Safari 3 thoughts

Apple has announced Safari 3 beta for OS X and Windows. To make room for more important thoughts in my head, here’s the associated Brain Dump™.

• Updated version of WebKit. Nothing new to Omniweb 5.5 users, but my un-scientific perception is that it’s speedier. I think there will be some users complaining of ‘ugly form buttons’ though…
• Draggable Tabs. Yay!
• Inline Find, and very nicely implemented it is too. Yay!
• Resizable textareas, extra yay. Is this the only browser to do this by default?
• The Web Inspector is in there too. Not a patch on Firebug, but a welcome addition.
• Its wonderful looking at a website on XP, and seeing gorgeous text smoothing. Even the apps menu’s are smooth – presumably it’s using webkit to display the interface too?
• WebClips are conspicuous by their absence, but I’m assuming that this is a Leopard only feature.
• No session saving. I wasn’t really expecting it, but this does make Safari the only browser that doesn’t reopen your tabs inbetween launches. As some commenters have pointed out, you can ‘Reopen previous windows’ from the History menu, but sorry, there really needs to be a preference for this, so that the process is automatic.
• Looking at the preferences window in Windows is slightly scary. Like those PC-esque interfaces in early version of Firebird/Firefox for the Mac. I did feel that the interface should’ve been a better Windows Citizen.
• I wondered if installing this on Windows would make Lucide Grande available to the OS. It seems that like iTunes, it doesn’t and keeps it to itself. Shame, I really hoped it would available to IE, Firefox and Opera as well, although as Ben Darlow points out, it does look ropey when aliased!
• Also wondering if Apple will give a copy of the updated webkit to 10.4 users, in the same way they did for Panther users?
• The sizable textareas thing and smooth text rendering seem to be only new browser features to Windows users. Is that right? If you’re a Windows user, and have tried the Safari 3 beta, I’d love to know what you think: Does it make you want to switch over?
• Developing Javascript to work in Safari in the past has been a pain in the arse, so I would love to know from any Javascript developers whether the situation is improved in v3.
• I wonder if/when developers of Saft, SafariStand and Inquisitor will update their plugins for SF3? My money is on Hetima getting a SafariStand b18 out first. (Update: Inquisitor actually works fine! Also, SafariStand will work if you turn off ‘Enable Site Alteration’).
• I find the new interface too dark, but I use the Uno shade which for me is just right. To clarify: I’m referring to the screenshots of the Leopard version, which I find darker than the brushed metal. The UNO shade I find just right.

Tags: braindump, browsers, osx, safari

Pimped Safari Icon

There has been a lot of requests for one of these, so I’ve finally made the PimpMySafari logo into a custom Safari icon!

Download this zip file to get the icon as an .icns file, iContainer and applied to a folder.

Tags: icons, safari

A Proposal for a Safari Microformats plugin

In a nutshell, I want to be able to easily take advantage of Microformats. I want to know about and get that information with the same ease as RSS Feeds, and I want it to work on a Mac.

Firefox already has its ‘Tails’ extension, but this currently only displays microformats in the sidebar. There’s the TailsExport extension for exporting the data found, but sadly, this is Windows only.

So what tools do we have on OS X? Tantek has put up some bookmarklets that will do the export for you, but the trick is detection – knowing that there is data present in the first place. So either the site author needs to announce the presence of microformats (in the same way that they would display an icon for RSS feeds), or the browser has to check and inform you. I prefer the latter, but currently, Endo is the only OS X app I know that detects (it looks for the hCalendar format and passes it onto iCal).

Tags: browsers, microformats, osx, safari

Web Development with... Safari

When it comes to testing and debugging sites, it seems that Firefox can’t be beaten. Not only does it have an inbuilt DOM Inspector and Javascript console to beat all others, but the plethora of useful extensions is unmatched. Everyone knows and uses Chris Pedericks Web Developer extension, along with any number other handy extras – Firebug, X-Ray, Aardvark, etc.

Other browsers have useful tools though, which gave me an idea for an ad-hoc series highlighting useful web development features, starting with Safari. While it doesn’t have an official plugin architecture like Firefox, that hasn’t stopped developers finding ways around it and providing excellent plugins.

Tags: safari

Moving navigation solved

One of the headaches I’ve had with the position: fixed navigation on the journal pages is a bug that has reared its head in WebKit based browsers (Safari, Omniweb, NetNewswire etc).

OK, a little background. To avoid the IE flicker problem, my navigation’s rollover states are set as the background of a list item in a numbered list, and the ‘normal’ state is set as the background of the link. On hover the link background is set to none – revealing the rollover state below. With me so far?

Tags: bugs, css, safari, solutions, webkit

Riffs, now for Safari too

As promised earlier, Riffs is now able to open its doors to Safari. Believe me, no one is more glad to see this than me!

There is now a blog to accompany the site – riffs on riffs so that Attap can communicate about what they’re up to, new features & changes, as well as gather more feedback about the site. If they let me, I’ll also use this to write about the CSS issues I encountered and solved whilst designing the site.

Tags: attap, riffs, safari

Dark alpha PNGs in Safari 2

Are your alpha png’s looking grey in Safari 2? Here’s the easy solution.

Tags: browsers, bug, png, safari

Jeremy is right! Tiger underwhelms, except for...

How I’ve come to love Safari RSS. No more browser hopping for me?

Tags: osx, rss, safari, software, tiger

Safari tabs for Firefox updated

How to improve the original tabs hack with close buttons.

Tags: browsers, code, firefox, safari, themes

Pimp My Safari: As ready as it will ever be

“As ready as it’ll ever be”, is an apt description of a little side-project of mine just launched, Pimp My Safari.com. Its been a pet project for many months, and was started as a reaction to all the sites cataloguing Firefox extensions. Many excellent plugins for Safari have been developed, but because Safari doesn’t have an official ‘extension architecture’, many are unaware of these extensions. This is where PimpMySafari comes in – a resource for the pimping of your copy of Safari no less!

Tags: browsers, safari, sites

Skinning sites in Safari with PithHelmet

It would easy to to think that Firefox is the only browser with cool extensions, and overlook the excellent ones available for Safari, such as Saft, Stand and PithHelmet. Here’s how to alter individual sites css using new features in PithHelmet.

Tags: browsers, css, plugins, rss, safari

Full Metal interface

The reason why I like Apple’s brushed metal window theme – in certain situations.

Tags: camino, interfaces, mac, osx, safari

Safari style tabs for Firefox OS X

As a CSS designer, I’m really enjoying the ‘customisablity’ of Firefox with a language that I understand. I can’t program, but I can do CSS, which it uses to define the look of its interface.

Here’s another little mod for OS X* Firefox users. It emulates an aqua version of Safari’s upside down tabs. I personally love this style, and prefer the more compact size of them compared to Firefox’s default tabs (which are designed to emulate the window title bar).

Tags: firefox, safari, themes

Safari grinds to a halt - culprit found

Hmm. It looks as if Zlog had this problem and I’d like to know if anyone else has too. Safari seems to have a problem with usage over time. The more I use it, the slower and unresponsive it becomes. Resizing the window takes the patient of a saint. Clicking on toolbar bookmarks has a 4 second delay, and it really has to think hard about showing you a menu item. Whats that all about? Does Safari need a sit down with a cup of tea the same as I do? The simple fix is the quit out, and relaunch. Everything is back to normal, until later in the day when I start to notice it slow down again. Grrr. Not so bad when you’ve got Saft reopening your last used tabs for you, but I still shouldn’t be having to do it. I have wondered whether this has anything to do with the various plug-ins for Safari that I’ve installed, so I’d particularly like to hear from anyone who runs Safari in its clean, naked form. update – It seems that after a length of time Safari will slow down, until you relaunch it, but that it was Saft that made this a little worse. Fiddling with caches of pages/history/favicons made no difference, but removing Saft from the input managers folder did. Its a bit of an arse using Safari without Saft, but the speed difference was incredible!

Tags: bugs, osx, safari

New Safari Stand features

The free Safari plug-in ‘Stand’ is updated to work with v1.2.3 (v125.9), and has added some rather nice new features.

Tags: browsers, osx, plugins, safari, software

Extending Safari 3: Stand

I’ve recently discovered another plug-in for Safari, called Stand. I can’t tell you a whole lot of detail about it, as the site is written in Japanese. What I can tell you is that its free, and it allows you to do the following slick actions:

• Allow syntax colouring in viewed source (no control over colours used though)
• Specify a font and size for viewed source (I like this – I have a thing about using Lucida Grande for source view).
• Search your bookmarks and history (very nice, although I tend to use Quicksilver to find bookmarks quickly, this is even faster).
• Specify that all links to a ’_blank’ target open in a new tab instead of a new window. This is nice.
• Save tab layouts as workspaces alá Omniweb.
• Assign categories, colour labels and comments to new bookmarks
• Create search shortcuts (as in Sogudi and Saft)
• ‘Site Alteration’. This allows you some basic preferences on a per site basis, such as what encoding to use, and whether images, pop-ups, plug-ins or javascript are to be allowed.
• Remove favicons.
• Set a time delay for auto-closing the downloads window after completion.
• It also seems to add ‘Copy Link HTML Tag’ command to the context menu when ctrl-clicking links. (I’ve only just noticed this though, so it could’ve been there all along!)

This is a beta, so although I could save windows as workspaces, I couldn’t find a way of reopening them. There is also a window called the ‘Stand Bar’, which includes searchable bookmarks and history again, plus 2 other menus which haven’t been ‘hooked up’ yet.

Tags: browsers, plugins, safari, software

RSS sidebar in Safari

Those of you who are registered users of Saft will now have the latest preview version with the new sidebar feature. The plugin nature of the sidebar (each panel can be a web page, perl script or shell script) has got me wondering about what useful little widget I could put in there.

Here’s my first idea. After hacking the excellent Feedonfeeds news aggregator script, I’ve made a little OS X style RSS sidebar. Feedonfeeds is a php/MySQL solution that you can install on your site, rather than using a desktop client. From here I can click the unread number to view the latest feeds, the grey number to see all the recent entries, and the blog name to go straight to the site. The first 2 open in a simplified format – very like the RSS Reader/Sage extension for Firefox, and the upcoming Safari RSS reader.

Tags: code, rss, safari, themes

safari sidebar - beta screenshots (updated)

That’s right. I’ve just received a new Saft beta, with the sidebar that I’ve been bellyaching about for months! To be honest, alhough I pestered Hao for this feature, I never really thought it would be possible, but hey, it never hurts to ask. Hao seems to like a challenge however, and he’s been kind enough to allow me to post screenshots here.

This version works the same as other releases of Saft. The plug-in goes into the Library>InputMangers folder replacing the previous version. Once launched, Safari then has the ‘Show Sidebar’ command in the Safari menu (this is a temporary position).

Tags: plugins, rss, safari, software, themes

Saftari

Saft has been updated yet again. It was only a week or so ago when Hao Li added the ability to save and restore windows and tabs on quit. Now, check out these new additions:

• New feature: Customizable HTTP timeout
• New feature: Separator in bookmark menu
• New feature: Control-1 to 9 to popup bookmark menu or open bookmark
• Improvement: Saft contextual menu items for shortcuts grouped in sub-menus
• Improvement: Open new tab for shortcut searching from contextual menu when holding down the option key

Look at that second one. Separators! I wrote to Hao Li asking for this feature, but never thought he would actually do it. How good is that?! The guy is putting Apple to shame with his development speed.

Tags: osx, plugins, safari, saft

Safari menu separators

I’ve come up with a very lo-fi hack for creating bookmark menu separators in Safari. By combining a grey line favicon, with the most minimal page title I could find (unfortunately, Safari doesn’t allow blank titles) you can get a passable separator. If you like the look of example above, simply go to http://sep.hicksdesign.co.uk/, and bookmark it. Once in your bookmarks it can copied into other folders by alt-dragging.

Tags: browsers, howto, safari, themes

extending Safari 2: saft!

One of my niggles about Safari is that I’ve always felt it’s a little short in features. As mentioned before, Pith Helmet (Advert blocking), Sogudi (Address bar searches) and Safari Enhancer go someway to improve it. I want to use Safari – I love its clean, elegant interface and speed, but sometimes it feels a bit lacking.

Tags: osx, plugins, reviews, safari, saft, software

New Browsers

After excitedly downloading the Omniweb 5 Beta yesterday, I was all prepared to give a critique, but as usual, John Gruber says it best.

Suffice to say that OW 5 shows a lot of promise, but the beta crashes and hangs too much too often to use it for any length of time. The thumbnail tabs are wonderful and I’m no longer a sceptic. The toolbar icons are not to my taste though. I feel a browser theme coming on…

Tags: browsers, firefox, omniweb, safari

Extending Safari

Just wanted to share with you my favourite apps for extending the capabilities of Safari – There might be one here you haven’t tried…

Safari Enhancer – Does a whole variety of tasks, but I use it to enable the debug menu (contains a spoof user agents menu), remove the metal skin (looks great in Panther!) and deactivate the cache.

Sogudi – creates search shortcuts to use in the location bar. For instance, to search for ‘skEdit’ on Versiontracker, just type ‘vt skEdit’ into the location bar. Comes with some preset searches, and the ability to add your own.

Tags: browsers, mac, osx, plugins, safari, software

safari and 10.2.8

If any other OS X users had the misfortune to update to 10.2.8 before it was pulled, you may have noticed that Safari Enhancer doesn’t work anymore. I use this to deactivate Safari’s cache and enable the debug menu. Also I’ve been trying Safari ‘demetallized’ recently, which looks great combined with a Panther OS Theme.

I found a fix on the Lord of the Cows forum. Copy Safari (cmd-D), dump the original, then remove the word ‘copy’ from the duplicate version. Works a treat.

Tags: safari

Safari final in June?

Think Secret reports the possibility that Apple is ready to release the final version of Safari next month, before the Worldwide Developers Conference.

There has also been a rumour flying around that iSync will feature a bookmark synchronisation option for Safari. This is partly due to the bizarre ‘iSync is updating your bookmarks’ error that users of the latest Beta have been getting.

Tags: safari