Serious Simplicity

Two weeks ago I wrote down my first impressions upon downloading the Safari 4 Beta. Over the past 15 days I’ve used Safari in parallel for almost everything I normally do with Firefox. So here’s a more detailed review of where the beta currently stands.

The Good

• The very fact that I did manage to use Safari and keep the icon on my dock for 15 days is a good indicator. I’ve rarely kept any other browser at hand – including Flock and Opera – for more than a couple of days.
• What made me stick to it is that it’s fast. Quite impressively fast in fact. Of course, I don’t have Chrome to compare to being a Mac user, but loading pages – even Facebook and Google Gears sites – feels significantly faster than both Firefox 3 as well as Safari 3.
• Thirdly, the UI is well designed and thought out. Despite the fact that in terms of functionality it’s clearly replicating what Chrome is doing, and that copying usually doesn’t pay, the Apple engineers don’t seem to have simply photocopied what the chaps at Google came up with. It seems like they truly understood the underlying motivations of the features they implemented and delivered a user experience to match.

The Bad

CSS/JS Faux-Dialogs don't work

• While loading web pages is fast, the application itself isn’t always as speedy. Opening up a new window or tab will typically show the “revolving pizza” for a few seconds and it feels like the browser crashed… even if no other apps or web pages are currently open.
• Certain basic features in web pages don’t seem to work well. For instance, cookies get lost: hardly any of my regularly used sites “remember me” on Safari 4. Certain basic CSS/JS features also don’t work well, typically the faux-dialog setups that most sites use nowadays.
• Google Gears stuff still doesn’t work well… or indeed at all.

Still, good job for a beta all round. Looking forward to the release as might just make Safari my default browser again.

Just downloaded and tried out the new Safari 4 beta which Apple launched a some time ago.

I’ve only used it for a few hours so this is hardly an in-depth review, but here’s a quick run of first impressions:

The Good…

• The look is, as expected, slick, cool and feels good to use in the traditional Apple way
• It’s impressively fast. Both in starting itself up as well as loading web pages it trashes Firefox hands down. Although I’ve not timed anything it feels like it’s one fourth faster at everything.
• It seems to conform to web standards. Websites look good with now IE-style quirks in how fonts and HTML is rendered.
• The bookmarks organization is much nicer than the old version. Folders and items are organized in an iTunes-like fashion… complete with cover-flow
• For a Beta, it’s surprisingly error-free and immediately  comes with a Mac + PC version.

The Bad…

• Google Gears doesn’t seem to work on Safari 4. Of course, it’s just a beta.
• Most of the “cool new features” are clearly just copied word-for-word from Google Chrome such as tabbed-browsing in the header and a “top sites” pages. However, kudos to Safari because Chrome hasn’t even launched for Mac yet!

Do you like Safari 4?

Microsoft has long been the butt of many tech-jokes, especially from Apple/Linux fans. It’s not surprising. After all, it’s tough being the “king of the jungle”, especially when your operating systems keep crashing, you’re not the “cool” underdog, and user-friendliness is a concept you discovered late in 2005.

However, times are a-changing.

Over the past year or so we’ve seen some amazing things come out of Microsoft. Photosynth and the World Wide Telescope immediately come to mind. Conversely, Apple has been widely criticised for delaying the release of Leopard over and over (the very same thing they often accused Microsoft of in reference to Vista), of blunders with the new iPhone 3G, and of huge flaws with Mobile Me – the ‘upgrade’ to the .Mac service. (Read what Walt Mossberg has to say about it.)

And now, the coup de grace – The Mojave Experiment. Well, maybe not coup de grace exactly but it certainly seems to show that Microsoft is getting a little bit cleverer with its PR strategies.

Last week I wrote about my 1 month experience using Apple’s Leopard and the couple of flaws that surfaced. Since that time I’ve had time to play around a bit more and some more eye candy melted :-)…

System Preferences Search is Broken

The new system preferences pane (control panel to Windows users) has also received a nice sprucing up with a lot of new little customisations and tweaks added. Particularly like the redesigned layout of the network preferences as well as the sharing preferences. One thing sticks out like a giant’s sore thumb though: search doesn’t work!  At all, that is – both out of the box as well as with the latest system updates. 

Seems like Spotlight’s batteries died out here and its back to hunting for that darned checkbox in the dark.

DashCode’s Help needs some Help

I’ve been quite eager to try out DashCode for myself – particularly as a I’ve been meaning to getting around to build a couple of widgets for some time now. I’ve found DashCode to be well designed, generally helpful and quite a good IDE overall. Except for one thing: technical help.

It’s great that DashCode makes use of certain proprietary Apple controls (like the Popup Button). Yet, seeing how these controls don’t quite function in the standard HTML/JavaScript fashion, one would expect some form of documentation. However there isn’t (or if there is its too hard to find.) Apple’s penchant for making things that “just work” seems to have stopped short of helping developer getting down to business… a little different from Microsoft’s approach to Developers Developers (lol can’t help throwing that in whenever possible) which, while as corny as they make ‘em, still provides incredible levels of technical support and documentation to .NET, Silverlight, etc users.

I’ve put off upgrading to Max OS X Leopard in the past but since buying a new MacBook around a month ago I’ve been prowling around the new Apple OS.

The redesigned Finder windows as well as the Fan/Grid views of Docked folders are definitely a great improvement and make organising and finding stuff on your Mac much easier. Ditto for the general look-and-feel of menus, windows and dialog boxes. Everything seems to have been very gently refined to give a sleeker and smoother experience.

However, as always, after the eye-candy melts, some hard-to-crack nuts begin showing up…

Mail
I love Apple mail. It kicks Entourage’s or Thunderbird’s ass from here to Glasgow (here being Aberdeen). But one thing is severely pissing off: notifications! Mail absolutely refuses to play a simple “ding” sound to let me know I’ve got new mail. I mean, come on guys. It’s not like you don’t know about it. Can it really be that hard to ship a simple fix for this…

PhotoBooth
What’s with the huge delay in replaying live video huh? What ever happened to the concept of real time that worked so well in Tiger? I fire up PhotoBooth to take a cool picture of myself (or to check my hairdo *blush*) and the hand movement I make to fix my stray locks delays by five seconds… resulting in undesirable hair patterns. Come on fellas, my rep is being negatively affected!

TimeMachine
As slow as a snail on Prozac. Enough said.