Linked List: July 6, 2005

Wednesday, 6 July 2005

NightShift 1.1 

Freeware app by Reinhold Penner automatically downloads and installs nightly builds of Web Kit, and allows you to use them with Safari. Rather than replacing the system’s built-in official version of Web Kit (which would be a terrible idea), NightShift keeps the nightly builds completely separate.

What NightShift does that’s particularly clever is that it gives you a little shim app named WebKit.app. When you launch WebKit.app, it lets you use Safari with the latest Web Kit nightly build; if you quit WebKit.app, Safari goes back to using the system’s official version of Web Kit.

So in short, you get to use the latest nightly build of Web Kit in Safari, but without having to hack either Safari or the system’s official version of Web Kit.

(Via MDJ 2005.07.06.)

Blue Coconut 

Free, open source app by Paul Mison that allows you to download tracks from an iTunes shared library. (Written in AppleScript-Studio, but with some Perl glue for the heavy lifting under the hood; I’ve used a similar technique for my own AS-Studio apps.)

TextWrangler 2.1 

Brings it up to speed with BBEdit 8.2.

European Union Rejects Software Patents 

The EU Parliament rejected the software patent bill by a vote of 648-14. Sometimes the good guys do win.

Mark Pilgrim on iTunes’s RSS Parser 

Mark Pilgrim (posting in the comments of Sam Ruby’s weblog) has figured out a bunch of details on how iTunes 4.9’s RSS parser works.