TidBITS#664/27-Jan-03
=====================
New PowerBooks may have sparked interest at Macworld Expo San
Francisco 2003, but more attention has gone to Apple's new Web
browser since, so Adam dons his pith helmet to explore Safari. We
also finish off our Macworld Superlatives list, noting the most
interesting products at the show, including a bit of sartorial
splendor for the wireless networking set. In the news, we note
a new 31-Jan-03 release date for iLife and a welcome upgrade to
PowerMail 4.1.1.
Topics:
MailBITS/27-Jan-03
Macworld Expo San Francisco 2003 Superlatives, Part 2
Going on Safari
<http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-664.html>
<ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/2003/TidBITS#664_27-Jan-03.etx>
Copyright 2003 TidBITS Electronic Publishing. All rights reserved.
Information: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Comments: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
---------------------------------------------------------------
This issue of TidBITS sponsored in part by:
* READERS LIKE YOU! Help keep TidBITS going via our voluntary <------ NEW!
contribution program. Our thanks this week to Masahiro Kudo,
Abdulkarim Alzuhair, and Duane Williams for their support!
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html>
* SMALL DOG ELECTRONICS: iBooks On Sale! <--------------------------- NEW!
iBook G3/600 12" 128/20/CD: $777; iBook G3/700 12" 128/20/Combo
iBook G3/700 14" 640/30 GB/Combo: $1379 - limited quantities!
<http://www.smalldog.com/tb/> 802/496-7171
* DEALMAC: 512 MB PC2700 RAM for $85 shipped. <---------------------- NEW!
<http://dealmac.com/articles/46819.html?ref=tb>
DEALMAC: DVD-Pro DVD-R media 100-pack for $59.
<http://dealmac.com/articles/46745.html?ref=tb>
* easyDNS: Tired of www.hosting.co/~you? Take control of your <------ NEW!
domain. Register & point your domain to any location on the net
Add email addresses @YourDomain with a click! All made simple
by easyDNS:the way things should work. <http://www.easyDNS.com>
* Creo's Six Degrees is time-freeing technology that automatically <- NEW!
connects messages, files, and people on your desktop so you can
quickly navigate through projects. Free 30 day trial version!
==> <http://www.creo.com/sixdegrees/index.asp?id=tidbits> <==
* TINDERBOX: Are your research notes on cocktail napkins? <---------- NEW!
Take control with Tinderbox! TidBITS called it "An inspired
piece of work" <http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06959>
Download your free demo! <http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/>
* Bare Bones Software BBEdit 7.0 -- New version adds CVS support, <-- NEW!
multiple Web site support, powerful new Sort Lines and Process
Duplicate plug-ins, and much more. Buy, upgrade, or try the
demo at our Web site: <http://www.barebones.com/>
---------------------------------------------------------------
MailBITS/27-Jan-03
------------------
**iLife Delayed Until 31-Jan-03** -- Sometimes, the baby just
isn't ready. At Macworld Expo, Apple announced a 25-Jan-03
delivery date for its $50 digital hub suite iLife, which
comprises iTunes 3, iPhoto 2, iMovie 3, and iDVD 3. Now, the
company has pushed the date back to 31-Jan-03 without citing
a reason. [JLC]
<http://www.apple.com/ilife/>
**PowerMail 4.1.1 Integrates Apple Technologies** -- CTM
Development recently released PowerMail 4.1.1 (a small bug fix
release for version 4.1, released several weeks before). Welcome
new features since PowerMail 4 include integration with Apple's
system-wide Address Book, support for the inline spell checking
code available in Mac OS X, and unlimited undo actions when
editing text. Upgrades to PowerMail 4.1.1 for owners of PowerMail
4 are free; from any previous version, upgrades cost $30. The
download is 4.7 MB. [ACE]
<http://www.ctmdev.com/powermail4.shtml>
Macworld Expo San Francisco 2003 Superlatives, Part 2
-----------------------------------------------------
by TidBITS Staff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
It's always telling when we lack enough space to publish our
traditional Macworld Expo superlatives in a single article.
Although Apple made most of the major show news, the TidBITS
staff had no trouble finding other products on the show floor
that were worthy of mention.
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07046>
**Best Use for a Finger** -- Being forced to log in to Mac OS X
all the time is annoying, even when it serves a valuable security
purpose. Wouldn't it be nice if your computer recognized you
automatically? We're not there quite yet, but with Sony's oddly
named Puppy Suite for Mac OS X Fingerprint Identification Unit,
you will be able to log in to your Mac by touching your finger to
a sensor. You train the software to recognize a specific finger
(with up to nine backup fingers to work around burns and bandages)
and from then on, touching your finger to the Fingerprint
Identification Unit works just like typing your password. Sony
is still working on getting Mac OS X to accept your fingerprint
in place of requests for the administrator password; that's when I
want to try it. The Puppy demoed well, recognizing the finger with
which I had trained it and rejecting both my other fingers and the
fingers of the Sony representative. It will cost $200 when it
ships in March of 2003 from the North American distributor Pacific
Software Publishing; those in other countries should contact Sony
for local distributors. [ACE]
<http://www.puppysuite.com/>
<http://www.sony.com/puppy>
<http://www.securecomputing.com/index.cfm?sKey=838>
**Second Best Use for that Finger** -- A colleague commented that
USB "keychain" storage (memory cards with USB plugs attached) have
become the new floppy disk. The problem is that these tiny devices
are easily lost, giving the finder access to your data. To keep
your bytes safe, the DevDepot booth was selling the BioSlimDisk,
a USB memory card with integrated fingerprint security. Your data
can be accessed only after you press your finger on the device's
sensor (you can configure up to six fingerprints). A 128 MB
version costs $120, or you can get a 64 MB model for $100 from
DevDepot's Web site. [JLC]
<http://www.devdepot.com/tidbits-fingerprint/>
<http://www.bioslimdisk.com/>
**Best "Aha" Accessory** -- MacAlly's iceStation is a simple,
great idea for improving your laptop experience. It's a $20
plastic stand composed of a groove that sits on the desk and a
sharply rising plane. You stick the front edge of your iBook or
PowerBook into the groove and lean the bottom of the machine (the
keyboard area) against the plane, so that it's almost vertical;
now you open the screen so that it's completely vertical. The
keyboard is now almost unusable, so you attach an external
keyboard and mouse. This solves two problems discussed in Adam's
recent article on laptop stands: the screen is raised to eye
level, and the computer's footprint is greatly reduced so there's
room on the desk for the external keyboard in front of it. My
PowerBook G3 is my everyday desktop machine, and I dislike its
keyboard, so I was galvanized by this potential solution to my
problems. I instantly bought MacAlly's small and responsive iceKey
keyboard, and tried to buy the iceStation - but it isn't shipping
yet. Impatience, however, is the mother of invention: when I got
home I found that a book stand from an office supply store works
nearly as well for one-fifth the price. [MAN]
<http://macally.com/spec/specialites/accessories/icestation.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07011>
<http://macally.com/spec/usb/input_device/icekey.html>
<http://www.officequarters.com/product.php/prod_id/2012041.html>
**Clearing the Desk** -- If you won't be replacing your desktop
Mac with a 17-inch PowerBook G4 any time soon, but you need to
reclaim some of your desk space nonetheless, take a look at
Marathon Computer's DeskMount. It's an under-desk mounting kit
for Power Macintosh G3 and G4 minitowers that suspends the machine
securely under the desk, lets you open the side door to add memory
while it's still mounted, and also lets you easily slide the
machine out of the mount. Its price of $60 covers everything but
the screws for your desk. [MHA]
<http://www.marathoncomputer.com/deskmount.html>
**Best New Click** -- Adesso has impressed us before with its
keyboard and mouse offerings, but we're tickled by the new way of
clicking introduced with the PowerScroll Optical Mouse. Available
in black or white, this $40 mouse can be rocked to one side or
the other to click or right-click. The scroll wheel is great for
scrolling through long documents or Web pages and serves as a
third button. [MHA]
<http://www.adessoinc.com/product_detail.cfm?productid=81>
**Sitting on the Dock of the Drive** -- WiebeTech's DriveDock
family takes home the award for smallest hard drive by eliminating
that pesky case and even sometimes the power supply. The
DriveDocks are tiny FireWire bridge controllers for standard
IDE hard drives that just plug into the back of a bare drive,
providing a FireWire connector, and if necessary, a power
connector. The $140 FireWire DriveDock works with 3.5-inch drives,
as does the $160 Super DriveDock, but the Super DriveDock powers
most drives from the FireWire bus instead of requiring an external
power adapter. There's also the $140 FireWire Notebook DriveDock,
which works with 2.5-inch laptop drives and doesn't require
external power. Finally, for specialized recovery situations,
the $300 Forensic DriveDock works with 3.5-inch disks but
doesn't allow writes to the disk. [ACE]
<http://www.wiebetech.com/>
**Hearing from your iPod** -- We saw lots of third-party
accessories for Apple's iPod, and there are of course thousands of
earphones and headphones on the market (many of which Dan Frakes
covered in "Music to Your Ears: 2002" in TidBITS-658_). MacAlly's
Noise Reduction Headphones ($70) and Retractable Earphones ($20)
are iPod-white, attractively designed, and attractively priced.
The noise reduction headphones work as well as my Aiwa set and
come with an airline adapter so you can listen to the in-flight
movie without paying the $5 "entertainment charge." The
retractable earphones have a small, coiled stretch of cable
that connects to an iPod, then the holder stays in your pocket
while the earbuds sit in your ears. [MHA]
<http://www.macally.com/spec/specialites/accessories/podiopro.html>
<http://www.macally.com/spec/specialites/accessories/podio.html>
<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07012>
**Best In Show and Out of My League** -- Redstone Software's
Eggplant is, bar none, the best thing I saw at this Macworld Expo.
It's for software developers, but I'm one, and I could have used
it during the last five months when I was writing a custom Cocoa
application for a corporate client. Here's the scoop: as you write
an application with a graphical interface, you worry at every step
that you may be breaking existing functionality, so you need to
keep testing, and the only real way to test is to use the program
like a normal user would, through the interface - choose this menu
item, type this text in this field, press this button, and a
certain window should appear containing certain information. To
be rigorous and complete, and to save time, you'd like a way to
automate such interface test suites. Eggplant is the solution,
and a brilliant solution at that. It works through VNC, a Timbuktu-
like system for viewing a computer's screen, and clicking and
typing in it, from another computer across a network. Thus,
Eggplant requires two computers, one to run the software being
tested, one to run Eggplant itself. Eggplant literally sees the
testbed computer's screen: it can search it, looking for a
particular button or other window element, and it can click
anywhere, choose menu items, type, and so forth. Testing actions
are combined into suites using a HyperTalk-like scripting
language. Results and screen images are logged, so if a test
fails, you can find out what the problem was and what the screen
looked like at the time. The downside: at $3,400 a pop, there's
no way I'd ever get my hands on a copy. [MAN]
<http://redstonesoftware.com/products/>
<http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/>
**Best Vertical Market Software** -- I'm not a salesperson, but if
I were, the one thing I'd want (aside from a different job) would
be Marketcircle's $150 DayLite. This program has absolutely the
most gorgeous, insightful Mac OS X interface I've ever seen, and
the software does everything - and I mean everything - that a
salesperson or sales team needs, at an astoundingly reasonable
price: it's a contact manager, calendar, to-do list, phone dialer,
mail merger, sales and revenue diagrammer, multi-user database,
and much more, all brilliantly and intuitively integrated. Words
fail me; you have to see for yourself. A demonstration of the
software left me gasping, "Wow, do these people have a clue or
what?!" [MAN]
<http://www.marketcircle.com/daylite/overview.html>
**Unless You're a Songwriter** -- DayLite may be cool for
salespeople, but if you've always thought you could put pen to
paper and turn out a few hit tunes, forget the pen and wake up
your Mac instead. MasterWriter, written in the 4D application
development environment, offers an amazing collection of writing
tools for songwriters, including a rhyming dictionary, an
alliterations dictionary, a rhymed phrases dictionary, a pop
culture dictionary, a standard dictionary and thesaurus, and more.
MasterWriter helps you find the words you want and assemble them
into a coherent (and hopefully tuneful) whole. It's basically a
good interface on a huge database of words and phrases; hence the
reliance on 4D. It works in Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and should be
available soon. [ACE]
<http://www.masterwriter.com/>
<http://www.4d.com/>
**Best Laptop Accessories** -- Lots of companies offer add-on
batteries, car or airline adapters, and USB media readers.
MadsonLine impressed us with its broad array of attractive,
useful, and affordable adapters and other gizmos. Their $36 Modem
Saver LT lets you test an unfamiliar phone jack for safety before
you plug your laptop's modem in, then stays in place to serve as a
modem surge protector. The $28 Worldwide Plug Adapter connects to
many of the common electric outlets around the world. And then
there's the tiny $52 USB IrDA Adapter, which adds an infrared port
to Macs that lack them. Use the infrared to sync your laptop with
your Palm, or to use your cell phone as a modem, if you're not yet
in the Bluetooth world. [MHA]
<http://www.madsonline.com/>
**Most Promising Educational Device** -- We've noted electronic
whiteboards in the past (such as Virtual Ink's Mimio), but
newcomer GTCO deserves mention for its InterWrite School Suite.
It has four components: a computer with software, a projector, a
whiteboard, and a portable wireless drawing tablet. The computer
constructs and holds the image, and the projector shows it to
everyone on the whiteboard. "Drawing" (which really means
communication with the computer, and includes control of the
software) can be done at the whiteboard, at the computer, or at
the tablet, and up to seven tablets can be used at once. Imagine
the teacher lecturing and drawing from anywhere in the room, and
saving and erasing screen-full after screen-full of diagrams, and
handing out additional tablets so students can question and
collaborate. The promised integration of computers and education
has yet to be realized, mostly because computer companies don't
listen to great teachers. These electronic whiteboards are
probably too small and require too much high-tech setup for many
venues; but when I was a college professor, the need to stand at
the board, and the loss of the diagrams I created spontaneously,
were serious problems that cried out for something like
InterWrite. [MAN]
<http://www.gtco.com/interwriteschoolsuite.htm>
<http://www.mimio.com/>
**Most Communicative Outfits** -- I nearly hit the floor laughing
when I saw the MacWarehouse presence at Macworld Expo. Instead
of having a booth on the show floor, MacWarehouse set up several
small stations in the large atrium area between the two halls of
Moscone. Each station was equipped with a high-speed Internet
connection and an open wireless access point, giving wireless
Internet access to anyone within range. To alert passers-by to
this service, MacWarehouse staffed their stations with people
in dark gray jumpsuits adorned with the "warchalking" symbol
indicating an open wireless network. And unlike Microsoft's MSN
butterfly guy mentioned last week, they seemed to be having a
good time, as you can see in our picture linked below. [ACE]
<http://www.macwarehouse.com/>
<http://www.tidbits.com/resources/664/macwarehouse.jpg>
<http://www.warchalking.org/>
PayBITS: Feel like you got the best of Macworld Expo without
having to go? Help us keep bringing you Macworld highlights!
<http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/contributors.html>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
Going on Safari
---------------
by Adam C. Engst <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
As I noted in "Apple Reduces Its Microsoft Dependency" in
TidBITS-662_, Apple's Macworld Expo beta release of the Safari
Web browser is indication that Apple is hunting big game, namely
Microsoft. But is Safari a high enough caliber weapon to take
down the lumbering behemoth that is Internet Explorer? Or will
the svelte and sprightly Safari merely bounce off Microsoft's
tough hide? We won't be able to decide that until Safari 1.0
finally ships, but there's no question that Safari is good enough
that, if possible, you should join the more than 1 million people
who downloaded copies of Safari through last week and take a look.
To be clear, Safari is a Cocoa application that requires Mac OS X
10.2 Jaguar or later, and Apple claims it's optimized for use with
Mac OS X 10.2.3. It does not and will never run in Mac OS 9, so
Macs that haven't yet upgraded to Mac OS X or that can't run Mac
OS X should stick with whatever browser they're using now. The
Safari download is only 2.9 MB; a welcome size for a modern Web
browser.
**Under the Hood** -- With Safari, Apple chose not to reinvent
the wheel, but instead of buying another browser, Apple chose to
continue in the Mac OS X vein by basing Safari on an open source
project, the KHTML rendering engine that lies underneath Linux
browser Konqueror. Although my money had been on Apple using the
open source Gecko rendering engine that powers Netscape, Mozilla,
and Chimera, KHTML is both faster and comprises significantly
fewer lines of code to understand and maintain.
<http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/kdeqt/kde3arch/khtml/>
<http://www.konqueror.org/>
On the downside, although KHTML displays pages relatively well,
it (or at least Apple's implementation of it, the changes to which
have already gone back to the KHTML maintainers) doesn't yet do as
well with Web standards as other rendering engines. Whether or not
KHTML ends up being better or worse in terms of standards support,
it's yet another target that Web designers must now test against,
since it will undoubtedly display many pages slightly differently
than other browsers.
From what I can tell from Web standards reports so far, Apple does
have a fair amount more work to do, despite all the claims of
superior standards support. Bugs should be reported, but final
judgment should be reserved until Apple releases the 1.0 version
of Safari (and frankly, people shouldn't stress about changing
their Web pages too much for Safari's sake until the release
version). Right now, Safari is unabashedly in beta, and one of
the primary developers, Dave Hyatt (who also started the Chimera
project), has a weblog where he has been posting updates about
problems that he's fixed in the source code. It's definitely worth
a read.
<http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/07/safari_review.html>
<http://www.mozillazine.org/weblogs/hyatt/archives/cat_safari.html>
**Fast, Streamlined Interface** -- After trying Safari on the
first day, Tonya became an immediate convert, purely because of
Safari's page rendering speed. She hates waiting and has commented
on several occasions since switching that she's finding a number
of sites less frustrating to use, simply because pages draw faster
than in Internet Explorer. Apple has benchmarks that show Safari
drawing pages more than three times faster than Internet Explorer.
Although all benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt
because code can be tweaked to produce good results, Safari
definitely wins out perceptually. It appears that some of Safari's
blazing speed is due to using some soon-to-be documented routines
that arrived in Jaguar; I hope other browsers will be able to take
advantage of those routines for improving Mac OS X's sluggish text
drawing performance.
That perceptual speed is undoubtedly helped by Safari's clean and
elegant Aqua interface, without many of the controls that clutter
many other browsers' windows. Though it doesn't bother me,
the brushed metal look (which Apple calls a "textured window
appearance") has drawn some criticism, in part because it
violates Apple's own human interface guidelines. Textured
window appearances are intended for applications that provide
an interface to, or attempt to recreate the interface of, a
real-world digital device such as a camera, MP3 player, or
calculator. Safari obviously violates this recommendation, and
its Downloads window, which is also textured, violates the
guideline that only the primary window in an application should
have the textured window appearance. The use of the textured
window appearance looks particularly odd with Aqua-appearance
sheets (such as appear when you create bookmarks or save pages).
<http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Essentials/AquaHIGuidelines/
AHIGWindows/Textured_Windows.html>
Numerous programs, such as SafarIcon and Safari Enhancer, have
popped up to let you switch the Safari textured window appearance
to an Aqua appearance, and SafarIcon also lets you replace
Safari's icons with different themed sets. Safari Enhancer goes
one step further, by enabling a Debug menu that provides some
interesting options and features, such having Safari pretend to
be another Web browser.
<http://homepage.mac.com/reinholdpenner/>
<http://gordon.sourcecod.com/sites/safari_enhancer.php>
**Enhanced Bookmarks** -- In the keynote, Steve Jobs made a big
deal about how Safari's bookmark interface is so much better than
competing browsers. These days, I seldom use bookmarks, perhaps
because keeping bookmarks organized has been so much trouble, and
in part because searching Google is so fast. I do store some
bookmarks in Internet Explorer, but those I access primarily
via the toolbar and via Internet Explorer's superior URL
auto-completion.
Safari can complete URLs if you start typing a word in the site's
domain name. However, Internet Explorer can perform similar auto-
completion on words that appear anywhere in the URL or the title
of pages you've visited recently or bookmarked. Safari should
mimic this behavior; it's unreasonable to expect users to remember
domain names, whereas it's fairly likely they'll remember some
word that is in the URL or title of the desired page.
Safari's bookmark interface is simple and well-done and - thanks
to the way it takes over the entire Safari browser window when
showing - looks much like iTunes. Also like iTunes playlists and
iPhoto's albums, Safari's bookmark collections don't support
hierarchies, but unlike those other programs, you can nest folders
inside the collection itself.
Safari imports bookmarks from Internet Explorer, but if you want
to bring your bookmarks from another Web browser into Safari,
search on MacUpdate or VersionTracker for "Safari" to find
bookmark importing utilities. (These sites also catalog a number
of utilities for localizing Safari for other languages.) Version
3.0.4 of Alco Blom's URL Manager Pro can import bookmarks from
Safari and export them back, but since Safari doesn't currently
support the Shared Menus Protocol, URL Manager Pro's full feature
set isn't available for Safari.
<http://macupdate.com/search.php?keywords=Safari>
<http://versiontracker.com/mp/new_search.m?search=safari>
<http://www.url-manager.com/version300.html>
**Googlicious!** In "Hyperspatial JavaScript Search Bypass" in
TidBITS-657_, I passed on a simple technique for quick searches
of Google or other search engines. That JavaScript technique works
fine in Safari, but with Google, there's little need, thanks to a
useful search field that appears at the top of every window. Aside
from providing immediate access to search results on Google, it
also remembers the last 10 searches in a pop-down menu.
This kind of feature isn't new - there have been lots of shortcuts
for searching throughout the years, and some (such as in Opera)
have provided almost identical direct searching fields. However,
Apple gets points for choosing Google and for their
implementation. Internet Explorer's hidden shortcut for searching
from the Address Bar (type ? and then your search phrase) is
rendered less useful by its reliance on MSN Search. And some
other browsers make the decision to provide access to many search
engines, which, though totally reasonable on the face of things,
can detract from the elegance of providing a focused feature that
meets the needs of many people without cluttering the interface.
The added fillip to Apple's Google search is SnapBack, which
solves a common problem with searches. You run your search, get
results, and follow a link out to another site, perhaps looking
at several pages before you determine you need to try more of the
search results. Instead of clicking the Back button five or six
times, you can click the orange SnapBack button in the Google
search field to jump right back to the Google search results.
A SnapBack button also appears at the right side of the address
field as soon as you delve at least one page deep into a site.
Find yourself too deep in the site? Just click the SnapBack button
and hop back up to the top level.
**Reality Check** -- Apple's Safari team has done a good job of
keeping Safari focused, while at the same time addressing the
often unpleasant realities of today's Web. For anyone irritated
at Web sites like Yahoo that pop-up advertising windows when you
visit, Safari offers a command in the Safari application menu (as
well as an option in the Security pane of its preferences) to
block such pop-ups. I don't understand why it's in the Safari
application menu rather than in either the View menu or the Window
menu, but since pop-up windows were driving me batty in Internet
Explorer, I appreciate the feature. You can toggle it quickly with
a keyboard shortcut should you visit sites that require pop-up
windows to function properly.
Perhaps my favorite feature in Safari, though, is the Bug button,
which you can turn on in the View menu. Should you run into a page
that Safari renders incorrectly, you can (and should!) click the
Bug button to report the problem to Apple. Even better, if you
delete the contents of the Page Address field, the Bug button
makes a great way to send general feedback about Safari to Apple.
All of Apple's software should offer a similar feature, and many
other developers could benefit from adding such a feature to their
programs as well. I understand that Safari's developers will see
all those feedback reports, and I'm sure that if enough people
request a feature change or even a feature, they'll give it
serious consideration.
Apple has posted a handful of sample AppleScript scripts for
Safari, and though the browser's scripting support is still
preliminary and non-standard, it's useful. A document's text and
HTML source are available, and you can script the browser to load
URLs (though you do so by setting a document's URL property,
rather than through the long-standard GetURL and OpenURL suites).
No application preferences are accessible, and you can't control
bookmarks, cookies, history, or other items using scripts.
<http://www.apple.com/applescript/safari/>
Lastly, some people have complained about how Safari takes over
as the default browser. When this came up in TidBITS Talk, others
noted that it hadn't taken over from their default browsers, and
after a bit of testing by several people, the group determined
that Safari takes over the default Web browser setting _only_ if
you've never changed it from Internet Explorer. If you switched
to Chimera or another browser, Safari leaves the default browser
setting alone.
**Missing, but Desirable Features** -- Even though the Safari
we're using today is still a public beta, it's likely that the
feature set for version 1.0 is pretty much locked. That leaves
Apple with plenty of room for enhancement, because as much as
Safari is fast and easy to use, it lacks some features that are
popular in other browsers. Don't assume Apple will definitely
implement these features in future releases, however, since the
team is focused on keeping Safari simple, lightweight, and
extremely fast. They'll have to balance that goal against some
of these killer features, which may prevent many users from
relying entirely on Safari.
* The feature I most miss in Safari is Internet Explorer's Forms
AutoComplete and AutoFill. Forms AutoComplete automatically
completes words you type into form text fields, and clicking the
AutoFill button fills in all the fields it recognizes in forms
asking for contact information.
* Internet Explorer lets you subscribe to Web pages, after which
the program watches the page for changes and alerts you to changes
in a variety of different ways. This feature can be invaluable
for tracking pages that change frequently, but not regularly.
* The Netscape-derived browsers and some others offer an interface
choice called "tabbed browsing," in which you can create a new tab
within the main window to hold a new page rather than opening it
in new windows. Tabbed browsing works particularly well for people
with limited screen real estate and is a good way to flip among
multiple related pages.
* Internet Explorer's Print Preview feature, which lets you
preview a Web page printout and shrink the text to use fewer
pieces of paper, is extremely useful for when you must print from
the Web. With Safari (or any Mac OS X application) it's easy to
preview a print job via PDF, so you can avoid printing unnecessary
pages, but Safari has no way of reducing the number of pages
needed.
* Internet Explorer offers two unusual features in its left-side
Explorer Bar: Scrapbook and Page Holder. Scrapbook is great for
saving receipts from online orders without cluttering your filing
system with another random file, and Page Holder lets you dock
one page in the Explorer Bar and open links from it in the main
window. Useful as these features can be, I'd be surprised to see
them appear in Safari, since they wouldn't seem to fit with
Apple's vision for the program. More likely and also helpful would
be a way to save all the parts of a Web page as a single file,
much as Internet Explorer can create Web archive files. And while
we're on the topic of saving files, it would be nice if Safari
would let you download to any arbitrary location, not just the
default location.
**Gazing out on the Veldt** -- It will be fascinating to see where
Apple takes Safari. Currently, Apple is clearly focused on speed
and elegance above all else, and that's a fine goal for a 1.0
product. But I hope that future versions of Safari incorporate
additional features that simplify life on the Web, much as
AutoFill, tabbed browsing, and other features have in the past.
Safari shouldn't merely settle for recreating those features,
though, and I hope to be surprised by innovative new approaches
to using the Web.
PayBITS: If Adam's Safari article was useful to you, help us
test whether PayBITS works better with Amazon or PayPal!
<http://www.amazon.com/paypage/P38EKU2E43038P>
<https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=ace%40tidbits.com>
Read more about PayBITS: <http://www.tidbits.com/paybits/>
$$
Non-profit, non-commercial publications may reprint articles if
full credit is given. Others please contact us. We don't guarantee
accuracy of articles. Caveat lector. Publication, product, and
company names may be registered trademarks of their companies.
This file is formatted as setext. For more information send email
to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. A file will be returned shortly.
For information: how to subscribe, where to find back issues,
and more, email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. TidBITS ISSN 1090-7017.
Send comments and editorial submissions to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Back issues available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/>
And: <ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/issues/>
Full text searching available at: <http://www.tidbits.com/search/>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
