Your browser is not supported.

Apple has released a beta for Safari 4, and it looks pretty awesome. I’m really psyched about the new web inspector features and the (hallelujah!) JavaScript debugger. I’ll install it on my non-work machine soon and report back with more details.

Also, I really really want a new MacBook Pro, since my PowerBook G4 is really struggling with the only tasks I use it for: watching video and using PhotoShop. Sigh.

Update 2009-02-24 16:25—The Safari 4 beta is rocking my world. Especially the revamped web inspector. I really really wanted the Firebug-style element highlighting when you hover over an element in the markup in the inspector, and I got it. That and the JS debugger are going to change my life.

Also, recent benchmarks show that Safari 4 is, for the moment, at least, 42 (yes. 42.) times faster than IE7 and 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3 on Windows. Let the JavaScript engine wars commence! (via)

So in an attempt to be a bit more organized and less forgetful, I recently purchased Cultured Code’s excellent, excellent to-do tracker software, Things—my previous to-do tracker being various hand-written slips of paper.

Now, you might think that a focused to-do tracker might be overkill, but Things’ gorgeous, intuitive interface and well-thought out design will change your mind. It’s pricey, but worth it.

But what happens if you want to manage your to-dos on multiple computers and mobile devices? The latter is not an issue for iPhone and iPod Touch users because Things also has an iPhone version with built-in sync support—there’s also a slightly more complicated method you can use with any device iSync supports. What about multiple Macs, though? If you’re a MobileMe subscriber like me, you could use the notoriously unreliable iDisk to store your Things database (a simple XML file), but, well, it’s notoriously unreliable.

Enter DropBox, an online file syncing and sharing utility of the elegant it-just-works variety of Mac software. Simply copy your Things library to DropBox, and when you start Things up, tell it to use an alternate library just as you would with iTunes. Awesome.

John Siracusa on Mac OS X 10.6, code-named Snow Leopard. (Via Daring Fireball)

I’d also like to take a minute here to note that Ars Technica is the hands-down best-designed news site I’ve seen; it makes simply excellent use of color and contrast to draw the reader’s eye where it needs to go. Notice how the only part of the page with a white background is the news content, the most important content on the page. In fact it’s the only site I frequently visit, other than Penny Arcade^*, where banner ads and animations aren’t distracting from the main content.

^* Though that white-on-blue text is a killer on the eyes after a few minutes.

I have to plug my wireless, internet-enabled phone into my computer with a USB cable to get the latest email, address book, calendar and settings onto it. With today’s keynote at WWDC 2008, however, Apple has addressed the lack by announcing MobileMe, the newly renamed, souped up version of their existing .mac service.

MobileMe enables seamless over-the-air syncing of mail, contacts and calendars on your iPhone, your Macs, and even your PC (with MS Outlook installed). They’ve also created some mighty sharp-looking web applications to manage all this information from online as well as from your devices, and boosted the existing 10GB disk quota to 20GB.

Other great features include revamped iDisk file sharing, which now lets you add password protection and URL expiry on a file by file basis, which is huge.

What remains unclear is whether they’ve fixed one of my biggest pet peeves right now: iCal and Address Book aren’t as well integrated as I’d like. I’d love the ability to add locations for appointments from my contacts, and then have them tied into the address lookup feature included in Address Book.

Check out the guided tour, and also information about the iPhone 2.0 software update, which will include a new app store that sells games. Kind of freaking out about Monkeyball, which will, I’m sure, take advantage of the built-in accelerometer. Woo!

You know what I love about all this? That Apple has, instead of adding new features and leaving them alone, actually spent time on making the existing features work better. I suspect that these changes, along with the improvements to be announced in the no-new-feature 10.6 OS update, will change my life for the better much more than a lot of new, half-baked features would. Great stuff.

Macs are faster and cheaper than PCs. Even when the Macs run Vista. (Via VodkaPundit)

So when I moved earlier this year, I bought an Airport Extreme base station. And typical of my luck, Apple announced the release of Time Capsule, a wireless backup solution (and the only realistic way to use Leopard’s Time Machine backup feature with a laptop) just a few weeks afterward.

I wasn’t too exercised by it, though, because I figured that I could just hook up a USB hard drive to my Airport Extreme and do the same thing. Imagine my chagrin when I found out that Time Machine wouldn’t recognize drives connected to the Airport Extreme as valid backup locations. Pretty dumb, I thought.

Thankfully, Apple released a firmware update (7.3.1) last week that enables you to use drives connected to the Airport Extreme as Time Machine backup destinations, so after much rejoicing, I went to my local Best Buy and bought myself a 1TB My Book external hard drive; I was going to have the poor man’s version of the Time Capsule, or die trying.

Now picture the tragic scene when I plugged the hard drive in, and neither of my Leopard laptops’ Time Machine installations saw the drive, even though it was mounting properly through the Finder. After floundering around a bit and searching the internet, I found out that Time Machine requires backup drives to be formatted with the HFS+ Journaled file system, and the My Book had shipped formatted in FAT32.

OK, simple enough, I thought. I’d just use Disk Utility to reformat the drive, and I’d be good to go. But, alarmingly, the the reformat kept failing with an error, and the only format I could get the drive successfully reformatted in was FAT. On a whim, I thought I’d try to make two smaller partitions on the drive and see if that worked. It did. But that’s odd, seeing as the HFS+ spec says the maximum volume size is 2 exabytes, and even regular HFS can handle 2 terabytes. What gives?

Regardless, now I have two 500GB partitions on my wireless backup drive, which actually works out for the best, so that I have a cleaner separation of the backups of my two different computers. All’s well that ends well.

Until what, you ask?

To me and a small group of my friends, it’s 7 days until we go to Vegas to celebrate my 30th birthday. This is my personal guarantee: Vegas will never be the same.

To most everyone else, though, it’s 7 days until Apple releases the next version of Mac OS X: version 10.5, named Leopard.

I have, of course, already pre-ordered^* my copy, and await it with bated breath. I plan on installing it on my personal laptop, a G4 PowerBook, but will wait until the first couple of patches come out (as, inevitably, they will) to install it on my work laptop.

Look out for my first impressions after installation, much like I did with Tiger. In the meantime, check out this neat-o guided tour.

^* What does this mean? That I’m ordering it before I order it? This is a flagrant bastardization of the English language, much like the words “pre-board”, “pre-install”, and “pre-fetch”. Jesus.

I tend to agree with John Gruber on this:

And for those of you who’ve already bought one and are pissed about the price cut, if you didn’t think the iPhone was worth $599, you shouldn’t have bought it. That’s how supply and demand works.

I won’t say I wasn’t a bit dismayed to hear of the huge price cut, a mere month after I’d ponied up for the iPhone on release day, but such is life for the early-technology-adopter. It’s happened to me countless times before, and it’ll happen countless times later. That said, I was pretty pleased to hear of the $100 store credit. That hundo will go a long way to paying for the new battery I need for my MacBook Pro.

From using the new Safari 3 beta with my everyday browsing patterns, here are a couple of things I noticed:

• The find-highlight feature, which I thought was useless eye candy before, is actually quite useful, and the kind of best-user-experience-improvement-I-didn’t-know-I-needed thing that Apple specializes in.
• You can’t close windows. Not with the red button on the top left, not using the hotkeys. Not at all. You can close tabs in a multi-tabbed window, but if you want to close windows, you’re stuck. The only way I found to work around this is to use the “Merge all Windows” menu option—one which moreover doesn’t have a hotkey assigned to it^*—and then close the tab(s) you no longer want open.

The latter is a deal breaker. I think I’m going to be uninstalling the beta in favor of Safari 2.

^* Yes, I know that you can manually assign a hotkey to any menu option through the system preferences, but how many non-power users are going to know about that?

Update 2007-09-08 0134: It turns out I was wrong about the closing windows thing. This problem was caused by the Safari extension Taboo, which took care of warning you if you tried to quit Safari when multiple tabs were open. Removing Taboo caused Safari 3 to work just fine when attempting to close windows using Cmd+W. So now I’m using Safari 3 on on of my computers and am very happy with it thus far. Though the fricking Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin keeps making it crash. God, I hate Adobe software.

The consensus on the WWDC 2007 keynote seems to be that it was disappointing:

Back in August at WWDC 2006, when Apple first unveiled Leopard, Steve Jobs made a point of mentioning that some of Leopard’s features would remain secret, lest Microsoft get a head start on copying them.

Apparently, these secret features consist of the new unified window theme and the Cover Flow view in Finder. This is sort of like saying you’re adding a secret new player to your baseball team and then revealing that it’s one of the existing players wearing a new jersey.

I gotta agree. There were no announcements that are truly exciting for power users, though I will admit that this quicklook thing and the Mail-iCal-Addressbook integration is going to be quite useful—but the latter is not innovation, and is something in fact that Apple should have done a while ago.