I have to admit that I thought Opera had all but abandoned Opera/Mac. How wrong I was: Opera 7.5 beta 3 was released a few days ago. While I don’t use Opera anymore, my current browser of choice being Epiphany, I do have a soft spot for Opera as it is one of the few browsers that I was tempted to buy at one stage. It seems like a sibling to the other browsers I use that’s flown the nest; only now and then popping back with news of how things are going.
First, Coca-Cola’s new brand of “pure” bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its “highly sophisticated purification process”, based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.
If you need more prodding to turn you into a cynic when it comes to multi-national corporations… Ludicrous, really, isn’t it?
As far as I have been able to tell, if you are tech-savvy in any way, Linux is better than Windows for a number of reasons:
Windows seems to slow up and either crash or just become un-usable after a few days, if you are doing much with it. Linux doesn’t. I’ve had my Gentoo system up for fifty days doing full time dev work and gaming without a noticable slowdown.
Recently, there has been some discussion in the Gnome community about whether to stay with C/C++ as the main language used for Gnome, or to move to another language, specifically C# or Java.
Both of these languages are, in my opinion, far better than C for desktop application development. Their focus on higher level structures makes them more suited to the task of creating usable software, relieving the developer from low level string manipulation, to take an example that always causes me problems when I use C. I think C is an excellent language, just not when it comes to desktop development. I’d be much more prepared to dev on a desktop level using C# or Java than C. The extreme control you get with C for all aspects of you code just seems like overkill for a desktop application.
As mentioned in the sidebar, we lost a couple of chat entries on switching to the new server. I guess this was due to the time it took the DNS change to propagate. Anyway, the most interesting post I saw was to Dean Edwards’ IE7 page.
This page presents a pretty good looking way of adding to IE’s CSS support by using DHTML behaviours to semi-rewrite CSS sent to IE into a form that IE can understand. It allows a developer to use some nice stuff that was previously only available for, ahem, decent browsers. It’s still in alpha right now. So it should be worth messing with, if not production use as yet.