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June 2010

I know everyone's all

?!?! over iPhone 4, and I kind of am too, but I gotta tell ya, what’s really making me go ?!?! is Safari 5. Included:

  • Safari reader, a feature that works much like Arc90′s popular Readability bookmarklet by detecting when the currently loaded web page has an article, and allowing the user to reformat the page in an easy-to-read, scrollable view that cuts the obnoxious ads out. What’s more, they actually go through every page of multi-page articles and concatenate them together for one seamless, easy reading experience. Say it with me: ?!?!

    Now, you might be thinking, “How are the content providers going to let this stand, when it could wreak havoc with their ad sales?” Well, grasshopper, its at least partly because when Safari is concatenating the pages’ content, it does a full HTTP request on each page, so the innocent kitten publishers who artificially split up short articles into 3 and 4 and more pages just to maximize ad annoyance views don’t have to worry about losing their accustomed number of ad-frame loads.

  • A smarter address field, that no longer requires you to remember exact URLs; it searches within (rather than at the beginning of) the URLs and page titles in your history like Firefox has been doing for months (perhaps years) now. I’ve got two things to say to that: hallelujah, and about damn time.

  • Never expected this, but sanctioned, easy to install, secure extensions, that can be developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. ?!?! Also, ROCK.

  • Then, of course, is the improved HTML5 support and the ever more feature-packed web inspector, the icing and the cherry, respectively, on the sundae.

All in all, pretty ?!?! for me.

I gotta tell ya something else. Humble pie tastes terrible. Turns out my new cheapie phone doesn’t have much going for it other than its cheapness. I can at least get calls on it more reliably than the iPhone 2G, but text messages don’t work. At all. Seriously. All my friends have stopped sending me text messages, because literally more than half of their messages to me never get there. Not get there late, which sometimes happens too, but never get to me at all.

Then there are the times when I myself am trying to send a text, and the phone (a $*@#!^% Motorola i465) reports that the message was sent, though it actually wasn’t, and I’ll have no idea that the message never got out the door until I happen to reboot my phone days later, and all the recipients are asking me why they’re getting replies to their messages so late.

In fact, if I had an actual piece of crap the size of my phone, it’d be more useful, because then I could use it as fertilizer. This…thing isn’t worth the plastic it’s made of. So, well, iPhone 4. As much as I loathe and detest the idea of giving AT&T my money again, at least I’ll get a nice phone in the bargain.