merging Libraries confirms you ... can't merge Libraries.

You need to export project-by-project-by-project then import project-by-project-by ...

It's awe inspiring, really.

And now I own this sucker ...

Safari 3.1 STILL doesn't work properly - pasting into rich text fields

Safari 3.1 is out, and it's no better with rich text fields than Safari 3.0 was.

When I copy rich text to the clipboard, and paste into a Blogger rich text edit area, it frequently appears outside of the bounds of the text area. If I repeat the operation, it appears repeatedly "out of bounds".

There's no fix but to switch to HTML mode and paste into that text box.

Firefox/Camino don't have this problem.

Very annoying. I think Apple is going for force me to fire up my free developers account and file a bug report. Next time it happens I'll attack a screenshot to this post ...