Archive for April 7, 2017

Friday, April 7, 2017

curl Is C

Daniel Stenberg (via Peter Steinberger, Hacker News):

No other programming language is as widespread and easily available for everything. This has made curl one of the most portable projects out there and is part of the explanation for curl’s success.

[…]

Does writing safe code in C require more carefulness and more “tricks” than writing the same code in a more modern language better designed to be “safe” ? Yes it does. But we’ve done most of that job already and maintaining that level isn’t as hard or troublesome.

[…]

The simple fact is that most of our past vulnerabilities happened because of logical mistakes in the code. Logical mistakes that aren’t really language bound and they would not be fixed simply by changing language.

simias:

So I looked at https://curl.haxx.se/docs/security.html

[…]

And I’ll stop here, so far 7 out of 11 vulnerabilities would probably have been avoided with a safer language. Looks like the vast majority of these issues wouldn’t have been possible in safe Rust.

Update (2017-04-10): The Changelog (via Jim Rea):

Daniel Stenberg joined the show to talk about curl and libcurl and how he has spent at least 2 hours every day for the past 17 years working on and maintaining curl. That’s over 13k hours! We covered the origins of curl, how he chooses projects to work on, why he has remained so dedicated to curl all these years, the various version control systems curl has used, licensing, and more.

Update (2019-02-27): The Changelog:

Daniel Stenberg joined the show to talk about 20 years of curl, what’s new with http2, and the backstory of QUIC - a new transport designed by Jim Roskind at Google which offers reduced latency compared to that of TCP+TLS+HTTP/2.

Use macOS VMs in VMware Fusion in Retina Mode

Rob Griffiths:

Here’s what you need to do to use your VMware Fusion OS X/macOS virtual machines in retina mode:

  1. Enable full resolution mode, as shown in the image above.
  2. Open Terminal (in the macOS virtual machine), paste this command, then press Return: 
    sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool true
  3. Logout and login from the virtual machine.
  4. Resize the macOS virtual machine (by resizing the window) to your desired dimensions.
  5. Open System Preferences > Displays, click on Scaled, then click on the one shown HiDPI mode.

TextExpander by Subscription One Year Later

Michael E. Cohen:

According to Smile, about a third of the TextExpander customer base has moved to the subscription service, which gives Smile the income to pay for continued app updates and to keep the lights on in the server room. And the promised frequent app updates have come: Smile delivered 17 updates to the macOS app last year compared to only 7 the year before.

[…]

More interesting, and boding well for TextExpander’s future, is that the TextExpander service provides the management capabilities to build snippet-sharing teams in businesses and organizations. Such teams share common snippet libraries, turning the TextExpander service into something of a low-rent content management system through which, for example, all the members of a customer support team can have access to textexpander.com-hosted support documents and links literally at their fingertips. Smile reports that a typical team is about 12 people, but it hosts teams that have nearly 1000 members. The enterprise attractiveness of Smile’s TextExpander service was further enhanced by the successful introduction of TextExpander for Windows.

The version history is here. Last year, I wrote:

The decision to keep selling TextExpander 5 strikes me as strange. On the surface, it sounds like what people wanted: the old product, with the old syncing, at the old price. But what is the future of the standalone version? There’s no announced commitment to add features, and it has the same name and a lower version number than the flagship product. I think the logical assumption has to be that TextExpander 5 is going to be stuck in maintenance mode.

In fact, there have been no updates at all to TextExpander 5.

I ended up switching to LaunchBar and Dash, which I was already using for other purposes, and this has worked out well. They are definitely less powerful, but I was only using the basic features, and I’ve gained easier snippet editing via BBEdit, version control and syncing via Git, and I’ve removed a Dropbox dependency (in addition to needing one fewer app).

I’m still using the old TextExpander on iOS, mostly to enter timestamps in OmniFocus.

Previously: TextExpander 6 and TextExpander.com, TextExpander Adjustments.

Clips 1.0

Apple’s Clips app for iOS is now available:

Clips is a new app for making fun videos to share with friends, family, and the world. With a few taps you can create and send a video message or tell a quick story with animated text, graphics and emoji, music, and more.

John Gruber:

Got to play with Clips yesterday. Love it. It’s like iMovie and Keynote had a baby and the kid got all the best genes.

Nick Heer:

It’s not that the app isn’t good at making short, fun videos; in fact, it’s great at doing that. But it seems like it’s trying to shoehorn an Instagram or Snapchat style of app into Apple’s typical UI conventions. As Ulanoff says, it seems less like a competitor to those apps than it does a trimmed-down version of iMovie. Maybe the market for something like that is large, but I’m not sold on it yet.

[…]

It’s a small thing, but the icon is also disappointing. It’s supposed to be a fun, creative, silly app, so why does the icon make it look like it will be for corporate videoconferencing?

Michael Rockwell:

I haven’t spent too much time using the application, but I’m very impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

Update (2017-04-07): Manton Reece:

Apple’s Clips is great. One of the best iOS apps they’ve made in years. It’s a useful quick video editor even if you ignore the fun effects.

Update (2017-04-11): See also: The Talk Show.

Update (2017-04-16): Eddie Smith:

Renie Ritchie apparently wrote a treatise on Apple’s new Clips app, but don’t let that intimidate you. Clips is ridiculously easy to use, and most of its features are discoverable by just playing with it.

The real brilliance of Clips is that you don’t even feel like you’re doing movie editing, but that’s exactly what you’re doing.

Copyright © 2000–2024 Michael Tsai.