Yesterday Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 2 was released.  We’re going to be using GWT for the next version of our internal software where I work.  I’m excited to use it.

There are two software updates that came out recently.

1. Mozilla Thunderbird version 3.  I’ve used the Thunderbird Betas and RCs ever since they’ve been available and have, for the most part, been quite pleased.  It’s been so long since I’ve used Thunderbird 2, that I don’t really remember how it looked.  Thunderbird 3′s new tabs and search functionality are hard to live without now.

2. Adobe Air 2 beta. I haven’t used that many Air apps – mainly as there aren’t many out there.  But, I have used a few.  I think Jonathon Snook’s Snitter was an Air app.  I used that for a while until he ceased development of it.  I also have used ExtJS’s Documentation Air app a few times.  The big updates are better profiling for CPU and memory and a Webkit update giving it the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features.

There was a bunch of news items that I thought were kind of interesting, but didn’t warrant a separate post for each, so I’ll just do a group post.

  • Google Dumps Gears – Google is halting development of Google Gears in favor of HTML5.  This is a good thing. The problem with Gears was that it was a separate install and most users wouldn’t do that.  Thus preventing widespread adoption.  HTML5 will be baked into (newer) browsers.
  • Google Analytics Goes Async – While I don’t personally use Google Analytics, a lot of sites do.  Up til now, the javascript that gets embedded for uploading statistics to Google was blocking.  Ever been to a website that seems really slow to load only to look in the status bar and see ‘Connecting to google.com’ (or whatever it is)?  That’s the blocking javascript preventing the page from loading.  It’s now set up to be asynchronous so there is no more blocking.  Yay.
  • Mozilla Sunbird / Lighting Approaching Version 1 Release – I use the Lightning plugin for my Thunderbird and probably couldn’t live without it. I will say pre-1.0 versions, at varying times, have sometimes not played well with 3.0 Beta versions of Thunderbird.  I suppose that’s the price you pay for being on the cutting edge of software.  I deal.
  • Google Releases Public DNS Service – Jeez,  a lot of Google News, eh? I hadn’t even realized it.  Anyways. Google released a public DNS service.  From what I’ve read, this is nicer than OpenDNS because it doesn’t have ads or redirects like OpenDNS does.  I don’t use either, so I wouldn’t actually know firsthand.  Google’s reasoning for releasing this is pretty obvious, by having more people using their faster DNS servers, it speeds up the user experience for users – particularly for Google users – and somehow that translates into more money for them.
  • New Java 7 Features – This is a little bit older, but I had it bookmarked.  I haven’t written much Java lately, but I’m slowly but surely getting around to writing more.  Language support for collections seems quite useful, reminds me of some of the Javascript work I’ve done lately.  I don’t particularly like the syntax for Automatic Resource Management in try/catch, but I like the idea at least. Strings in switch statements is way overdue, but at least they have it now.

That’s all I have for now kids!

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 apparently introduces a new feature that if you click a link from one page and open it in a new tab, the new tab will be placed next to the current tab in the tab list.  This quasi-grouping seems useful.  If you open a link in a new tab from one page, one could easily assume that it’s related to the first tab’s content.  For me, the only time I usually open a link in a new tab is usually when I’m in Google Reader or a news item from my iGoogle desktop.  In these cases, the newly opened tab isn’t related to the initial tab, it just happens to have come from it.  So, this related tab business was very annoying to me.  If you too are annoyed by this, follow these simple steps to go back to the old way of doing things:

  1. Open a new tab and type ‘about:config’
  2. If you see a warning about voiding your warranty, or something to that effect, press ok
  3. In the filter search bar, type ‘tab’.  Firefox will auto search for you
  4. Locate the key ‘browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent’
  5. Double click the value, this will switch it from true to false.

Voila!

Ever use something like phpMyAdmin?  Ever add and/or remove some columns to a table, but then realize that the order of the columns aren’t really the way you’d like them?

This has bothered me ever since I started using phpMyAdmin.  To the best of my knowledge there isn’t a way to fix this from within the software.  However, it’s quite trivial to do it via regular SQL:


ALTER table `table_name`
MODIFY COLUMN `column_name` your_data_type
AFTER `other_column_name`

And by golly it works!

Found at Treble Click: Reorder mysql table columns via a Google search.

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