I downloaded around with the first beta of new Firefox browser last week and have to say that I’m impressed by the updates already. Memory usage, once the bane of my browsing experience has been vastly improved. Take a look at this screen grab of my task manager. Guess where I got bored of Firefox hogging 700,000K of my memory and ended the process?
Cocoa widgets played a big part in me installing Bon Echo (which is the Mac Intel optimised version of Firefox 2) but now with Firefox 3 Mozilla are giving us native form controls themselves.
Look-and-feel is one thing but for a web developer at a design agency more important than this and the memory usage is the support of standards. Firefox now follows the lead of both Opera and Safari and passes the ACID2 test. ICC color profiles are now fully supported (again, a good few months after Safari) although the not enabled on default installs. You can switch it on using the special about:config URL of Firefox (you can safely ignore the cute warning message for this), changing the gfx.color_management.enabled setting to true and restarting. You can see the color profile support in action at color.org.
Published on
November 21, 2007 in
Software.
After a lot of waiting, feature pruning, a few false dawns and a good deal of hype, Microsoft Vista was launched with much fanfare at the start of this year. Indeed more fireworks were used in the French launch than were used to celebrate the new millennium. Before the official release Vista’s DRM and security specifications were being referred to as the longest suicide note in history despite clever security improvements like ASLR.
(Microsoft security may well be an oxymoron. It is a much ridiculed aspect of the company and their software but did it really deserve a spot on the list of 2007 worst jobs in science?)
Continue reading ‘So, how is Vista doing?’
I’ve been using Leopard for three weeks now and while I am finding it an improvement from 10.4 (Tiger) there have been (and still are) some issues. In the past I’ve waited for a couple of updates to be released from Apple. However in this case I was one of the early adopters (or Beta testers as we’re sometime referred to).
Continue reading ‘Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)’
Published on
October 24, 2007 in
Software.
In the early 80s pre-announcing details and price points of your new product could prove to be disastrous. Especially so when there was a delay in releasing said new product. Everybody knows that this is what happened to Adam Osborne (and as usual, everybody appears to be wrong) but at least the saying has stuck around.
In the world of software — in particular operating systems — the effect seems to be harder to gauge. Apple’s announcement and iPhone induced delay of Leopard (OS X 10.5) didn’t appear to dent their financial results. On the flip side, developers of third-party software are likely to have suffered. I know that I have personally held off purchasing several applications while waiting to see how Leopard addresses the situations in which they have proven to be valuable while using Tiger (OS X 10.4). In particular, the brilliantly useful utility Hazel and Power Manager.
We use remote .ics files in the office for our calendering with Apple iCal and Thunderbird with the Lightning extension. The files have got to be pretty unwieldy as some of them date back to late 2004. Thunderbird in particular was becoming so slow and non-responsive as to be bordering on being barely usable.
I knocked together this Perl script which is run via cron at the start of each month to archive old calendar files and remove events older than one month to try and keep file sizes more manageable.
I’m not talking about Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (easy for me to say) but the brilliant just-out-of-beta text editor that my colleague introduced me to last week. It basically brings the power of TextMate to Windows. I’ve tried to switch from TextPad several times before but I’ve always been shackled by just how used to the keystrokes and shortcuts I’ve gotten over the years. True enough, you can alter the keystroke bindings in a lot of editors but one thing kept me returning to TextPad time and again: the context-sensitive transpose call invoked with Control-T.
I’m glad to report that it wasn’t just me being weird. The developers of e obviously value this functionality as highly as me. Actually, scratch that. Higher than me as they’ve extended how this tool works to embrace multiple sections and a column mode.
It’s not quite perfect just yet. Line bookmarks and a split-screen edit mode are missing. A more powerful search and replace is also conspicuous by its absence. One final downside is that after a lot of excited discussion of new features with my colleagues it will probably be expected that I’m at least 15% more efficient!
I’ve recently switched my day-to-day browser of choice from being Firefox (herein taken to be version 2) to Safari. Okay, so being the geek I am, I actually use a nightly build of WebKit (Safari) and Bon Echo (OS X Intel compiled Firefox) but I’ll use the names that everybody knows.
A couple of things annoy me in Safari however. I can’t start up with the windows and tabs from my previous session. Control+Enter still top-and-tails what I type into the location bar with http://www. and .com but does so in another tab. I guess I’ll get used to it. Also while I’m actually building sites I’ll still be using Firefox mainly due to the fantastically useful array of developer tools available.
Continue reading ‘Safari, so good’
I spent a little of this morning watching the iLife ’08 guided tour video and when I noticed the new “skimming” feature of iPhoto and iMovie I couldn’t help but feel like I’d seen it somewhere before. Then I realised that I had seen the style sheet genius Stu Nicholls use exactly this effect for pure CSS flick-book style animations at least two years ago. I never really found an occasion to use the technique myself but it seems to work well in the iLife examples I’ve seen.
In light of recent postings of software lists in the comments I thought I’d better chime in with my two cents. After all, it is my blog! My favourite piece of software of late which always gets a good reaction from my less geeky friends is the marvelous MacOSaiX, which produced this topical image (click for larger version):
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks clearing through roughly 10,000 emails which adds up to more than 1.5Gb accumulated from over three years of borderline obsessive pack-ratting. Next up is categorising my blog posts and rating and tagging over 3,000 songs and a similar amount of photos.
Meta information is becoming more and more important and, by extension, useful to me. Finding things quickly is just one outcome. Being able to put together auto-updating Smart Playlists in iTunes (for example, 20 songs that I’ve rated with five stars but not listened to in six months) or Smart Albums in iPhoto (again, as an example, family pictures from Christmas) are simple examples of what can be achieved but using these in conjunction with Automator can really demonstrate the power of meta information.
Of course, it’s a lot easier if you’re disciplined and keep on top of things!
