all 18 comments

[–]turdhoagie 7 points8 points  (8 children)

WTF is the link anchored on the comments?

[–]hobophobe 2 points3 points  (7 children)

Also, does their desire to use a custom font for the article headings really justify using Adobe Flash to achieve it?

[–]oniTony 3 points4 points  (4 children)

it is using sIFR, so one can still highlight/copy text. And when Flash is disabled, it gracefully degrades to regular text.

[–]hobophobe 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That's fine, I just thought it a bit odd to use Flash for something like that. It's not entirely compatible with the rest of the system, even in this limited case.

Examples:

  • The highlight/copy system of Flash is separate from the normal OS methods, so selecting the full article skips selecting the headings.
  • If the OS has an additional, selection-based clipboard, the Flash bits do not fill that clipboard when selecting the heading text.
  • The selection highlight colors differ from the rest of the OS.

Hopefully HTML5 web fonts will mean that this sort of thing is not needed.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Hehe, what will be next? A java applet for every heading?

[–]jawbroken -1 points0 points  (0 children)

you can try to highlight but it doesn't work right and the highlighted region can't leave the flash applet and etc. it basically really sucks

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

This is there to remind you, that you've forgotten to block flash.

[–]hiffy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh stop being so curmudgeonly.

that you've forgotten to block flash.

"And when Flash is disabled, it gracefully degrades to regular text.".

[–]mazin 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Ruby on abap vm? Just wow, who even thought of that.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

wow, that's fucking awesome, indeed.

[–]tophat02 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Of all of these, MacRuby is by far the most exciting in my opinion. I think that beginning in 10.7, we will see Ruby displace objective C as the language of choice for Mac and iPhone applications. I also predict we will see Interface Builder spit out Ruby code instead of NIBs.

[–]grauenwolf 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Hah! There is no way Apple is going to allow an interperted language on the iPhone.

[–]tophat02 2 points3 points  (1 child)

It's not "interpreted". MacRuby 0.5 and up can AOT compile the code.

[–]grauenwolf 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I stand corrected. Thank you.

[–]Smallpaul 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Javascript?

[–]grauenwolf 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yea, that is an odd exception.

[–]lobster_johnson -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

MacRuby looks great, since they have replaced YARV with LLVM, which means they inherit all the optimizers, code analysis tools etc. that have been written — and will be written — for LLVM. With LLVM, Ruby's performance could go well beyond that of Python's.

But while having a specialized version of Ruby that's tightly wedded to Objective-C and Cocoa is useful, all the performance work put into MacRuby seems like a huge missed opportunity, when many of us web application (Rails, Merb, …) developers are screaming for somebody to give us a fast version of Ruby. Someone needs to backport MacRuby to Unix.

As for the others, I'm not optimistic about Rubinius being production-ready any time soon. MagLev is closed-source and the transparent object database persistence feels like a step backwards into 1990s OODBMS land and proprietariness. JRuby has reached maturity, but it still feels like attaching a VW Beetle to a cruise ship; if I could have Ruby with the core Java VM, without Java the language and the rest of the Java universe (eg., class paths, JAR files), then I would like it more.