Greg In The Desert

Apple has released a Safari 4 beta for Mac and Windows. Although I am forced to use Internet Explorer 6 at work for internal sites, I almost use Safari exclusively for non-internal sites.

The biggest change is the user interface. Apple has abandoned the Mac OS like metal look on the Windows version. Hallelujah! I have no problem with a Mac applicaltion looking like a Mac application on the Mac, it’s just out of place on Windows.

The menu bar is missing and is replaced with two icons. One icon looks like a document and the other looks like a gear. Tabs are now on top. There is no progress indicator in the URL text field.

I don’t have the Flash plugin installed on my Windows version of Safari and Safari 4 no longer pesters me about it ever time I go to a page that needs Flash.

I have the absolutely slowest T42 on the planet and I used to most applications loading slowly. Safari has always loaded faster than Internet Explorer, but that’s not saying much. Safari 4 does seem to be considerably faster.

So far I am happy with what I am seeing but the UI changes are going to take some time to get used to using them.

• Just got in cell range. Was on a 4 day ski to yurt trip near chama. #
• I’m at over 3000 unread feeds. May declare feed bankruptcy. #
• I am down to 2600 feeds. #
• Just watched the last stargate atlantis. Learned there will be a new series this summer called Stargate Universe. YAY! #
• Moonlight Over Spruce Hole http://tinyurl.com/spruce2009 #
• If my eyelid doesn’t stop twitching, I’m going to cut the fucker off! #
• getting familiar with imovie 2008 in preparation for imovie 2009. #
• Using a broken link checker plugin with WP and started with over 2000 broken links. #
• I was in a good mood when I came into work today. Now I’m pissy. Can anyone guess what time of year it is? #
• The day just gets crappier. The family dog died. RIP Annie. #
• Pic of annie. I will miss her. http://snipurl.com/9zvcc #
• Any other INTC people hear rumors about a 10% pay cut? #
• Thank you, every-website-on-the-internet for telling me about Steve Jobs. #
• Is there anyway to geotag movies on a Mac? #
• Why do I bother leaving Safari open with multiple tabs when I know it will just lock up on me. #
• It’s too bad about Circuit City. I had better luck with them than Best Buy. #
• Congratulations! You picked the right day to give up cocaine http://tinyurl.com/a93936 #
• The only way for websites to stop talking about Jobs is for Apple to come out with a new product. #
• I’m thinking of hiring a contractor to finish this master bath/bedroom remodel I can’t seem to finish. #
• Just watched BSG. I don’t get what’s going on. #
• I love watching COPS. #

I have absolutely no inside knowledge, this is just a theory of mine. I believe Apple is waiting to update everything and It’s all hinging on Leopard.

I think iLife’08 was suppose to come out earlier, but since Leopard was delayed, they had to fix it to work on Tiger.

A massive update to the iPhone is coming. The iPhone update will have 3rd party application support, better syncing, a notes application, etc. They will all require technologies in Leopard that Apple doesn’t want to give away.

The AppleTV will also have some major updates. Once such update could be Safari and the ability to browse the web on your TV (good by WebTV). One such feature will eliminate the need for a keyboard since you will manage and sync bookmarks from Safari on your computer. It also illustrates the need to have Safari on Windows

Apple is scrambling trying to get band-aid fixes in place so people don’t loose interest for the next few months. What do you think, am I way of base?

Delusions of Grandeur has a preview of of Shiira 2.0, the Japanese open source WebKit based web browser. This next version is the next generation Safari that Safari probably will never be by adding many of the features that the iLife applications have.

Right now you can download Shiira 1.2.1 with little risk. It will use your Safari bookmarks so you don’t even need worry about configuring it.

I’ve been having some issues since installing 10.4. Specifically system wide lock ups, where every application including the finder and any menu bar items don’t respond and all I get is the spinning beach ball. But the cursor still moves even with a bluetooth mouse. Back in the OS9 days I could tell if the the system was locked up based on if the menu bar clock’s time separators would stop flashing. Prior to 10.4 this was never a sufficient indicator because the whole system never locked up. I’ve also had problems with my MacBook Pro going to sleep, or that it wouldn’t go to sleep (instead having a dark screen and having to force it to reboot).

I’ve had this same weird behavior on my 1Ghz TiBook and I figured it was due to the fact that I was pushing the limits of my hard drive space. But I’m having the same symptoms on my fancy new MacBook Pro and I have plenty of hard drive space available. I started watching the system log via the Console and see these errors: (default pager): [KERNEL]: no space in available paging segments.

So what’s going on here? Searching Google doesn’t reveal much, only that a few other people have had the same issue. One guy thinks his system was hacked, but I don’t believe this is the case for me. Another thinks a Windows Server bug, that one I could believe. I also considered that it could be related to a bad prefs file or something when I migrated all my settings from the G4. I re-installed, or should i say over-installed, the OS. This seemed help with the sleep problem and the over all stablity seems to have improved but the MacBook Pro will still totally lock up every now and then.

I think there’s some fundamental problem with 10.4 that Apple has yet to fix related to paging. It could also be related to Safari since Safari is always open when I have this problem, of course that could be a coincidence since Safari is my most used application.

Safari 2.0.1 for Mac OS X 10.4 is available for download and has this super, incredible description of what’s new.

Safari version 2.0.1 for Mac OS X Tiger improves website compatibility, application stability and support for 3rd party web applications.

Thanks Apple!

You can get the same update for older versions of Safari too.

Crufty: “Poorly built, possibly over-complex.”

Since upgrading to Tiger, I have been unimpressed with the performance of the Mac OS. I had more problems then I want to count with just getting installed and I’ve had these exact same problems.

With Safari blowing up on me every time my web server squirts some funny Ajax on it, iPhoto exiting when I rotate a photo and Mail.app taking ages to even acknowledge that I have switched to another folder, I guess it’s time to take a hard look at how things are going.

Now, Mail.app has “lost” some of my mail, some in a specific folder that is from the important people. I cannot add things to that folder in mail and the finder gives me a “error -51″ when I try to delete it there. It is also amazingly slow at updating the folder displays, sometimes it doesn’t do it at all.

In Mac OS 9 I always used the blinking time separators in the menu bar clock to determine if my system is “thinking”. When Mac OS X came out this was no long a indicator because it would always blink even when the system got bogged down. Now I again are relying on this indicator because my system will become so bogged down that even those stop blinking. This happens much too often, and never happened prior to 10.4. Nothing is more annoying then having to sit there waiting for the computer to finish doing whatever it’s doing, sometimes for as long as 5 minutes.

It’s still better than my shiny new T-42 running Windows they give me at work, but Apple needs work on the quality side to prevent things from getting any worse.

The links on the right bar come from a javascript file, which mirrors my Safari bookmarks. I have a Applescript that generates this javascript by parsing the Bookmarks.plist XML file.

It no longer works in Tiger since it’s binary file, and using the plutil command line to convert it to text isn’t working on that file for some reason (could be just me). I’ve posted the script up on MacScripters for some suggestions. Take a look if your interested.

It has cost millions of dollars, hundreds have died, but the site layout is pretty close to where I want it. I thought the old layout had too much grey in it, so I took some cues from Mail.app to put some color in the side bars.

The brushed metal is totally me, so it stays. But I felt the title bar could be more compact so I pushed the flickr badge to the top. I think the look is good and should fit well at 1024 width. For those with lower resolutions, well I suspect it won’t display right anyways.

There’s some more tweaking to do and if I don’t wipe out the CSS again, it shouldn’t be much work. If your using a browser other than Safari, let me know how it loosk.

I performed the Tiger upgrade yesterday, purchasing it from CompUSA (they were having a release party for it, but it was anything but a party). While Mail was importing my emails the screen saver came on. When I tried to log back in the screen stayed black but I could see the cursor. I let it set for 45 minutes finally deciding it was in a coma and force rebooted it.

When I logged back in I found a horrific site, everything had been set to factory defaults. The dock was at the bottom with the standard set of apps, the back ground pict was set to default. Mail had no sign of my accounts and wanted to know passwords and such. MY KEYCHAIN HAD BEEN WIPED OUT! DEAR LORD NOOOOOOOO!!!! Thankfully I make a nightly back up of my home folder, which I was able to restore a copy of my keychain. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to restore it using the Backup application, because it’s stupid. I had to break into the package contents of the back up and copy it. Mail is not working properly. It will not apply any rules to incoming messages and is pretty slow to display mailbox contents. It continually downloads the same messages and instead of showing their contents gives this message, “The message from username concerning ?Message Subject? has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it.” WTF?

Finally I had a heck of a time getting Safari to work. I had downloaded Saft a while back, which was still installed in Safari. It prevented it from launching, instead giving a dialog box with the option to disable it but not allowing you to click it.

Update 05/01/05 06:39 PM: What a nightmare this has been. First I want to think iBlog, because as I wrote this entry (now for the 3rd time) it crashed after saving the entry, and deleted the entry upon relaunch. I hear Ecto calling.

I tried several times to import my mail, dam good thing I make a nightly back up of my users data. But Tiger seemed to be eating itself, menu items started to disappear.. I had 25GB of free space when I installed Tiger, I was under 300MB when I gave up. System performance was horrid. Never got .Mac sync to work either.

There was only one thing to do, reformat and fresh install. Something I wanted to do anyways but it’s such a pain. I was planning on getting the thing set up right in Tiger and then cloning it so I could just import my user data, but that wasn’t going to happen. I copied what I thought I needed and to my various HDs and wiped the drive.

I’m running Tiger now and everything is much better. Still need to turn on FileVault for my account. Mail never did import everything correctly and I had to recreate all my rules. Email from the last 2 months are missing.