Carbon: The Undead

I just downloaded the Eclipse SDK to check out a plugin for it, and I noticed it was done in Carbon. That got me thinking about the state of Carbon these days. Last year at WWDC, it was made very clear that Carbon is in a holding pattern now. Maintenance mode.

I can understand why Apple might do this, Cocoa is a full-featured application framework, and the objective-C runtime does allow you do do some pretty interesting things with it. Why have two frameworks when you can focus on one. Also, now that Carbon did its job and got the developers over to X, it can be put out to pasture.

Sadly, I think this is a bad move overall. And not because I put so much hard work into it, but simply because I think it allows you to do some things easier than Cocoa. Arguably more important things.

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More Galactica Theories

I’m mostly writing this to see how good or bad I can predict. I’ve been pondering the whole death of Starbuck and the line that’s supposed to come up in tonight’s episode about “We’re all cylons.”. Of course, the second Starbuck bought it, I thought “she must be a cylon then”. Why spend all those episodes talking about her destiny only to have her die. Putting myself into a writer’s shoes, it just doesn’t make much sense.

But of course you listen to Ron Moore’s podcast and he’s all dramatic about how they felt you know what, she need needs to die. And the part about how the called her up to break the news to her. There’s also the fact that she grew up and had a mother. Of course, one could argue that either

• those memories are fake
• the final 5 cylons are hybrids

What’s stuck in my brain now is the part where the cylon tells her about there being nothing wrong with death and some line about the space in between life and death. Which is of course where the Deanna model of cylon kept trying to get to to see the final 5 cylons.

So I say Starbuck might return tonight and change everything. To what, I have no idea. If they are all cylons, then what? Why race the other cylons to Earth after all. Why continue the series? Unless they take a tack of “well, we’re the good cylons” or something equally ridiculous. I don’t know. Guess I’ll know in an hour or two!

Stargate on Blu-ray

Last night I watchd Stargate on Blu-ray. It looked really good, but I’m wondering why the heck the subtitles didn’t show up when they were talking “Egyptian”. I had to manually turn them on, which of course, then gave me subtitles when they were saying everything. Scanning the web this seems to be an issue with the disk (I hope — it would be unfortunate if it were a blu-ray limitation and would likely flip me to HD-DVD). I’d hate that you couldn’t get partial subtitles on a movie, as you need in this one or possibly at the beginning of Hunt for Red October, etc.

One amusing note was that I started listening to the commentary track for a while and they were very adamant they had nothing to do with the series. That’s sad to me as I really enjoy the series (though since Sci-Fi’s had it it hasn’t been as good). It’s not unexpected though that they don’t like from past stuff I’ve read.

Another interesting thing is that in this version (which I also have the DVD of), they show extra scenes, including glimpses of some petrified ‘gods’ that apparently tried to come through the gate and got embedded in the rock. I had thought they were just buried with the stargate after the revolution, but the commentary says they tried to come through. It certainly isn’t clear from the movie, but I like that explanation a lot better.

And of course, you always have to wonder as you watch it why the computers were already set up for 7 symbols when he cracks the secret of the glyphs. That takes so much away from it. I realize they want to get on their journey quickly, but they could have at least had a scene or two in-between where they figure out how to dial it. I dunno. Something. Anything.

Anyhoo… geektime over.

Yahoo! Widgets 4 Released

We’re done with Yahoo! Widgets 4! Read all about it on our official Widget Blog. This release took a while to get done, but the team is ramped up substantially. We do still have three engineering reqs. to fill, so if you know someone who’s a wiz at doing framework-level development, send them our way. The next couple of releases are really going to change things.

Hey! That ain’t right!

Check out this picture. On the left, Konfabulator/Yahoo! Widgets. On the right, an Apollo sample. As you can see, they stole our images verbatim. Not cool.

I should point out that their Widget takes 26MB of RPRIV on Mac OS X, our Weather Widget takes 3MB. Booyah. Yeah, i know it’s alpha, but still.

It’s been a while…

I’ve been away from blogville lately, and it’s not from lack of caring. I’ve been incredibly busy on our imminent Yahoo! Widgets 4 release. It’s going to be pretty kick-ass if I do say so myself. Does it do everything I’d like it to? No. Will it in the future? You betcha!

But this post isn’t about that. Or anything much really. Just a sign that I’m still here. I was actually just looking through the Flickr ‘Interestingness’ photos on their site, and I have to say, there are some amazing pictures on there. I mean, I have a really good camera and all, but it’s not the equipment that matters. It’s the eye. Some pictures on there just stop me in my tracks. Amazing.

If you don’t know Flickr by now, you really should.