decidedlyodd

Yesterday, I had lunch and coffee with Martin. I hadn’t seen him in a while, so it was nice to catch up a bit. As is often the case when we get together, the conversation turned to geekier things at various points. One of the more intertesting pieces of geekery that came up was about Webkit which is the browser engine originally based on KHTML used by Apple for Safari, Mail and a number of other places in OS X. He was telling me that you could download nightly builds and run the replacement Webkit framework through an existing Safari installation. This has the effect of exposing all the improvements made in Webkit, which means pretty much anything having to do with the browsing surface. So far it seems quite stable and even a bit snappier. Definitely recommended for other OS X / Safari readers out there. Just copy Webkit.app from the disk image to your Applications folder (or wherever really).

One of the more distantly disappointing things (by that I mean things that are disappointing but which I’ve never actually done, just might want to do some day) about my job is that in practice I can’t work on any sort of publicly released software projects outside of work. The fact of the matter is that virtually any kind of software falls under Microsoft’s business interests, so it’s just not feasible to work on what are effectively or clearly competing products. Generally, I don’t have a burning desire to do this anyways, but with a lot of planning/meeting stuff going on lately and very little coding, a guy can dream about fixing bugs again, can’t he?