Installing SVN support to Eclipse 3.5 Galileo

One of the things I miss in Eclipse is the integrated full SVN support. This is currently work in progress, and in Eclipse 3.5 Galileo, the SVN plug-in reached the status of incubation (Subversive – SVN Team Provider); the main classes are already integrated into Eclipse as optional features; the Connectors are currently developed by Polarion, and require separate installation.

Using iTunes to manage PDF books

In my hopeless struggle to clear the ever increasing document mess, I noticed that, after music and photos, the documents that seem to have the higher growth rate both in terms of numbers and cataloging needs are the PDF books and manuals.

Partial support for PDF was already available in iTunes for quite a while, as it was needed first for music booklets and later for iTunes U lessons, but proper support for PDF books was added only since iTunes 9.2, where Books are now a new category of documents managed by iTunes.

Warning! Apple completely redesigned iTunes, and support for books was removed, being delegated to iBooks.

Crockford on JavaScript

Things are turning upside down! I never though I’ll ever spend one more minute on JavaScript, and now… I don’t know. I just completed the 5 sessions lecture of Douglas Crockford on JavaScript, Crockford on JavaScript, and I’m quite intrigued by what I found out.

10 years ago Douglas met JavaScript with the same disregard and distaste as most of us did. Now he is Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect and a member of the ECMA committee designing future versions of the world’s most popular programming language.

Apple Bug Reporter – Miracles Do Happen!

In the past I hopelessly tried to submit bugs and feature requests to Apple, using various available methods, like the iTunes Provide Feedback menu, or Apple – Mac OS X – Feedback, or posting on various forums. Needless to say, I never ever received a reaction.

So imagine my surprise this evening after receiving an email from Apple, related to a bug report that I filled in… yesterday! So miracles do happen! And it was not even a catastrophic bug, but one that I assigned myself the lowest priority (the Dictionary.app bug fails to display Wikipedia entries).

Apple Romanian keyboard layout for Windows running on Mac

I recently evaluated the status of Romanian language support on various platforms and I decided that now it is reasonable to start using Romanian extensively, including on Web pages, eMail, etc.

There are still compatibility problems with some old devices (like mobile phones), or some XP fonts (that do not look great), but on modern platforms like Windows 7 and Mac OS X, the problems were already solved.

The Apple record and the end of an era

The recent Apple record of dethroning Microsoft in terms of market capitalisation, besides important financial aspects, also has an exceptional symbolic value: it can be considered the official end of an era: the end of the PC era.