The category (or, in many cases, categories) that each post on my blog is assigned to is (are) now listed in each individual post, just underneath the time/datestamp at the end of the post. Might make finding older and/or related posts a bit easier than it was before. I’ve also added a lot of categories in order to even further (over-)organize my posts — new posts will get these added at creation, older posts will just have to live without until I get them all assigned.
Tech
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
Browser Daydreaming
A few days back, Phil asked what we’d like to see in a web browser. I initially responded in my usual semi-flippant fashion, but after running it through my head for a couple days, I’ve actually got some ideas.
To start with, I’ll look at web browsers as divided into two core components, as outlined by John Gruber on Daring Fireball:
It is essential to understand that there are two huge, almost completely separate tasks involved in producing a web browser. The first is the HTML rendering engine — the part of the browser that parses HTML and turns it into an on-screen graphical representation. The second is the browser application: the windows, menus, buttons, and dialog boxes.
I’ll start with the second part — the application itself. The things I’m most interested here are scattered across multiple browsers at the moment, and I do end up wishing that they were all in one package. Key things I’d like to have in my ‘ultimate browser’:
- Safari’s clean, simple interface (without the ‘brushed metal’ look, though).
- Safari’s speed.
- Chimera’s tabbed browsing (unless someone can come up with something better).
- Safari’s bookmark management.
- Internet Explorer’s form autofill.
- OmniWeb’s beauty.
- The ability to tab among all page elements — links, form elements (text fields, buttons, and menus).
- Full-featured contextual menus (Safari’s are pretty anemic at the moment).
- And there’s probably more that I’m not coming up with at the moment.
When looking at the other side of the browser experience, I was kind of inspired by Jason Kottke’s browser integration musings and Mark Pilgrim’s wondering if Safari should be intentionally buggy (and for the record, no, I don’t believe it should, but that’s another post for another time).
Dreaming about the perfect UI for a browser is all well and good, but we’re still faced with the dilemma of which rendering engine to use. Each of the major engines out there (IE Mac, IE PC, kHTML [Safari, Konqueror], Gecko [Chimera, Mozilla, Netscape], Opera and OmniWeb] has its own collection of bugs to be worked around, causing frustration for both web designers trying to design sites that look equivalent under all browsers, and for end users who, depending on their level of expertise, may or may not understand why any given site doesn’t seem to work in whatever browser they use.
So, what I’d kind of like to see, would be a plug-in based interface for the rendering engine, easily changed via a menu choice somewhere. Find a way to wrap the latest build of any given rendering engine in a small piece of plug-in code, and drop it in an “engines” folder for the browser app. The app would come with one default engine (and as long as I’m living in a perfect fantasy world, let’s make that engine an as-yet mythical completely strict standards-based engine), but at any given point, you could go to a menu and switch to another rendering engine, which would then re-render the current page (or all pages — let’s add a preference option to select whether rendering engines would apply on a global basis or window-by-window) with whatever engine was chosen, which might be less strictly accurate, but might be more compatible with whatever mess of code the user is currently attempting to view.
I have no idea how feasible something like this might be, and I don’t think it’ll ever happen, but hey, I like the idea. Of course, in a perfect world, I’d much rather see standards-compliant websites that worked in standards-compliant, bug-free browsers, but I don’t expect that’ll be happening anytime soon. I can dream, though….
Abuse my taste in music
Being silly here. ;) Feel like harassing me about what I listen to? Here’s the place to do it….
The last ten tracks I’ve listened to in iTunes are:
This feature is no longer active, as a consequence of the move to TypePad. Sorry!
Feel free to use the comment form to praise or condemn me — or if you’re feeling rich and/or adventuresome, use the links to Amazon and pick up something new to listen to!
(This is inspired by the playlist comment feature on Phil Ringnalda’s site.)
Revamping the Archives
I’ve made some revamps to my archive listing pages, in an attempt to address some of the issues raised by Dave and Kirsten.
Monthly archives I’ve kept the same — I really like the calendar-style display that they use.
Clicking through to the main archive page should be much nicer now. Rather than the huge (and rapidly growing) table listing the title for every post I’ve ever made, you’ll now see a simple list of each category I use, with a short description of the category and the titles of the last ten posts within that category.
Heading into each category’s archive page (for instance, my Humor archive), I wanted to get away from listing the entirety of each post, as that lead to huge pages, but still include more info than just the title of each post. Nicely enough, MT includes an ‘excerpt’ field for each post, and if an exerpt isn’t written by hand, MT will auto-generate one using a snippet of the beginning of each post. So, the category archive pages list the title for each post, then the excerpt. I’m going to start trying to remember to create excerpts for any new posts from here on out, but the auto-generated excerpts will have to suffice for all the old posts — at least until I get really bored. ;)
Hopefully this makes things far easier to deal with. As always, questions, comments, and words of wisdom are always appreciated!
[Addendum: the main archive listing and all category listings validate as valid XHTML. Individual entry pages should, but may or may not, on a case-by-case basis. However, there’s lots of those, and I need to go to bed.]{.underline}
More on Safari
In order to give it something of a workout, I went ahead and set Safari to be my default web browser. I’ll probably keep it here for the next couple days to stress test it, then switch back to Chimera until Safari moves out of beta status.
Mark Pilgrim has a good rundown of current CSS bugs that he’s uncovered in Safari so far (thankfully, though, it renders djwudi.com just fine). Amusingly enough, I may have just found one more while I was reading his post: while most of his links highlight correctly when the pointer is over them, the ‘First test case’ link towards the end of the post that has \<code> tags within the link displays oddly — the code snippets disappear! Here’s a couple quick screenshots of how it looks in Chimera and in Safari:
I’m also finding that I (along with many other people) really miss the tabbed browsing available in Chimera and Mozilla — once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s really hard to go back to having window after window all over the place. Still, the speed is definitely good, and overall, it’s not too shabby. Just definitely a beta release. Here’s hoping that future releases are as impressive as the first shot!
Thoughts on the keynote
Just a couple quick thoughts I had regarding some of the news from Steve Jobs’ keynote speech today at MacWorld.
- Apple plays nice
Apple is continuing to support the Open Source software movement. Not only have they been utilizing the Open Source community to help improve the code for OS X, but they’ve done the same with Safari, the newly announed browser. On top of that, after dramatically improving the code base that Safari uses, they are sending the improved code back into the community for public use. Very nice move.
-
Apple plays nice, part 2
I noticed a nice little feature in Safari during the few moments I was able to play with it before I left for work. In the main Safari menu, just underneath the ‘Preferences…’ option, is an option to disable popup windows. While the option has been around in most Mozilla-based browsers for a while (sometimes easily available, sometimes not), it’s nice to see Apple including the functionality right off the bat in their browser.
-
Open format files
The announcement that Keynote (the new presentation application) uses XML for it’s saved project files really got my interest. While I haven’t played enough with XML to be able to take advantage of this right off, I can think of some very interesting scenarios that could make this very useful.
Say, for instance, a script that weekly (or monthly, or daily, or whatever) pulls the Apache logfiles from your OS X webserver, extracts whatever key data points you want to extract from them, and plugs the resulting data into the right spots inside the XML file of a predefined Keynote template. Bingo – an automatically generated weekly professional presentation of your website’s traffic, most visited pages, most frequently used search terms, etc., ready for presentation to your boss, board of directors, whatever. Or, since Keynote can export to PowerPoint, you could have the report ready to send off to those Windows-based heathen. Or just export the report to a PDF file or QuickTime movie for posting on a website. All automatically generated, without the need for any interaction beyond the initial setup.
Pretty damn cool, I think.
In the meantime, I’ll just go drool over that 17\” Powerbook now…
MacWorld Expo '03 Keynote
My schedule actually works out so that I can watch Steve Jobs’ keynote address at MacWorld Expo 2003. I’ve got the live streaming webcast going now, watching people filter in…everything’s scheduled to get started at 9am, so in theory, Steve should be hitting the stage any time now. Okay — I had a hard time getting the stream going after it stalled, but I’m back in now.
- Apparently he’s got about “two MacWorld’s worth of stuff to show today.”
- 130 countries are watching the keynote live via the Web.
- Some Apple Store facts and figures.
- 51 stores, \$141 million in sales last year.
- Going over the updates to iCal and iSync that were released last week.
- Talking about .Mac now.
- 250,000 paying .Mac subscribers since they added the yearly price (I’m one).
- iPods have been around for 14 months, over 600,000 have been shipped (one every minute since introduction).
- iPod #1 .mp3 player in US and Japan, with 42% market share in Japan.
- Apple has teamed with snowboard equipment/apparel maker Burton to create a skiing/snowboard jacket with a pocket for the iPod and remote controls built into the sleeve.
- Jacket is \$499 only from the Apple Store this year, should be more widespread next year.
- Moving to Mac OS X (still pronounced Jag-Wire according to Steve).
- 5 million active users of OS X.
- Expecting to get to 9-10 million users in ’03.
- “We’ve got a few laggard apps we still need to get released — we all know which one we’re talking about.” (Quark Xpress?)
- QuickBooks Pro 5.0 just started shipping a couple weeks ago (the most requested app).
- Other quick application mentions.
- Dave Lebolt from DigiDesign coming onstage to demo Digidesign ProTools professional audio app, which will ship this month.
- Pro audio and MIDI creation and editing support finally available for OS X.
- Next featured product — FinalCut Pro, the top pro video editing app.
- Introducing Final Cut Express — FCP with a lighter feature set.
- Phil Schiller taking stage to Demo FCE.
- FCE uses same interface and file format as FCP.
- Quick demos of built-in transition effects and color correction tools.
- FCP is \$999 — FCE is \$299.
- 5,000 native OS X apps available now.
- Starting today, no new products will boot into OS 9 — Classic layer is still there, but will boot OS X only.
- Moving to the Digital Hub concept.
- All-new versions of all Hub apps being released, all rewritten to be more completely integrated.
- iTunes 3 has some “hidden features” that will be revealed today.
- iPhoto 2 comes out today.
- iPhoto integrated with iTunes.
- Adds 1-click enhance, retouch brush, and ability to archive photo albums to CD and DVD.
- When creating an iPhoto slideshow, the iTunes music library is available for a soundtrack.
- New iDVD 3 button in iP2 automatically transfers an album into iDVD for burning as a DVD slideshow.
- Quick demo of iPhoto one-click enhance for automatically color-correcting photos.
- Retouch brush demo — being used to automatically remove bruises and freckles, etc. from photos, just by “scrubbing” over the area.
- Next — iMovie 3.
- Fully integrated with other iApps.
- Added most requested feature — Chapters, which are automatically read by iDVD.
- Also added the “Ken Burns Effect”, named after the documentarian, and precise audio editing.
- Updated UI, iMovie interface combined into a single window.
- Again, iTunes music library integrated into iMovie.
- Library of sound effects by Gary Rydstrom of Skywaker Sound and Pixar in iMovie.
- One-button transfer of projects from iMovie to iDVD, automatically moves everyting into iDVD including chapter markers.
- iDVD 3 released today.
- 24 new menu themes integrating menu choices with user movies.
- Steve is demoing various combinations of film clips, menu themes, and background music imported from iT3.
- Blank DVDs from Apple lowered to \$3 each.
- Recap — all four Digital Hub apps integrated into iLife — available Sat. Jan 25th.
- iLife will be bundled with all new macs.
- iMovie, iPhoto, and iMovie will be free downloads, iDVD will be sold (in a package with all iLife apps) for \$49.
- “Buckle up — I’ve got something totally new for you.”
- New App — Safari, a “turbo browser for OS X”.
- First major new browser in 5 years.
- Why? Speed — fastest browser on Mac.
- Tested against Internet Explorer, Netscape and Chimera (latest versions of each) — 3 times faster than IE, faster than all others.
- Second reason — to innovate.
- Google integrated into toolbar, new Snapback feature, new bookmark system, ease of use.
- Minimal UI, brushed metal window interface.
- Fully supports CSS, Quicktime, Flash, all other standard technologies (this should be the browser built from the Chimera/Mozilla codebase).
- Bookmarks easily dragged around on toolbar to reorder, or dragged off to delete.
- Bookmarks library based around same interface as the iTunes or iPhoto libraries.
- Snapback button brings you back to a Google results page after multiple click-throughs deep into a site.
- Snapback also available on other search sites (Amazon is demoed).
- Bug reporting built into Safari to submit problem reports to Apple.
- Safari is standards-based, built on an Open Source rendering engine.
- Apple started working with the code a year ago, improved the code dramatically to create Safari, and is re-posting their improved code to the Open Source community today.
- Safari beta release starts today, free download.
- Next brand new application — Keynote.
- A presentation app “when your presentation really counts”.
- Jobs has been using early versions of Keynote for every keynote address in 2002.
- Full anti-aliasing for text, Quartz graphic functions (opacity, etc.), all major graphic file formats.
- Lots of effects for charts and graphs.
- Many high-quality built-in themes.
- Lots of transitions between slides that utilize the Quartz 3D engine, allowing for 3D flips, rotations, etc.
- Keynote imports and exports PowerPoint presentations.
- Also im/exports PDF and Quicktime.
- Uses an XML-based open file format.
- Keynote for sale for \$99, available today.
- Expo keynote attendees got free copies of Keynote.
- Brings up the TiBook ad from its introduction two years ago.
- Apple aiming to replace more desktops with notebooks, want to make 35% of their shipped computers notebooks.
- Introducing a new 17\” PowerBook.
- Uses same 17\” widescreen ratio display as the 17\” iMac, built into a PowerBook chassis — 1\” thick, slightly thinner than the original TiBook.
- 1440 x 900 widescreen 16:10 aspect ratio display.
- Keyboard keys are backlit with a light glow for use in low-light situations.
- Ambient light sensors detect room lighting to automatically adjust keyboard brightness.
- Only 6.8 lbs.
- Built using a new material — aircraft grade Aluminum alloy (AlBook?).
- 1Ghz G4, superdrive, GeForce graphics, Firewire 800 (twice as fast as current FireWire), Gigabit Ethernet, S-Video output, VGA/Digital video output, USB ports on each side, PC Card slot, line in and headphone jacks.
- Bluetooth built in, Airport built in.
- Introducing Airport Extreme — 54Mbps (up from 11Mbps) based on 802.11g wireless standard.
- Wireless antennas in 17\” PowerBook built into the screen, equals wireless range of the iBook.
- New Airport Extreme basestations handle up to 50 users, allow wireless bridging across multiple basestations.
- USB printing built into basestation — plug a USB printer into the basestation, all wirelessly connected clients can print.
- New basestations sell for \$199.
- Battery for 17\” Powerbook allows for 4.5 hours runtime.
- Quickbooks will come bundled with new Powerbook.
- \$3299 for new 17\” Powerbook, shipping in February.
- One more thing…
- Introducing a new 12\” PowerBook — smallest full-featured notebook in the world.
- 1024×768 display, 867Mhz G4, slot-load combo drive, wireless (Bluetooth built-in, Airport ready), 5 hour battery life.
- \$1799 for new 12\” Powerbook, shipping in about 2 weeks.
- \$1999 with added SuperDrive.
- 2003 is “The Year of the Notebook” for Apple.
- Cute quote from BT when getting a demo of the lit keyboard — “When do you guys stop thinking of cool stuff?”
- Two new TV ads being shown (Jeff Goldblum is still doing the voiceovers).
- Second ad is wonderful, contrasting the size of the notebooks — you’ll just have to see it.
And that’s it…
Searchling
I just stumbled across Searchling, a very cool little mini-application for OS X. When running, it adds a system-wide search field that allows you to search Google, Slashdot, or a few other sites.
The coolest bit, though, is that the search options are defined by a simple XML file. So, I did a bit of digging, figured out the syntax (which really wasn’t all that hard), and added djwudi.com to the search options!
On the off chance that another OS X user might want to add me to Searchling, here’s the code to add:
<dict>
<key>name</key>
<string>djwudi.com</string>
<key>types</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>type</key>
<string>Web</string>
<key>url</key>
<string>http://www.djwudi.com/cgi-bin/search/search.pl?
nocpp=1&Match=1&Realm=All&Terms=</string>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
(Note: the string between <string> and </string> is one continuous line, a linebreak has been added here for readability.)
Update: As I’m no longer weblogging at djwudi.com, the above XML snippet won’t actually work. I’m leaving it up here, though, as a handy example of how to add things to Searchling.
Fine tuning
A few more changes to the main page here, as I work my way through the ideas I’ve got running around in my noggin.
I wish…
I’m not too sure how they stumbled across me, but I just got notification today that I’ve been added to the list of birthdays at I Wish, You Wish. They’re working on collecting links of bloggers that have their Amazon Wishlists posted, and listing them alongside their birthdays. A pretty cool little idea, I think.