Today, I am glad to announce the release of my new product: Chronograph. Chronograph is one of those tools, that I wrote for myself, because everything else out there felt like nonsense. Either too complicated, or too ugly. Anyway, Chronograph . . . → Read More: Chronograph]]> It’s been a while since I posted anything here. Life was keeping me busy

Today, I am glad to announce the release of my new product: Chronograph. Chronograph is one of those tools, that I wrote for myself, because everything else out there felt like nonsense. Either too complicated, or too ugly. Anyway, Chronograph — is a time tracking application. Basically, there are Projects, which consist of Tasks. You can select task and start the timer. Then you do the job, stop the timer and move on to the next task. Chronograph keeps stats on the time spent and you can create reports (basic, for now) based on them.

I am trying to make application, which would feel “right”, and looks like the direction is correct.

If you have any comments, ideas regarding Chronograph let me know in comments, or using email: info@milkfarmsoft.com

Thanks

I wonder, if that is coincidence

Dear Santa, please, bring me Mk 41 next christmas, so I can fix this world.

Makes me think, that I should really-really get some old mac-mini and install Haiku on it. At least, I can program some fancy Jukebox out of it

ohloh.net: The World’s Oldest Source Code Repositories

Hey! I was only 1 year old, when they . . . → Read More: Some things which happened while I wasn’t blogging]]> Haiku OS reported on their Google Summer of Code results

Makes me think, that I should really-really get some old mac-mini and install Haiku on it. At least, I can program some fancy Jukebox out of it

ohloh.net: The World’s Oldest Source Code Repositories

Hey! I was only 1 year old, when they started to use version control!

DSource: LLVM D Compiler

I love D language, I love LLVM — they make such a beautiful couple. Project is not complete, yet, but it already works for simple cases. Author needs any man-power he can get: spread the word, please.

Sam Ruby noticed CouchDB: Ascetic Database Architectures

It brought some more attention to CouchDB, which is really-really deserved. CouchDB is a document-oriented non-relational database written by Damien Katz and Jan Lehnardt in erlang, which has JSON, PHP and Ruby APIs (the number of APIs grows each day).

Opera released 3 public alpha-versions of their 9.5 series

Finally, Opera looks like a native application on mac. It is lightning fast with a new javascript-engine and heavily optimized UI code. I already use 9.5 on daily basis without problems, but your mileage may differ — it is an alpha-version, after all. Get it here

PHP 5.3 will have Late Static Binding

LSB will allow static methods to know about inheritance (to know, on which of the descendant-classes the method was actually called). Which means, that it will be possible to make a good-looking ActiveRecord implementation, after all these years.

The texts and downloads are there — everything should be working fine. I didn’t do any software updates this time — just republished old archives (they still work) to the redesigned site.

So, . . . → Read More: www.milkfarmsoft.com up and running]]> Web site of my company (Milk Farm Sotware, ltd.) is kinda “alive” again. The design is brand-new, the content is partially updated.

The texts and downloads are there — everything should be working fine. I didn’t do any software updates this time — just republished old archives (they still work) to the redesigned site.

So, in case you were missing my software, you can grab it again, now

Plans:

• release “Ping-Pong” — the new piece of software by us
• release universal binary of Separator
• check if open-source stuff needs to be updated

p.s. the plans will probably be realized in mid-september, as I am going to take a vacation in a week

As usual, if you have any good or bad feedback — let me know

BeOS was always about C++, opposing UNIX’es, MacOS’es and Windows’es choice of C (well, formally, windows had C++ api, but, still, it was very C-ish in it’s essence). Years passed, MacOS switched to . . . → Read More: BeOS + SmallTalk]]> Some internal feeling makes me believe, that Smalltalk would be an ideal language for Haiku-OS/OpenBeOS (which looks more and more alive, again).

BeOS was always about C++, opposing UNIX’es, MacOS’es and Windows’es choice of C (well, formally, windows had C++ api, but, still, it was very C-ish in it’s essence). Years passed, MacOS switched to Objective-C, Windows switched to C#. Both of these languages are higher-level OOP languages which have some kind of memory-management. C++, while it has some advantages, still is not as easy and dynamic as these languages are.

Unfortunately, both Objective-C and C# are developed by Apple and Microsoft (correspondingly) behind the closed-doors.

So, what is the alternative? I see two of them:

• D
• Smalltalk

D is good, as it makes a step from C++ to real life, but is still low-levelish, by design. memory management will solve some headaches, but programming in it won’t be as fun as it can be. I like to see D as a language for writing libraries.

Smalltalk, on the other hand, is a high-level dynamic language which is just what is needed. Once you “taste” the fruit of dynamic languages you wouldn’t want to code high-level tasks in static-languages anymore (static is extremely good in low-level, though). To give you a brief idea on what all this is about, there is a nice article by a game developer who switched from C++ to Smalltalk: Learning to Talk: Introduction to Talking.

Further reading:

• Comparison of Objective-C and Smalltalk
• Smalltalk implementations
• Ambrai Smalltalk (Smalltalk for MacOS-X)
• F-Script (Smalltalk-based scripting environment for Cocoa)
• Comparison of programming languages @ wikipedia