Safari 4 FAIL February 25, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : computers , add a commentSo Apple released Safari 4 today. I’ve tried it at work and at home (both Windows and Mac) and it gets a big FAIL from me.
I tried it on Windows first. I run XP with the Classic theme. That’s the one that looks like Windows 2000. Safari looks terrible and out of place. The window decorations are indeed native, except for those horrible tab things getting all over the title bar. The rest of the window has some horrible pastel shading with plastic-looking widgets. I’ve seen a screenshot of what it looks like on Vista and it’s not too bad there, it kind of fits in. It may also fit in with the XP theme but the Classic theme? No.
Open up the preferences app and you get a strange mix of standard Windows widgets and Mac widgets. I’d rather see all Mac widgets or all native widgets than this mixup. It’s quite jarring.
I found a bug too. Click on Customize Toolbar and the whole app just hangs.
When I came home I installed it on my Mac. I run 10.4 because that’s what came with my machine and I don’t see anything particularly compelling about 10.5 (10.6 looks interesting though, bummer about the 32-bit CPU in my MacBook Pro). Anyway, Safari actually managed to look respectable here. Mind you, I have UNO installed so that may have influenced the look a bit. I’ve noticed that newer apps have a Leopard-ish colour scheme that doesn’t really fit with 10.4, that’s why I installed UNO in the first place.
I found a bug here too. Opened a bunch of tabs at once then the UI just froze. Pressed Cmd+W until the tabs had closed (the UI did not reflect this though) and the window went away.
Lets talk about the tabs. They don’t fit even on Mac OS X. They’re clearly modelled on Chrome but there’s something that Chrome has and Safari doesn’t and that’s a title bar. Sure, Chrome makes it seem almost as if it’s not there but it is there and it works like you’d expect. That’s important and worth the extra pixels required. Even the Mac Chrome version in development keeps this separation of title bar and tabs (though it strangely avoids putting tabs underneath the window management buttons).
So Safari 4 is one big FAIL to me. Buggy and ugly. If I wanted faster JavaScript and ACID3 compliance, I’d install a WebKit nightly.
Update 2 March 2009
So I’ve tried Safari 4 with the XP theme and as I suspected, it looks much better. In fact, I’d say that with the XP theme Safari 4 for Windows looks nice. It’s still hamstrung by the lack of a title bar but it doesn’t look ugly.
I’m posting this update from Chrome. It seems to look the same no matter what theme you’re using (though obviously, the controls take on the appropriate appearance). If I used Windows as my primary OS I’d definitely consider using Chrome (I’ve already done some tweaking of Firefox to make it more Chrome-like).
Chrome also (correctly) puts the close tab button on the right side of the tab. Sure, on a Mac you can put it on the left but on Windows it goes on the right.
Update 2 March 2009
Here’s some more Safari annoyances (not specific to Safari 4).
Why does Safari insist on creating the default window at the full height of the screen? This is so annoying!
Why is the status bar disabled by default? Chrome shows how to have no status bar while displaying everything that would normally be displayed on the status bar (ie. a temporarily-visible bar).
Why is the (useful) bookmarks toggle button only available on the bookmarks toolbar? IE gets this right. Chrome gets it half-right (no easy way to see bookmarks without opening a new tab).
Why is the main toolbar becoming less customizable? First it was the Google search box (you could remove this in early versions). Now I can’t remove the Add bookmark button? The search box is redundant because the location bar can be used for searches (or at least it should be able to do this, all the other browsers have this functionality).
Back to the tabs. I took some screen shots. This is what tabs at the top should look like.
See how easy it is to see that there are tabs and where they are? See how obvious it is that you can still click above the tabs to move the window? Here is what Apple did instead.
Yuck.
For completeness, here’s Safari with the XP theme.
And Safari on Vista.
Hey, what happened to “Top Sites” on the Vista machine?
My camera has hot pixels! February 19, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : camera , add a commentI know LCDs can get hot pixels but I didn’t know cameras could get them.
According to Ken Rockwell, hot pixels are a fact of life for every digital camera.
I only noticed the hot pixels from my camera because of 1 particular photo that had a very black part (which, because I was playing with the ISO was actually black and not full of noise). The pixels were just noticeable when I viewed the image full-screen and of course were recognisable as hot pixels when I zoomed in. I could also notice them in one other photo (that was dark but not black).
I haven’t noticed them before but I guess if I go back and look I’ll find them in all of the photos I have with dark bits in the right places.
Microsofties don't get it February 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI stumbled on this list of Windows 7 features and found this snippet really interesting…
On my machine, I noticed that the Research add-on that Office 2007 installs was a particular culprit, and since I never use it, it was simple to disable it from the same dialog box.
Hang on a minute… I wouldn’t think to myself, “Gee, what a neat feature of IE, letting me find something useless that was installed by Office”. I’d think to myself, “How the fuck did Office 2007 manage to install some crappy add-on (that I’ll never use) that slows down IE without telling me?”
Not that other programs aren’t immune. Firefox lets you do the same thing, otherwise you wouldn’t need instructions on how to remove the Microsoft .Net framework assistant. Again, my point is that the add-on should not have been installed in the first place.
Rule for people writing programs:
Don’t install crap into other programs unless the user ASKS for it. Make them opt-in, it’s not good enough to popup an opt-out dialog (because people who don’t know what they are doing will just click “yes” or “ok” until the dialogs go away).
Were you on my buddy list? February 17, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentSo the official IM program we’re supposed to use at work is Microsoft Live Communication Server, which has no official client support for anything other than Windows (it does have a web client version but that’s crap). Someone wrote a plugin for Pidgin that makes this work so I installed Pidgin and got it going.
I already had Kopete (for MSN) and Skype (because Kopete/MSN is not reliable at work). However since Pidgin is a multi-protocol IM I thought I’d give it a go. It can even do Skype (though you still have to run the official Skype client – stupid proprietary crap). Unlike the old Gaim days, Pidgin is actually nice to use.
Except that it just went and deleted every one of my buddies from both MSN and Skype. I would have thought removing a bunch of buddies would be cause for a big warning message but no. I was removing the bogus groups crap that Pidgin insisted on displaying (none of my other IM programs have ever shown me groups). Upon removing the groups, I found Pidgin had just removed the buddies inside them. What?
So if you were on my buddy list and want to be on it again, you’ll have to send me a message or something.
I have a web host February 13, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI’m back online properly now.
I looked at free hosting but couldn’t find something that didn’t have restrictions I couldn’t live with. The best 2 alternatives I found had as limitations, “no .prc files” which is a problem because I want to serve AttnGrab.prc and “no hotlinking” which is a problem for my blog resources.
So I went for the next best thing, really cheap hosting through ServerGrade. They’re an Australian company but my web host is in the US because that’s cheaper. Whatever, I’m not particularly concerned about lag times. I signed up for the cheapest plan which is $24 per year. While I’m sure I could technically have got away without one, they wanted me to purchase a domain or point an existing domain to their servers. Since I don’t own a domain I got one through them for $15 a year. I’m told domains can be found cheaper but then I’d have to setup DNS myself and $40 for domain+hosting per year isn’t exactly going to bankrupt me.
So now ramsay.webhop.org redirects to yasmar.net and as before, some URLs redirect to blogspot pages (although this is now done properly, via 301 redirects rather than via meta-refresh because I have access to more low-level functionality).
After a big search-and-replace session, all of the blog resources are now loading properly again and I even went and cleaned up links in the blog contents. Turns out though there’s some links I broke a while back by removing stuff. Oh well, I guess these things happen.
One thing that’s new about my web hosting is that I have heaps of room (500MB, 50 times what I had before) and the ability to run things like perl and php. I had the option to do a one-click install of WordPress so I went ahead and did that. I’ve played with WP before but that was a long time ago. I’m not really sure if I want to move off of blogger at this point in time but I’m going to play with it anyway because it’s there. The static pages stuff it has is something I’ve long wanted for my blog (I currently set my “static” pages to the first day my blog existed so they are out of the way of my regular posts but I have to manually link these into the template ). I’ve got it setup on a subdomain, wp.yasmar.net using a dump I made from here just before this post. Only the content is there now. It’ll take me time to port my template, which is a finely-tuned masterpiece, devoid of the tag soup required to let Blogger do things to it automatically. I wonder if that will help or hinder my porting efforts?
The main reason to switch is to bring everything together on the one server (and to get static page management). The main reason not to switch is that I suddenly need to worry about backups of my blog (though you might argue I shouldn’t be trusting Google to keep reliable backups of my data now).
Car stats February 12, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentI noticed that since moving to Eagleby, my average fuel consumption (L/100Km) has gone down. However, the total Km I drive seems to have gone up.
I found a bug in my car.
There’s a “feature” where you unlock the doors and 30 seconds later they lock again. Great if you accidentally bump the button I guess. However, the way this is implemented seems… not quite right to me. There is 1 check, exactly 30 seconds after you press the button and if all of the doors are closed, they lock.
What if you’re sitting in the driver’s seat about to put the key in the ignition? This has happened to me twice now! The first time, I was literally turning the key as the doors locked. Even worse, the alarm went off and starting the car didn’t fix it. I had to turn off the car and use the remote to unlock the doors before it stopped!
I think that opening a door should cancel the 30 second timer. After all, there is no warning of any kind if the 30 second check finds any door open.
Back online February 9, 2009
Posted by a1291762 in : Uncategorized , add a commentSo the first thing I was told was that I just needed a BigPond CD and my existing modem and I’d be right. I downloaded an image of the BigPond CD (the guy on the phone had no idea you could even do this) and tried to get online. No Luck. The modem was reporting an error with the cable.
Next I was told Telstra doesn’t actually support “bring your own” modems. They sent me out a new modem but just as I expected, it didn’t work either.
Next up was getting a technician out here. He gets here at 2 (not the 5-7pm I was told). Turns out the call centre is in NSW and they don’t understand that QLD isn’t on daylight savings time (not to mention that cable installs can’t be done in the evening since the guys need light). The problem ends up being that some moron ripped out the cable when repainting the house. There was literally nothing connecting the Telstra box to the point behind the TV. The technician un-helpfully suggested putting a new hole through the bedroom wall because we’re wireless… except that this is a rental, a foxtel point behind the bed is pretty much useless and we have devices that need to be plugged in next to the TV. So he had to do his job properly and run a cable around the house to the TV point.
Of course now everything works fine. I bet it would even have worked with my old modem if the guy had let me do the registration step on that one. It was funny watching him. He’s obviously used to Windows machines. “You’re working offline” he said repeatedly, even though there is no such mode in Safari. He also closed the window and clicked on the icon over and over again. I don’t think he understood that the app was not being restarted. He really had trouble grasping the fact that I have a local HTML page as my home page. Eventually though the cable box let us on the Internet and he went away.
I think the technician helped himself to some of the stuff that came in the box with the modem on the way out. I mean, sure, I’m not using it now but what if I wanted to connect another device? I paid $129 for the contents of that box!
At least I’ve got internet again. I’ll rebuild things over the next week or so. The front URL works but anything else that links to ramsay.webhop.org will be broken right now.
Update 10 February 2009
It seems that Telstra doesn’t actually give you free hosting (like every other ISP on the planet). So it’s going to take me a bit longer to get setup. I noticed that some of this blog’s resources are still loading from my Optus pages, I don’t know how long those will last. I’ve got a copy of all the files but the URLs used to access them are buried all over the place.