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- Safari Alternatives: What's Your Primary Browser of Choice and Why?
Macworld’s Joe Kissell observes that there are many fine Mac Web browsers to choose from, and there’s no reason not to have several installed so that you can switch among them as needed. Indeed, I virtually always have at least three up and running at any given time.
Safari vs. Firefox
However, most folks are inclined to rely primarily on one main browser, and for that purpose, Kissell recommends using one of the two most popular ones — either Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox – which he says both make excellent all-around choices and work well as a default browser, which I don’t dispute, although neither are my own choice as my number one browser. Kissell notes that certain situations may make one or the other of these two browsers an especially good choice, outlining several areas where in his estimation they respectively excel. Of course such evaluations tend to be somewhat subjective.
For example, Joe likes Safari’s built-in PDF support. I’m personally not a big fan. While the built-in facility means you don’t have to switch to Preview or Adobe Reader to launch a PDF file you still have to wait while it loads in the browser window, and saving it is another step. I prefer the download and view mode, but that’s just me. Joe mentions that if you like inline PDF viewing, a free extension called Firefox-Mac-PDF will add similar functionality to Firefox.
Another Safari feature Joe likes is the ability to resize text area controls (multi-line text fields) by dragging the handle in the lower right corner of the field. This is indeed handy, but not a killer feature, in my opinion.
How Often Will You Want to Do That?
I do agree that Safari’s full-text history searches (Safari’s Top Sites view>History -> Show Top Sites) and search field for words that appeared on Web pages you viewed recently even if they’re no longer open is pretty cool, and he likes Safari’s ability to display graphics in non-Web TIFF or JPEG 2000 formats, although how often will you want to do that?
When Firefox May Be a Better Choice
However, Joe thinks there are also instances where Firefox is a better choice than Safari, such as when using Google Toolbar — another free extension for Firefox that adds a long and user-configurable list of features to the browser, including quick access to various Google Gadgets.
He also likes Firefox’s more flexible and versatile privacy setting configuration that lets you configure many privacy settings per domain, as opposed to Safari’s all-or-nothing privacy setting limitations, and praises the vast range of choice in Firefox add-ons and plug-ins compared with the lack of an officially supported plug-in API for Safari. For folks who like to tweak their browser functionality, Firefox is the way to go.
Firefox (and its sibling Gecko-based browsers like Camino and SeaMonkey) can also display inline mathematical equations, while Safari and other WebKit-based browsers only support display of linear strings of characters.
Why I Use Opera and Chrome More Than Safari and Firefox
Personally, I use Firefox more than Safari, but Opera 10 and lately Google’s Chrome for Mac each respectively get more hours of surfing on my machines than Firefox and Safari combined, and both Opera and Chrome have features I miss when using the more mainstream browsers, such as their superior download managers, Opera’s up-front and versatile Zoom menu, and Chrome’s raw speed, fast startup, and “right now” Finder response. Opera and Chrome both seem more nimble and less inclined to be memory hogs than Safari and Firefox (although the latter has cleaned up its act in that regard somewhat in recent iterations). I prefer the looks of Opera and Chrome as well, but as Joe Kissell noted, we have an embarrassment of choice in browsers these days, and everyone should be able to find a browser (or two or three) that suits their needs and tastes to a tee.
What’s your favorite OS X browser, and why?
Related GigaOM Pro Research: What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
Переслать - Could a Tablet Replace Your Notebook?
PC World’s Jeff Bertolucci recently posed the rhetorical question, “Could a tablet replace your notebook?” He referenced not only Apple’s anticipated tablet computer but also new PC tablets like the one from Microsoft and HP that was pitched at CES, the chatter about which inclined him to wonder if a tablet/slate would work as a suitable notebook replacement.
Bertolucci thinks that for folks who use their laptops and/or netbooks primarily for light-duty web work like email and casual surfing, the answer may be the affirmative, and of course many have pretty much switched to using their iPhones or iPod touches for that type of duty. A tablet would presumably provide a larger display size as well as greater feature depth, so for that cohort, and in that usage context, such a machine could be quite satisfactory, and a step up from the handhelds in terms of performance.
However, for those of us who do serious production work on our laptops, not so much. I’m resolved to keep an open mind, but I’m exceedingly doubtful that a tablet will be a really well-suited tool for workaday production use.
Of course there are many as yet imponderables, especially in the context of an Apple tablet, such as whether the machine will support the standard Mac OS and application software or will run with a variant of the iPhone OS, limiting one to iPhone apps, and if there will be some provision for supporting a work-worthy external keyboard and mouse, rather than limiting users to touchscreen input.
On the OS support front, recent scuttlebutt is not encouraging. Earlier, Gizmodo reported new intelligence from someone they say has been a reliable source in the past that the new tablet will be basically an “iPhone on steroids,” and will be running an ARM CPU on the iPhone kernel rather than Intel Core power with the Mac OS, so Mac OS applications will not be supported. If that is accurate information, then it would pretty much rule out the Apple tablet as a serious work platform as far as I’m concerned, and along with prognostications of a $1,000 price tag, I would say good luck with that, Apple.
If the iTablet/iSlate or whatever really is going to be an “iPhone on steroids,” that would also make prospects for external keyboard and pointing device support murky, to say the least.
I simply can’t conceive doing production work on a machine without a physical (QWERTY) keyboard. I’m only a “semi-touch” typist, but I’m pretty fast, using most of my fingers in an idiosyncratic typing technique I’ve developed over the years — part visual and party spatial reference — and I find the lack of tactile feedback with touchscreen virtual keyboarding unacceptable for typing more than a paragraph or two. Not a problem, perhaps, for tweeting and texting, but not the thing for long-form typing projects.
Both handwriting and voice dictation support could have potential. I use MacSpeech Dictate a lot for entering text both as straight dictation and for transcribing material drafted by hand. Efficient and accurate handwriting recognition could potentially condense those operations into one, but only if scribbling on the tablet proved ergonomically comfortable. My flirtations with using handwriting recognition in OS X have not been encouraging, and personally, I would miss the tactile satisfaction of putting pen to good old low-tech paper, which seems to help me organize my thoughts more effectively.
Without Mac OS support, Dictate is out (along with much else), although MacSpeech or some other developer might eventually fill that void with an iPhone OS compatible dictation app. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that. I anticipate that I’ll be using laptops as my do-all tools for years to come yet.
How about you? Can you envision a tablet, especially one running the iPhone OS, displacing your laptop?
Related GigaOM Pro Research: Is The Age of the Web Tablet Finally Upon Us? and Rumored Apple Tablet: Opportunities Too Big to Ignore
Переслать - Vodafone Sold 50,000 iPhones on Launch Day
The selling strength of Apple’s iPhone appears not to be waning very much at all with the passage of time, if the Vodafone UK launch of the device is any indication. The newest iPhone provider in the UK, which joins recent entrant Orange and original exclusive carrier O2, sold a reported 50,000 handsets when it officially started selling the iPhone on Jan. 14.
It’s an impressive number for a launch this late, when the iPhone 3GS has already been on the market for six months. Even more impressive is the fact that it beat Orange’s launch day total of 30,000 by a wide, 20,000-handset margin, only two months after that company’s introduction of the device.
The massive sales day comes despite the fact that Vodafone doesn’t really offer any significant pricing advantages over either Orange or O2. In fact, pricing and terms on all three carriers are scarcely indistinguishable. And Vodafone’s subscriber base is only the third largest in the UK, following the merger of T-Mobile and Orange. The number disparity would make more sense proportionally if Vodafone already had more market share than did Orange.
It could just be that Vodafone was more flexible with early contract upgrades and other incentive programs for its existing subscribers, but I think what we’re seeing has more to do with the growing outward appearance of freedom of customer choice. Feeling corralled into making a carrier decision based on available hardware is not a pleasant thing, speaking from experience. I would much rather choose my provider based on the testimonials of people I know who’ve actually lived with and used the service.
If I was still in the market for a handset, now that the iPhone is available on all major carriers here in Canada, I would’ve gladly waited until it became officially available on all networks before making a final decision. As it is, I bought my iPhone back when only one provider offered it, and the other two didn’t even have the network capability to support it. The 50,000 figure, then, has more to do with many more people making up their minds now that all the cards are on the table than any significant advantage offered by Vodafone over other carriers.
This strong launch is yet another reason Apple should really considering following Google’s Nexus One strategy and reconfiguring its sales strategy of the iPhone towards more openness. More choice is better for business, and with a device as popular as the iPhone, there’s little carriers can do to prevent Apple from selling its device in whatever way it chooses.
Related GigaOM Pro Research: Why AT&T Should Be Ready for an iPhone Slowdown
Переслать - How-To: Create Your Own iTunes LP
The iTunes LP is the new format Apple has been pushing in iTunes. It’s more like a DVD than anything else. You have menus, music, photos, liner notes and videos. Since this is such a fresh format, not many albums are available in it yet. The good news is, you can make your own.
I’ll take you through the process of creating your own iTunes LP that you can distribute yourself.
Getting Started
Apple offers a template to help you out, which can be found here (ZIP). After it is unzipped, you should see an
iTunes-LP-Example.itlpfile. Right click on the file and select “Show Package Contents.”If you open up the
index.htmlfile in Safari, you’ll see the LP.First, we want to edit the
iTunesMetadata.plistfile in TextEdit and enter some info about the LP we are creating. I decided to do the Neutral Milk Hotel album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Filling out this information helps iTunes import the LP correctly. Make sure the artist and album name are correct at a minimum.Now we can get into the good stuff. We want to create the background image and the bleed image. The bleed image is what the user see’s if they are viewing the album at a resolution larger than 1280×720. Open up the
images/interface/bleed.pngfile in your image editor of choice. For now, you might just want to make the image a solid color, otherwise it may look cluttered.The buttons are simply images that can be replaced easily. The LP format is really just HTML with some nice JavaScript and CSS. Because of this, you can make your LP’s as complicated as you see fit. The CSS folder contains all the CSS files that reference the positioning of the buttons. Editing the
home.cssfile, I can change the position of my title on the home page.The one thing your LP will need, no mater how simple, is music. The music doesn’t live inside the LP itself. The LP file just references songs in your iTunes library. There is an audio folder, where the intro music that plays on the LP lives. Apple suggests keeping this short, so I opened up one of the songs off the album in iTunes. I then edited the Start and Stop times.
After I made sure it played back properly, I created an AAC version of it by right clicking and selecting “Create AAC Version.” This created a new m4a file that was the specific length I wanted. I renamed the file to
intro.m4aand replaced the originalintro.m4afile in the audio folder.Next, lets add some photos. I used Google to grab a handful of images related to the band. Then I replaced the photos in the images/photos folder and used the same naming convention of
photo01.jpg.The photos will get resized and cropped automatically to 600×400 when they are displayed, so size doesn’t seem to be too important.
Now I want to add some liner notes, so I used the band’s bio information from Amazon. Just edit the
views/linernotes.htmlfile and add your own text.I decided that I didn’t want the credit or video sections so I deleted them out of
views/home.html.Then I had to edit the
css/home.cssfile to move the liner notes button up.Things are really starting to come together.
Adding Songs & Lyrics
Adding songs is probably the hardest part of the whole iTunes LP creation process. The LP references songs by their XID. The XID is a serial number of sorts that Apple assigns to every song available for purchase in the iTunes store. This means the LP can play any song that it knows the XID for, regardless if the user renamed the file in anyway. If it’s a song you didn’t purchase from iTunes, you have to create your own XID.
We’ll look at how to find the XID for songs you’ve purchased from iTunes. First, you need to enable author mode for iTunes. Make sure iTunes is closed and then run this command in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool trueNow open iTunes back up, right-click on a purchased song and choose Get Info. Under the Info tab you will see an XID field. That is how to tell your LP what song to play.
But what if this isn’t a song you purchased through iTunes? Then the XID field will be blank. We need to generate our own. Go to Terminal and enter the following command:
uuidgenYou will now get back a random UUID string that can be used for a song. You have to do this for every song so they each have a unique XID. Find your song in iTunes and get to the XID field. Apple wants us to prefix this UUID with
TEST:uuid:to create the complete XID string. Now our song has a unique XID that can be referenced in our LP.There are two places these XID’s need to be entered. The
manifest.xmlfile and thecontrollers/data.jsfile. First we edit themanifest.xmlfile and replace the default XID with the one from our track.Then we edit the
data.jsfile and do the same.Now open up your LP in iTunes, play the first song and admire your work. These same steps need to be done for every song on the LP.
Let’s add some lyrics to our song next. The lyrics are just an image file located in the
images/songs/folder. They are named simplylyrics01.jpgand so on. You can either just create a simple image with text in it or get creative. What about scanning lyrics from the original vinyl/CD art? You could go even further and scribble the lyrics down on paper then scan it in.Replicate these steps for each song and remember to be creative. The LP will only be as cool as you want it to be. I like to think of it as digital scrap-booking. If you love the music, you will be inspired to go all out.
If you create an LP and use XID’s from songs purchased through iTunes, you could give the LP to someone else. As long as they also purchased the songs in iTunes, it will work for them. You could also find a small local band that you dig and create one for them. That should get you some backstage passes.
Переслать - Intel Promo Material Points to Core i5 MacBook Pros
An internal employee incentive program aimed at Intel retail salespeople seems to have let the cat out of the bag about a major upcoming revision to Apple’s MacBook Pro line, according to AppleInsider. If the flyer detailing the program is accurate, the MacBook Pro will soon sport the Intel Core i5 processor, replacing the Intel Core 2 Duo chip that has long driven Apple’s upscale line of notebooks.
A prize draw for passing the training for sales associates for the month advertises two prizes of MacBook Pro laptops, featuring the Intel Core i5 processor. Intel, for its part, maintains that although the flyers are indeed company material, the suggestion that MacBooks will soon feature Core i5 tech is merely a typo.
The Intel Core 2 Duo has been running the show in MacBook Pros since the very same year Intel took over chip-making duties for the Apple line of computers in 2006, although originally the upscale notebooks ran Core Duos, and were upgraded late in the year. That means it’s been nearly four years since we’ve seen a major platform upgrade, although we have seen minor spec bumps and the introduction of the Santa Rosa platform in 2007, which incorporated the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M integrated graphics card.
Intel formally introduced the new Core i3, i5 and i7 chips last week during CES, and the mobile i5 is definitely the most likely suspect for inclusion in subsequent generations of Apple’s powerful notebook line. If Apple does decide to go with the Core i5 chips, contrary to earlier rumblings, future MacBook Pro owners can expect a nice little increase in performance over the Core 2 Duo chips, while at the same time not sacrificing anything due to increased power demands. Advantages also include increased battery performance, more speed and better graphics, and they could allow Apple to assign less internal space to the motherboard, which could clear up room additional battery volume or other things. 3G antenna, anyone?
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