waffle

The question on everyone’s lips: What you can write in Perl 6 today. I like the Perl community because it’s extraordinarily friendly and as delightfully quirky as the language itself, but the shut-in factor is a bit unnerving at times. I get that Perl 6 writing at least in the beginning has to center on what old and trusted constructs can now be dispensed with because of a more capable language, and I get that (for some odd reason) the only ones still following Perl 6 are Perl Hackers, but with all the candy in Perl 6, I don’t think that the Schwartzian Transformation deserves top billing.

Google Chrome does extensions right: one type for content filters, one type for browser adornments; both with disparate, implementation-detail-resistant, designed APIs. Firefox never had well-designed APIs for extensions as much as they had high-level (reified?) plumbing, which is why extensions sometimes break between versions.

Speaking of Google Chrome, the early automated builds for Mac shows that a real Mac team is producing this. The attention to detail was always great in Windows Chrome, and OS X Chrome fits in remarkably well in OS X. Hats off.

Zune HD’s browser brings the brown: it’s based on Internet Explorer 6. Great move. Bring the awesome rendering power of the browser that was obsolete eight years ago and now holds back innovation to the detriment of web users everywhere. Everyone running WebKit (Nokia, Android, Palm Pré and iPhone) are bringing their best game out of the box; why build a toy? (No, the “heavy, heavy customization work on the UI” or “[optimization] for multi-touch, gestures, and finger-based navigation instead of a stylus” won’t net you points, because you would have had to do that regardless.)

I JIT you not: they’re making ahead-of-time compiled assemblies resilient to patches to contributing modules in CLR 4. Always fun to hear how the hard problems are solved.

Internet goes bonkers over Palm authoring an iTunes device plugin for the Palm Pré. You did know you could write those, did you? You did realize that Palm’s not going to ship something that they have to word in the manual as “to sync Palm Pré in iTunes, select [name of our arch-rival] in the source list, bask in the glory of the rich, prominent on-screen image of [name of Lucifer reincarnate device] and press the ‘Sync’ button in the lower right corner”, and that’d work for about a month before Apple finds a way to work around it?

Update: Pré footage from D7: “That icon looks like an iPod”. They’re actually doing it? Have they gone stark raving mad?

Penny Lane, literal version. The only good literal version besides Take On Me (“pipe wrench fight!”).