Working on SQLEditor SVG improvements (arriving soon in 3.0), and found this excellent series of articles by Sara Soueidnn on several of the details.
So SQLEditor in future will be using the same object icons in SVG as are drawn in the main document and each will be its own beautiful SVG symbol, rather than being separately drawn.
(Object icons in SQLEditor 3 are now little images rather than being individually, because this improves performance quite noticeably and allows nicer styling)
Apple has made some big changes to their developer programs, which I think are a big improvement:
1) You can now apparently develop and deploy to your own iOSÂ device without a program membership. (Possibly only with Xcode 7, I’m not perfectly clear yet). This is a big win for casual developers and people just getting started.
2) There is now a single developer program combining iOS and OS X which is much simpler and cuts the price in half if you subscribe to both
3) The safari extension program is being merged in. This possibly isn’t so great if you were solely doing safari extensions, because now you may need to pay. But if you are doing other development anyway, then it’s a simplified approach (only one program to deal with and remember to renew)
Overall big changes and a strong improvement in most areas.
I’m also hopeful about the new OS versions too.
Wonderful news: Lois McMaster Bujold, one of my favourite authors, has announced a new novel, due sometime in 2016.
If you haven’t read Bujold, I strongly recommend going out, getting a copy of one of them and reading it right now (or you know, when the bookstore or library are next open)
The title will apparently be Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen.
WordPress usually needs plugins for things, but it’s a pain keeping them updated, unless you want to use the built in auto-updating (which I don’t use for various reasons)
That was until I discovered this method of using svn:externals to update them.[kovshenin.com]
cd public_html/wp-content/ svn propedit svn:externals plugins <edit as required> svn update
By adding third party plugins to the plugins directory svn:externals list, they all get updated at the same time as I update the wordpress install, which I already use subversion for anyway. The akismet plugin already gets updated by this method. It also allows changes to the version of the akismet plugin, which is good if it gets updated between major WordPress releases.
Well done to the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at the UK ministry of Defence. They’ve started to release code on github.
I can’t imagine that getting approval for this was easy, and it probably required a fair amount of negotiation to get this far; but it’s a good sign for openness in government and hopefully it will be a good thing for both the government and the wider community.
Given that governments aren’t trying to make money selling software, open source seems an excellent fit. Hopefully we’ll see more stuff from them. (I imagine not the classified things though!)
I’ve been playing Prison Architect recently, having picked it up in a Humble Bundle deal.
Interesting idea and great fun. Plus not so lifelike that IÂ would be uncomfortable playing.
October 16th has arrived, the Apple event is scheduled. Will this be the official release date of Yosemite? Enquiring minds want to know…
update:Â yes it looks like it will be
It teaches a bit about Cross-site scripting (XSS) bugs that, as the page helpfully describes, are one of the most common and dangerous types of vulnerabilities in web apps.
Worth checking, even if you think you know the material.
Is your JIT compiled javascript function running too slow?
No worries, just wait and the javascript engine will recompile it and then replace the function with a faster version!
But that’s not fast enough either?
Webkit will compile another version using more optimizations, using code from LLVM.
Is the function still executing some long running loop?
No problem! The javascript engine will copy all of the current state and build a new compiled function that starts at the beginning of that loop, then replace the old slower function with the new one, while it is still running!
It gets flipped over at the beginning of the next run through the loop.
(see the Hot-Loop Transfer section of the original article)
Just from the description, this sounds stupendously complicated. But the performance improvements are apparently quite considerable.
I’m truly impressed by the effort that goes in and the work that’s been done on this.
🙂
Read the original post for the full details:
https://www.webkit.org/blog/3362/introducing-the-webkit-ftl-jit/
The newest and latest feature to arrive in SQLEditor 2.7Â [55MB Zip] is a customizable object palette.
For a long time, the object palette in SQLEditor has looked like this:
There were three fixed objects, that could be dragged from the palette into the document. The images have changed, but the basic functionality is little changed from v1.0, which also had a three object palette that worked like this.
In version 2.7 though, there is a new palette, that initially looks like this:
It doesn’t look that much different at first, however it’s much more than it used to be.
The biggest change is that you can now add your own items to the palette.
To add an object, you can hold option (alt) and drag it to the palette.
SQLEditor create a new palette item, with a small preview of the objects. You can rename the item by double clicking on the label. Or delete it by right clicking and choosing delete.
You can also add palette items from the clipboard. Add items to the clipboard using the normal cut or copy commands, then click on the small gear icon in the bottom left to see a menu. The New from clipboard command adds the contents of the clipboard as a new palette item.
You can the use the new palette item just like the default ones. The palette item contains a copy of the original objects, so you don’t need the original document they came from.
There are lots of possible uses for this, the obvious one is templates for tables. If you frequently create the same kinds of databases, you’re probably also creating the same kinds of tables.
For example, there always seems to be a “user” table, with a fairly similar set of columns. In the above example the user table has been added and now we can instantly create a user table in a single action that contains the four important columns in every user table:Â unique id, first name, surname and shoe size. You can also set things like table type=INNODB, or set colors and styles (although not yet object labels).
SQLEditor will save the objects and bring it out ready for use.
You can also add groups of objects, including any relationships between them.
This feature has been on the wish-list for some time, I’m glad it’s now finished and I hope that people will like it.
SQLEditor 2.7 is available now via the in-app update system or from the website:
SQLEditor 2.7Â [55MB zip, 10.6.8+]