After a rather long wait, 10.5.3 is finally out. The update is 420MB big, so it seems to have a rather big effect on the system. You can find Apple’s detailed notes about the update here. The included graphics fixes should enhance scrolling not only in Apple’s own applications (like for example iPhoto) but also in newer third party applications like Delicious Library 2.

Its interesting to note, that Deric Horn, Apple’s Application Frameworks Evangelist, announced the update on Twitter noting that “iPhone developers take note”. Since there’s no word about anything iPhone in the Apple Release Notes, I wonder if somewhere hidden in the update is additional software to support the upcoming iPhone OS X 2.0 launch.

There’re by now quite many sites offering ways to browse and create custom color palettes online. ColourLovers, Colorcombos or Kuler – just to name a few. Wear palettes is a service which I’ve been using for a rather long time now that offers similar results by means of a different approach: Instead of listing user-contributed palettes, the author examines pictures from the well-known style-blog “The Sartorialist” and identifies the main colours of the protagonists’ clothes.

What I like most about this idea is that I, in addition to finding a nice color palette, can just as well browse through interesting clothes or style combinations.

Wear Palettes.

The Blender Foundation just released the newest Version of the popular and very powerful open source 3d Modeller “Blender 3D”. The work on their second open source movie “Big Buck Bunny” has resulted in a new version with a greatly improved feature set. There’s a new “Hair and Fur” System, with astonishing capabilities, a completely rewritten Particle system, Cloth Simulation, improved Render Baking, Approximate Ambient Occlusion (awesome speed & quality), raytraced soft shaows, and much much more. So if you’re into 3D, or just want to experiment with it, you should definately try Blender, since it’s not only free but also very competetive. 

The Web 2.0, with it’s simplified and enhanced usability paradigms, relies heavily on Ajax, as it’s main tool for managing the communication between client and server. In comparison to the old Web 1.0 way of sending a HTTP Request and recieving the complete site, Ajax, of course, allows to communicate just the changes and moves the view part of the process from the server to the client via Javascript. However, this makes it sometimes difficult to debug and especially to find ressource and performance hogs. If you ever created a web app which suddenly didn’t work at all anymore, because you have two concurrent never-ending HTTP connections going on via Ajax, you probably know what I’m talking about. 

The IBM developerWorks has an excellent article describing various tools which help in identifying those ressource hogs and performance problems, just as well as describing how to circumvent them. So if you’re into lowlevel Ajax programming, this could be worthwhile information for you.

In order to create stunning HDR Pictures, one needs a tool which allows to combine pictures of different exposures into one composition. This is possible with Photoshop or Gimp but way more difficult than achieving the same effect with a dedicated software. The standard tool for this task is Photomatix Pro. However, with Hydra there’s a new contender, and it supports integration in Apple Aperture (although still in beta). So if you’re interested in creating stunning HDR Pictures, you might hop over to www.creaceed.com/hydra and see if it’s the right tool for you. Hydra costs $59.95