In the past few years, Adobe Flash has become more than an annoyance that some of us have kept in check by using "block Flash" plugins for our web browsers. More and more, entire web sites are being built with Flash, and they have no HTML alternative at all! This goes way beyond annoying, into the realm of crippling.

I had noticed the trend building for quite awhile, but it only really hit home when I realized that Google, of all companies, had redesigned its formerly accessible Analytics site to rely heavily on Flash for displaying content. This wouldn't be absolutely horrible except for the fact that Google provides no HTML alternative. I tried to needle the company through its Analytics forums, but only received assurance that yes, indeed, one must have the Flash plugin running to view the site.

Keep in mind that content like that on Google Analytics is not mere marketing information, like the sales pitch on the Analytics home page.

Those of us who are disturbed by the trend need to be a bit more vocal about our opinion. Hence, I'm starting a "Just Say No To Flash!" campaign, with its own web page, graphics for a banner, and the CSS and HTML code to deploy it on your own web pages.

I've mentioned this to some of my family and friends, and they often come back with: "So, Why should I say no to Flash?" I admit that as a power browser and a programmer geek type who, shall we say, makes more efficient use of the web, I'm more keenly aware of the ways that Flash is chipping away at the foundation of web content.

In the beginning, it seemed harmless: Flash was an alternative to animated GIFs, and an easy way to embed movies on web pages. But then advertisers wrapped their meaty mitts around it, and that's when Flash started to be annoying. However, one could block Flash in the browser, as part of a strategy of shutting out obnoxious advertising.

But publishing content via Flash is just wrong, for a number of reasons.

➠

It's A Proprietary Technology

. . . Or, One Company Controls The Standard

I don't think Flash is what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he created the first web browser and the markup language called HTML to run the web. Then, as now, the web is meant to be open to all. It is meant to be built using open standards that belong to no individual or company. The main open formats that should be used to build websites are simply:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Images (open formats)

Open standards for video, audio, vector graphics, virtual 3D graphics, animated graphics, and others are also available to be thrown into the mix.

Adobe PDF is also a common format for distributing final-form documents, and PDF is based on open specifications for both PDF and PostScript that Adobe published back in the 1990s.

➠

It Isn't Backwards-Compatible

. . . Or, How Many Times Do I Have To Upgrade My *!/?#%@! Plugin?

If you install a Flash plugin today, there's no guarantee you'll be able to view Flash content created 2 months from now.

If you have a Flash plugin from 5 years ago, it's probably useless today.

Flash is designed with built-in obsolescence, forcing users to repeatedly visit the Adobe website to get an upgrade. This is not only a bother, it forces one company's advertising into the world's face every time it releases a software update.

➠

It Can't Be Customized

. . . Or, How Do I Increase The Font Size?

From time immemorial (well, at least since the beginning of web time), a web page's text could be customized to suit the user's taste and needs. All web browsers provide the tools to increase/decrease the font size, as well as to specify custom fonts for different page elements (headers, paragraphs, etc).

Flash throws all of that out the window with a terse shrug, "Let 'Em Eat Helvetica 10pt."

➠

Its Content Is Inaccessible

. . . Or, How Do I Drag And Drop Images and Text?

No, you can't drag and drop images or text from Flash content. This most basic method of interacting with a web page—dragging images off the page, or selecting sections of the page to drag onto an email or text processor—is a non-starter if it's part of a Flash file.

Copy and paste? If the Flash programmer has been thoughtful, you should be able to copy and paste text. But don't even try to copy any other page element.

And that includes copying a link's URL. Right-click (Ctrl-click) anywhere in a block of Flash content, and you get the standard Flash popup menu. Not very helpful.

➠

You Can't Save The Page

. . . Or, You Mean, I Can't Save A Copy?

Another common task many web users take for granted is the ability to save a web page as text, as HTML, or as a format like rich-text format. With Flash, this is impossible.

You may be able to save the file as a web archive, but there's no open standard for a "web archive," and getting at the content inside one is almost as hard as getting inside a Flash movie.

➠

Flash Consumes More Of Your Computer

. . . Or, Running Flash Diverts Your Processing Power and Memory

When I'm running Flash — as I am now while shopping at Adobe — my Activity Monitor shows it's consuming a continuous 5-percent of my processing power, and about 130 MB of my RAM.

For What? There's nothing a Flash movie can deliver that can't be delivered using open formats. its heavy resource drain is one reason I keep Flash turned off when browsing the web.

➠

You Can't View Flash on an iPhone or iPad

. . . Or, I thought Apple was the bad guy here?

Apple has very good reasons for not supporting Flash on its tiny devices. As the previous point makes clear, Flash isn't a delicate, lightweight technology that your processor and RAM won't notice.

When trying to build hardware and software for small devices that work well and don't lead to memory problems or application crashes, why wouldn't you ditch unnecessary technologies like Flash?

Obviously, Steve Jobs stepped into a hornets nest here, but I think the hornets were wrong.

Make Your Site Say No To Flash

It's easy! Just follow these two steps:

1. Download the Image(s)

You can copy and save one of the following images, or download the Photoshop source and make your own.

2. Add the CSS

Here are two CSS styles for positioning the Just Say No To Flash banner on your web page. One positions the banner at the top-right, and the other at the bottom-right. To use the styles, just copy and paste the following code into the <HEAD> portion of your HTML.

To place the banner at the top-right corner of your page:

1. <style>
2. a#noFlash {
3. position: fixed;
4. z-index: 500;
5. right: 0;
6. top: 0;
7. display: block;
8. height: 160px;
9. width: 160px;
10. background: url(images/noFlashTR.png) top right no-repeat;
11. text-indent: -999em;
12. text-decoration: none;
13. }
14. </style>

To place the banner at the bottom-right corner of your page:

1. <style>
2. a#noFlash {
3. position: fixed;
4. z-index: 500;
5. right: 0;
6. bottom: 0;
7. display: block;
8. height: 160px;
9. width: 160px;
10. background: url(images/noFlashTR.png) bottom right no-repeat;
11. text-indent: -999em;
12. text-decoration: none;
13. }
14. </style>

3. Add the HTML

Add the following to the beginning of your HTML, just below the <BODY> tag, or at the end, just before the closing </BODY> tag:

1. <a id="noFlash" href="http://www.musingsfrommars.org/notoflash/" title="Just Say No To Flash!"> Just Say No To Flash! </a>

Please always link your image to http://www.musingsfrommars.org/notoflash/ so everyone can find the information associated with the image.

Thanks to the "Too Cool for Internet Explorer" campaign run by w3junkies for the concept behind "Say No To Flash," as well as for the general outline of information that campaign provided.

One of the many challenges of building a usable black theme for Mac OS X is making it work with web pages. If you use Safari, the buttons, scrollbars, and other interface widgets on web pages get their marching orders from the system's graphics files—the same ones that regular applications use.

So, if a web page has a pushbutton, the button will by default take on the style of the active theme. If you're running Crystal Black, this means that the button inherits the Crystal Black style. We like this.

Color for the button's text, on the other hand, gets its marching orders from the browser's default Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) file—which, naturally, makes the text black, and therefore unreadable on top of a black button. We don't like this.

On first glance, the solution seems to merely design a special CSS file for Crystal Black and make Safari use it. And that does work for many web sites and many buttons. However, many folks who design web pages like to fiddle with the CSS style for their pages' buttons, and such fiddling means that there's nothing "mere" about designer a Crystal Black style sheet.

Further, many Mac applications these days have views that are simply embedded web content using Apple's WebKit framework. The practical implication here is that Mac apps don't know how to read a Crystal Black CSS file, so Crystal Black must do some fiddling under the hood to avoid having unreadable buttons in such web views.

Then there's Safari itself. I really wanted to theme the Web Inspector—the incredibly useful built-in website viewer/debugger/designer assistant—with the Crystal Black look and feel, but it wasn't immediately obvious how to do this. I assumed that the tool was just a part of Safari, and therefore built with classes and widgets from the Cocoa AppKit (which is the framework all Cocoa apps are built with). However, when I began to inspect the Inspector, I discovered that everything contained within its borders was simply web content: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images.

In other words, the Web Inspector tool is nothing but an intricate, sophisticated, and extremely well designed web page!

Having built a Crystal Black CSS file for web pages in general, and with my past expertise in CSS, I attacked this challenge with relish! It reminded me of the time I realized that Dashboard widgets are, at their core, nothing but little web pages (as are simply apps for the iPhone). In tackling this one, the main question was, How should the various elements look? And the hardest part was inspecting the various parts in of the Inspector in great detail to determine which CSS rules governed their default appearance and behavior.

As I discovered, the WebKit has a a sub-framework called "WebCore," which in turn has a folder of resources specifically for the Web Inspector. In the Inspector folder, among other things, is a suite of CSS files that handle different aspects of the Inspector's design and behavior. Of these, the primary one I needed to tweak was called simply "inspector.css."

Besides controlling the usual attributes of a web page—document elements, text elements, image elements, layout elements, form elements, and so on—this style sheet applies various advanced CSS properties that serve the purpose that in years past would have been handled by many individual images. As I've described this CSS 3.0 magic previously, there's no longer a need for using graphics and JavaScript to add box shadows, rounded box corners, borders, gradients, and reflections to your web pages.

Naturally, since the open-source WebKit project was initiated by Apple, and since that project zoomed ahead of all other browser engines in developing new ways to design with CSS, that's how the Web Inspector is built. This approach—using a command syntax rather than images to design a user interface—is one that Apple has been adopting for its desktop applications. In recent years, Apple has been adding new classes and methods to the AppKit that make it a trivial matter to build a window frame, a border, a toolbar, or a button using code rather than individual graphics. 

While this is a logical and efficient approach, it also presents challenges for theming Mac applications, a challenge that Crystal Black is often unable or unwilling to overcome. (The story of all the challenges in building Crystal Black are described in this article.)

Not so with the Web Inspector, fortunately.

The Inspector does use a few images in its design, but most of the toolbar, separators, and section headers are built with CSS gradients. Very cool indeed!

This bit of Crystal Black will eventually be bundled with the whole theme, but for now I offer it as a free download. Admittedly, the audience for such software is small—you have to like Crystal Black, and you have to be a regular user of the Web Inspector—but it might be of interest to others who are curious about how such things are done.

One caveat in viewing the screenshots... The scrollbars that appear, as well as the HUD window style, are part of the overall Crystal Black theme and are not part of the Web Inspector theme itself.

Enjoy!

Update 4/18/11: The full Crystal Black 1.0 theme is now available from the Crystal Black website.

Installing Crystal Black for Web Inspector

The download contains a small application that you can use to install—and to uninstall—the theme. Simply double-click and select "Install" to apply the theme. Or select "Uninstall" to restore the default CSS files and graphics.

After installing or uninstalling the theme, you'll need to quit and restart Safari for the theme to take effect.

Crystal Black for the Web Inspector (Download file is 1.0MB)

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Styling Scrollbars. I've been so busy I missed this... it's another in the WebKit team's aggressive expansion of the possibilities for user interface development using the basic stuff: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The brief article on the Surfin' Safari blog has a pointer to an interactive demo.

Too good to ignore: 6 alternative browsers

Computerworld goes beyond IE, Firefox, and Safari to take a look at six lesser-known and -used web browsers for both Mac and Windows. It's interesting to note that three of the six are based on WebKit, the core engine used in Safari.

Surfin’ Safari » Web Inspector Redesign

For my money, Safari's Web Inspector has been a strong rival to the excellent Firebug that Firefox deveopers use. Its capabilities and usability have been growing by leaps and bounds since it was first introduced in January 2006.

I wrote a brief article on the enhancements that came in August 2006, and since then the improvements have just kept coming:

1. June 2007, total redesign with beaucoup added features.
2. December 2007, adding inline CSS editing, a database browser, downloadable fonts, several CSS properties, and more.
3. September 2008, redesigned interface and way too many terrific features to list here. Go read the WebKit blog article for details.

At this point, I don't think there's any question among those of us who've used both Firebug and Web Inspector that the bar has now been raised far beyond what's available to Firefox developers.

Note: At this time, the new web inspector--like the hugely faster Squirrelfish JavaScript engine--is only available in the nightly WebKit builds. But that doesn't mean you can't use it in place of Safari!

Tom Yager: Developers should skip Google's Chrome, and jump straight to WebKit

Of course, I completely agree with Yager, but I'm delighted to see a nationally prominent technology analyst come out with this opinion. I can't try Chrome yet because it's not available for Mac OS X (that's strike one against it!), and besides, Chrome uses the WebKit engine under its hood.

The latest builds of WebKit, and in preview builds of Safari 4, provide developers with the richest set of tools for building advanced Web 2.0 applications yet. Sadly, most tech writers are totally oblivious to this, even some who use Macs. Firefox is still the new and most politically correct kid in town, despite the fact that WebKit is just as open source but has a much faster-moving and forward-thinking engineering team.

Consumer Reports urges Mac users to dump Safari, cites lack of phishing protection

And to think I used to like Consumer Reports!

They keep writing me to "come back" and resubscribe, but I've told them that won't happen until they become objective and truly knowledgeable about the Mac... at least as knowledgeable as they are about Windows PCs.

And now, it turns out they're recommending that Mac users "dump Safari," which just happens to be the best web browser on the Mac platform. Oh, and since this article also appears on ZDNet, while other industry journals gave it little play, I begin to conclude that ZDNet is a rats nest of Microsoft zealots.

So, here's the little note I left them today about their latest phishing/Safari scare tactic:

There is nothing in common between phishing and viruses, adware, spyware, or other malware. Phishing is just an old-fashioned scam dressed up in new HTML clothing. Consumers need to be educated about it, and no anti-phishing technology is going to save them. For one thing, most phishing schemes come to consumers through their email client, not their browsers.

Oh, and 6 or 7 years ago, why didn't Consumer Reports advise Windows users to ditch IE? That would have been the single best way for them to avoid Internet malware, but I never heard them do such a thing. The phishing problem pales in comparison to the security nightmares we experienced after IE6 was released (and before SP2), and which millions of Windows users continue to experience today. Active/X is the most dangerous technology out there as far as security is concerned, but is MS being pressured to remove it from IE?

Unfortunately, I don't think we've heard the last of this... At least, until Apple goes ahead and joins the other browsers in adding "anti-phishing technology" to Safari. Like I noted above, it really makes a lot more sense to add this capability to users' mail clients, since phishing is just a form of junk mail in the end.

ZDNet: iPhone vulnerable to phishing, spamming flaws

There has lately been a rash of articles about how "insecure" Safari is because it has no anti-phishing mechanism. Frankly, I think this is a bunch of hogwash. It's an attempt to show how lax Apple is about security, and, by implication, how great Microsoft is.

It's not that I don't think phishing is a serious problem... I do! It's just that phishing is not a security issue, which is how the anti-Apple, pro-Microsoft (and pro-Firefox) zealots are trying to portray it.

Here's the comment I left on ZDNet's site about this article, dated 7/23/08:

Phishing scams are very bad, but they are not the same as viruses or malware that gets installed on your operating system. Not even in the same category. They are simply a sophisticated con, and unfortunately there are a lot of naive, clueless web users who will click on any link they're offered. Then again, I know people who are so paranoid they won't click on any link in an email at all... even if it comes from a trusted source (like a friend). I'm not at all convinced that anti-phishing software will work any better than junk-mail filters have, though I understand the need to try.

All you guys who are so hot to jump on Apple need to at least know what you're talking about. Though the companies who make money on security vulnerabilities like to lump phishing in with "security" flaws, in my opinion they aren't. Why? Because they pose no threat to the integrity of your computer or to your network.

Later, in reply to a reader who thought I was kidding with this opinion, I wrote:

Of course it's bothersome... on the same plane as the scum who trick old ladies out of their social security checks by conning them into some phony investment.

Phishing is more insidious, but if you have an ounce of common sense, it's easily avoided.

Not so with viruses and spyware, which can invade your system without any action on your part... not even clicking on a link. If following a link loads a virus, that's not phishing, defined as [blockquote] the activity of defrauding an online account holder of financial information by posing as a legitimate company[/blockquote].

My point is, phishing is not so much a security liability as it is a privacy issue... Phishing amounts to identity theft.

I'm not arguing that phishing isn't a serious concern that needs to be addressed. But I'm saying it's not a security issues in that it doesn't install software on your system, invade your network, or propagate itself to others.

I am arguing that it's more like spam, which is likewise a serious problem that can lead individuals to dangerous websites or tempt them into bad decisions. Like spam, I'm doubtful that any software solution to eradicate phishing is possible.

In this light, the urgency to correct a phishing vulnerability is much lower than that to correct a security vulnerability, and the fact that such a vulnerability exists should not alarm users to the same degree.

Turns out this "phishing" scam isn't over with the iPhone or Safari. See more of my ranting in Part 2 of this topic.

My, we've come a long way in browser choices since 2005, haven't we? It's been a very heady time for programmers who dabble in the lingua franca of the World Wide Web: HTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, the Document Object Model, and XML/XSLT. Together, this collection of scripting tools, boosted by a technique with the letter-soup name "XMLHttpRequest," became known as "Ajax." Ajax spawned an avalanche of cool, useful, and powerful new web applications that are today beginning to successfully challenge traditional computer-desktop software like Microsoft Word and Excel. As good as vanguard products like Goodle's Maps, Gmail, Documents, and Calendar apps are, one only has to peek at what Apple has accomplished with its new MobileMe web apps to see how much like desktop applications web software can be in 2008.

That this overwhelming trend toward advanced, desktop-like applications has happened at all is the result of the efforts of determined developers from the Mozilla project, which rose from the ashes of Netscape's demise to create the small, light, powerful and popular Firefox browser. The activity of the Mozilla group spurred innovation from other browser makers and eventually forced a trend towards open standards that made the emergence of Ajax possible.

This article starts with a brief history of web browsers and then jumps into a look at the feature set of the four primary "modern" web browsers in 2008. The comparison of browser features begins by listing the core features that all these browsers have in common. The bulk of the article lists in detail "special features" of each browser and each browser's good and bad points, as they relate to the core browser characteristics. Following that, I present some recent data on the comparative performance of these browsers. The article concludes with recommendations I would make to organizations interested in making the switch from IE6 in 2008.

1. Web Browsers in 2008: A Brief History
2. Comparison of Browser Features
• Baseline Features
• Firefox 3.0
• Internet Explorer 7.0
• Opera 9.5
• Safari 3.1
3. Browser Performance
4. Conclusions
5. Bookmarks for Further Reading

Web Browsers in 2008: A Brief History

Comparison of Browser Features

Browser Performance

Conclusions

Bookmarks for Further Reading

SproutCore is Apple's Flash, Silverlight-killer - Mac software - Macworld UK Sproutcore is a new Ajax/JavaScript framework being developed as an outgrowth of Apple's new MobileMe product. It's also part of the ongoing rapid development of the iPhone development platform and the WebKit browser engine that forms the basis for Safari. To call it a "Flash killer" is perhaps a bit overstating the case, but judging from the demos on the Sproutcore website, it appears to be on its way to being a robust rival to more mature frameworks such as Ext.js. I've installed Sproutcore and look forward to playing around with it soon.

Why 'no Macs' is no longer a defensible IT strategy | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-04-21 | By Galen Gruman This article is a must-read for anyone who cares about the longstanding problem of getting enterprise IT staff to support Macs. If you can get them to read the article, published by a major and highly respected IT trade journal, you may change a few minds. The author runs down all of the issues that kept Macs out of the enterprise in the past, and effectively addresses the concerns, some of which have been outdated since the release of Mac OS X.

My only quibble is the author's assertion that enteprise reliance on Microsoft Office means unequal time for Macs. He points out that OpenOffice is a viable alternative but makes no mention of Apple's own terrific iWork suite, which is quite compatible with the basic aspects of Microsoft Office. Likewise, he fails to acknowledge Apple's effective collaboration suite in the form of iCal, Mail, iChat, and Address Book. Perhaps it's because those aren't cross-platform. However, even if that's the case, since they are able to interoperate with Office, they should be considered by businesses seeking to support their growing numbers of Mac users.

A lot has happened in the world of web browsers and CSS 3.0 since I wrote this article last summer at the time Safari 3.0 became available as a public beta. Besides WebKit/Safari, Opera, iCab, Konqueror, and Firefox have all made progress in adopting CSS 3.0 specifications, the next generation of the W3C's Cascading Style Sheets standard.

However, the WebKit team continues to lead the pack, as they have since I first contemplated this article over a year ago. In the last 6 months, that team has not only adopted more of the CSS 3.0 specs ahead of the others, but they have proposed several exciting new specs of their own, which the W3C is taking up as draft recommendations.

In addition to updating the state of CSS 3.0 in WebKit/Safari, I've also added some new demos for the Backgrounds section of my CSS playground at the end of the article.

Here are the CSS 3.0 features I wrote about in July 2007:

1. Box-shadow: Yes! Add drop shadows through CSS!
2. Multi-column layout: Can we really do this now? With HTML?
3. Resize: Give JavaScript hacks a rest and let users relax when typing input on web pages.
4. Rounded corners: The corners of any
   element can be made round to any radius you specify.
5. Colors with transparency: There goes another ugly hack from way back!
6. Background image controls: Remember how great it was when you could add images as well as colors to an element's background CSS style? Well, it's about to get a whole lot better!

And since then, WebKit and Safari 3.1 have adopted the following bleeding-edge CSS features:

1. Adopted last October, WebKit introduced its first take at CSS Transforms, which it has submitted to the W3C for consideration. With CSS Transforms,
   s can be scaled, rotated, skewed and translated... all without using JavaScript!
2. Announced at the same time is the equally exciting implementation of CSS Animations. At the moment, the only type of animation that's documented and demonstrated on the WebKit blog is based on CSS Transitions, which let you define how an object or attribute changes over time from one state to another. Using this specification, you can now program many kinds of animations with CSS alone.
3. Also in October, WebKit added the CSS Web Fonts feature, which lets designers beam fonts to users through CSS and HTML, approximating the capabilities of PDF in a much lighter-weight form.
4. Then, after a lull, things started to heat up again last month, when Apple released Safari 3.1. Safari 3.1 incorporated all of the CSS 3.0 features WebKit had pioneered earlier, plus it added a bunch of things the WebKit team hadn't blogged about. Chief among these was support for CSS Attribute Selectors. This is something of a holy grail to advanced web developers, since it opens up a whole world of possibilities for using the Document Object Model (DOM) to build better web interfaces. When released, WebKit was the first and only browser to fully support this geeky, but highly practical feature. (Some of the other browsers have implemented partial support.)
5. And then, just today, WebKit added support for CSS Gradients to its portfolio. Gradients are not yet a CSS 3.0 specification, but they are part of the HTML 5.0 spec. No doubt Apple's implementation will be referred to the W3C for consideration. (This is the only new feature in this list that as yet works only in the latest WebKit nightly build.)

This article lists the CSS 3.0 features that were first available in Safari or the nightly WebKit browser. Besides listing them, I've tried to keep up with what the features can actually do for me as a web designer, so each feature is accompanied by a demo or two and some explanatory notes. Since some of the features are a bit complex, and almost totally lacking in documentation from either W3C (which only lists the standards, not the implementation details), Apple, or the WebKit team, I've had to experiment to discover what some of the attributes do.

Fortunately, a forward-thinking group of techno-weenies is keeping a close eye on the emerging details of the CSS 3.0 implementations, and they have done some experimenting of their own. Since they're in the same boat I am (actually, they have a much better boat!), it's not surprising that I'm finding ambiguities in the way they've built some of their demos. Still, it's the closest thing to documentation that I've found, and I highly recommend that anyone interested in learning more about CSS 3.0 pay a visit to the terrific CSS3.info website. In fact, you'll find links to their pages throughout this site.

Following CSS3.info's lead, I'm organizing the (at this time) CSS 3.0 available in Safari into four categories: Borders, Background, Effects, and User Interface. These correspond to the W3C draft modules for CSS 3.0. The fifth tab in the navigation control below gathers the CSS 3.0 specifications that have been implemented by Safari and at least one other major browser. As you browse through these up-and-coming features, I think you'll understand my excitement about the benefits they offer to web graphic- and user-interface designers.

In the first release of this article, I only had demos for the section on Borders. Today I've added demos for CSS Backgrounds, and I plan to continue experimenting with the rest as time permits. In the meantime, as mentioned before, do pay a visit to CSS3.info for their demos of each, or follow the links to demos at the WebKit site. I hope you're inspired to take up a keyboard and pound out some experiments of your own!

Gone in 2 minutes: Mac gets hacked first in contest The fact remains that neither I nor any other Mac user has ever had our machine infected with a virus, a worm, or any of the numerous forms of malware that Windows users have suffered from since 2001, when Mac OS X was released. The single biggest risks users have faced online during this period are (a) running Windows XP, (b) running Internet Explorer, and (c) running Microsoft email software. Why? Microsoft has called it various things over the years, but I know it best as Active/X. Microsoft argued in the aborted antitrust trial that tying IE tightly to the OS was in the best interests of consumers. Right. It certainly has been good for IT security firms. Heck, this gave rise to an entire industry that would never have existed without Microsoft's highly vulnerable system, and it made consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars on antivirus/antimalware software to combat the problem. Plus it created a generation of people who are afraid to use the web to the fullest, and who are neurotically suspicious of hyperlinks in emails... even when they come from people they know and trust.

Even if you believe these things would have happened if Apple's OS held the monopoly (which is a demonstrably false opinion), the burden of computer security has fallen exclusively on Windows users over the last 7 years. Exclusively... not just 90-95% of the burden. I have never spent a dime on security software or subscriptions, nor have I spent a moment worrying about going online. I've never had my machine hijacked by malware, or had my browser go haywire because I visited the "wrong" website. I take sensible precautions about suspicious emails, and I don't download files from suspicious websites.

If someone has developed a true exploit for hacking Mac OS X, I'm sure it'll be quickly squashed by Apple. And one or two such exploits in 7 years is a far more intelligent risk than dealing with thousands of such exploits a year over that period, don't you think?

Apple - Support - Downloads - Safari 3.1

This update brings in all the latest standards implementations and innovations in the open-source WebKit project, plus a few interface enhancements as well. The Windows version gets some important updates too. From Apple’s tech document on Safari 3.1:

Performance

• Improves JavaScript performance

Standards

• Adds support for CSS 3 web fonts
• Adds support for CSS transforms and transitions
• Adds support for HTML 5 <video> and <audio> elements
• Adds support for offline storage for Web applications in SQL databases
• Adds support for SVG images in <img> elements and CSS images
• Adds support for SVG advanced text 

Developer

• Adds option in Safari preferences to turn on the new Develop menu which contains various web development features
• Allows access to Web Inspector
• Allows access to Network Timeline
• Allows editing CSS in the Web Inspector 
• Allows custom user agent string
• Improves snippet editor

Other

• Double clicking on the Tab Bar opens new tab
• Includes URL metadata when images are dragged or saved from browser
• Opens Download and Activity window in current Space
• Supports trackpad gestures for back, forward, and magnify on MacBook Air and compatible MacBook Pro computers
• Shows Caps Lock icon in password fields

Surfin’ Safari In case you missed it (I've been so busy that I did!), be sure to check out the WebKit team's writeup of their pick of the 10 best new features of Safari 3.0 (which has WebKit 3.0 running at its core). My nomination goes to the absolutely incredible upgrade to WebInspector and Drosera, the two tools for web developers that have been included in WebKit since early this year. WebInspector is the best tool out there now for analyzing the makeup, structure, content, and interactivity for any web page you encounter or are building. Drosera is the sidekick JavaScript inspector. But as you'll see from reading the WebKit team's blog, the goodness in Safari 3.0 doesn't stop there! According to the blog, most of the features described are also available in the upgraded Safari 3.0 browser included in the new Tiger upgrade, OS X 10.4.11.

By the way, before any defensive Firebug fans (I love Firebug, too, by the way) start a reflexive reply, you should know that in a recent podcast for Ajaxian, Firebug developer Joe Hewitt made clear he's now working on iPhone development and has been won over by WebKit from Firefox. He now thinks WebKit/Safari is the best platform for web development out there. I'd say his opinion is pretty significant! I see he's also built an early version of Firebug for the iPhone.

Demeter This is certainly welcome news! I've been disappointed at the very slow pace of development on the core Shiira project, and Demeter appears to be a fast-growing branch of that project. Like Shiira, it's open source, and also based on the latest (Safari 3.0) WebKit code. Definitely worth a look-see!

Apple - Safari 3 Public Beta - Download I'm still going through all the news from today's blockbuster announcements at the Apple developer's conference, but this one has blown me away the most so far: Apple has made available a beta release of Safari 3.0 (which is awesome, let me tell you, as a Leopard developer), which contains all the amazing advances I've been reporting on since last fall. Not only that, but when I went to the download page, I couldn't believe my eyes... there are Windows downloads as well! Yep, that's right! One of web developers' biggest complaints about Safari is that it's not available for Windows... now, it is! This is incredible.

Funkware - Googalyzer Originally downloaded May 3, 2007. I ran across Googalyzer the other day and fired it up briefly this evening. Though it wanted to crash on me a bit, I got a peek at what's developing into a damn good web browser based on WebKit. Googalyzer is a bit like Charlotte in that regard, though it's more specialized, relying almost exclusively on Google knowledge banks, whereas Charlotte ⤴has a more broad-based vision. Googalyzer has a lot more features though, and you won't know it right away, cause they're mostly hidden. Take a look at the screenshots on the Googalyzer website if you don't want to just start tinkering with the interface... From those you'll see that Googalyzer has a hidden pane on the left that can be opened, which is used for a list of your research "projects." Then pull up the little doohickey on the bottom window bar and you'll find a wealth of functions I haven't had a chance to try yet:

• A full Cocoa editor, complete with toolbar, tables, fonts, etc.
• A Bibliography... where you can store your sources, I presume, and a
• Outline viewer... I believe this is where you develop an outline for your research.

Besides those cool toys, Googalyzer lets you take "Web Clips", though I haven't figured out how yet... It's a small window that's where you'd store clips of text and images from the sites you visit. Googalyzer is a real, honest-to-God web browser, too, with bookmarks, history, tabs, and more. It even has a full screen interface. Now, if I can get it to run for more than 10 or 15 minutes, I look forward to seeing what else it's capable of! If it actually proves stable, I'm beginning to think Googalyzer's developers are extending the vision that a tool like Webstractor ⤴started some time back. Disappointingly, though, Webstractor hasn't been enhanced in over a year now, and the developers don't seem responsive to inquiries.

Version as tested: 3.0 b1

Update 8/12/12 Software is no longer available. Obsolete.

Shiira Project

The Shiira Project has at long last launched version 2.0 of their alternative-Safari browser. Ever since the first beta last summer, Mac tech writers in the know (me included) have been extolling its virtues, waiting anxiously for a version with all of its features intact. Although the 2.0 version released today still has a few small screws loose, I could easily write a whole new article describing some of its cool new features and the polish its put on the ones revealed in beta. Chief among the new features I love are

• The full-screen mode, which comes with a mouse-activated menu at the top of the screen that lets you navigate to other websites, change font size, and other basics.
• The final look and feel of the new HUD-style panels is awesome, although the “action gear” icon at the bottom of each is still out of comission.
• The RSS reader tool, which could still use some polish but has some nice alternative features not found in Safari.
• The final configuration and content of the Page Info window is tops in its class! You’ll find that the “links” pane now neatly and powerfully ties each item in its list to the actual page, so as you select a link, the page scrolls to that point. If the link has an image, the image is shown in the information pane below, along with the full HTML of the link–including any javascript. Awesome! I also highly approve of the way the image browser pane turned out. The DOM browser is pretty basic, and I would highly encourage the Shiira folks to figure out how to integrate WebKit’s page inspector into Shiira—it likewise is the best around (well, neck and neck with Firebug for Firefox).
• The PageDock is even better than originally, and Shiira still has the very best “Tabs Expose” feature of any browser around.
• The Shiira folks have wisely updated some of the underlying WebKit components, as a result of which Shiira now speaks “ContentEditable” like 95% of the other browsers in use. (See my recent article on this topic if you don’t know why that’s important to Mac users.)

I’m going to try running Shiira instead of WebKit for a day or two. At the moment, my chief gripes from very limited use (since last night) are that

• Shiira doesn’t integrate with Inquisitor, the awesome Cocoa search plugin for Safari,
• Shiira doesn’t have a built-in JavaScript debug tool or a DOM/CSS inspector like WebKit does,
• Shiira hasn’t incorporated WebKit’s CSS3 support bits. As a result, it can’t do things like rounded corners, drop shadows, multicolumn text, and the rest. (See this CSS3 Preview site to check them out.) The main CSS3 feature I use daily is resizable textareas… indispensible if you’re trying to get text entry work done in a browser.
• The browser’s feedback showing it’s loading the page is a bit weak… It relies on the PageDock icon “filling with water”, but if the icon is quite small, it’s hard to notice. I prefer Safari’s use of the address bar for this.

In any case, I’m glad to see Shiira returning back to life as a truly excellent, native Cocoa alternative WebKit-based browser for Mac OS X.

Ajaxian » Performance test results show strong WebKit outcome Ajaxian posted a nice report on a distributed study of the relative browser performance on Dojo's charting system yesterday, and immediately the naysayers started naysaying. "Safari is a piece of crap. WebKit is so buggy..." and the like. I suppose if WebKit keeps coming up at the top of the heap on these kinds of tests, eventually Safari/WebKit will earn more respect, but probably not until a lot of the bozos who are so critical actually buy themselves a Mac. By the way, the test is strictly speaking a measure of relative performance at rendering SVG code, not overall browser speed or javascript parsing. (Although WebKit excels at those, too.)

Charlotte: Spotlight for the Web

Downloaded May 17, 2006. (Note: See update from 4/14/07 at the end.) Here’s another stab at getting at web content through Spotlight… only unlike the Google Importer tool, which adds Google results to Spotlight’s results list, Charlotte runs as a separate, Spotlight-lookalike process. And it’s not just a cute menubar item that produces a list of results like Spotlight, either. Charlotte actually has an embedded web browser sporting some of the coolest, core-image-based animation effects you’ve ever seen. They make Shiira’s page-flip animation look positively lame! I want to play with Charlotte a bit more before deciding to keep it around, but it sure has made a big first impression!

Update 6/18/06: Charlotte still has a few bugs… it seems to conflict with the AcidSearch plugin, but then so does the nightly WebKit browser I like to use. But all in all, I like the concept they’re going for, which is to provide a consolidated search across several distinct content “buckets” on the web. You can get this effect at Google already, which presents buckets for “Web,” “Images,” “Groups,” “News,” “Froogle,” and “Maps,” thereby letting you reuse your search term in several different contexts. This isn’t always that useful, but in Charlotte it’s got the potential to be more useful than at Google. Charlotte’s “buckets” are “Web,” “News,” “Images,” “Books,” “Blogs,” and “Developer.” At this point, Charlotte’s buckets aren’t as full as they presumably will be as more plugins are created for it, but it’s still quite interesting to switch from, for example, “News,” to “Blogs” with the same search term.

Charlotte is indeed a full-fledged web browser, with the basic functionality plus some serious eye candy. If you’re a fan of Dashboard’s “ripple” effect, rejoice! With Charlotte, you have two different kinds of page loads you can animate, choosing from about 8 different transition effects… some of which I haven’t seen before (disintegrate, mod, and copy machine). I miss having a back button between the results list and my navigation from there, although I’ve found that Charlotte’s “Switch View” button serves the same purpose (a sort of “snapback”). Unlike a normal browser, Charlotte has no menubar. Instead, you access “her” through the menu extra or via a keyboard shortcut (Command-Return or Command-Option-Return), which you can customize in the preferences.

Click on image above to see Charlotte in action!

Charlotte also supports auto-suggest, with a customizable timer, but I didn’t have any luck getting it to work. You don’t have access to your normal bookmarks. Instead, Charlotte assumes your Del.icio.us site is your bookmark repository, and adding a bookmark in Charlotte means adding it to Del.icio.us. That’s fine with me, but if you haven’t yet discovered the joys of social bookmarking, you might be taken aback by this. One little quirk is that if you have more tabs than will fit in the browser window, there’s no way (that I could see) to get to the far-right ones. They’re still there, but you have to clean out other tabs to reach them. Still, I’m reviewing this at version 1.01, and it’s pretty damn good for a free, newborn software package of this complexity.

All in all, I’ll be glad to keep Charlotte in my menubar!

Update 4/14/07. Finally! A new version of Charlotte was released today, and it’s even greater than I remembered. I haven’t been using it regularly because I was worried the project was abandoned, but this new release gives me hope it’s not. Everything I said before is still true about Charlotte, and I thoroughly enjoy using it, even as a full-fledged browser alternative. Now, if more plugins get written for it, Charlotte could be a truly awesome web search platform for Mac users. (Not that they don’t already have any… but Charlotte’s just so cool!)

Version as tested: 1.1.

Worldmark: Bookmarks for Every Browser, Every File

Originally downloaded April 2, 2007. Imagine you could bookmark anything… in any browser, in the file system, on network drives… It’s a lofty vision, and the Cocoa app Worldmark, a shareware utility that appears to be still in beta, tries to accomplish this feat. I’ve definitely got to see how well this works!

Update 4/2/07. Worldmark is the kind of project that is very disappointing to fans of Mac apps like me. It’s been over a year since I downloaded Worldmark, and I’ve tried it a few times. One huge flaw in the concept is that the menubar icon is only there to let you drag items (URLs, files, folders, etc) to it…. it doesn’t display a list of your “worldmarks”, doesn’t give you access to Worldmark’s preferences (of which there are hardly any), and doesn’t let you load different Worldmark documents. As such, it’s totally counterintuitive. But that’s not what’s disappointing to me.

No, it’s the fact that this first beta release was issued in September 2005, and there hasn’t been a single update since then. And yet the developer has the temerity to expect users to pay $10 for continuous use. Sorry, but to me, payment for shareware is a bargain between user and developer: The user agrees to pay for the software, and the developer agrees to not put the software in mothballs, which is exactly what appears to have happened to Worldmark.

The good news, however, is that there’s a free, open source application I had already adopted, which does everything Worldmark can do, plus a whole lot more: Check out Hallon some time. By developer Peter Borg, who has also given the Mac world the open source Cocoa apps Smultron and Lingon, Hallon actually lets you bookmark items within applications. For example, you can bookmark a particular song in iTunes, or a particular album in iPhoto, and so on. In addition, it’s extensible, so users and other developers can build plugins for applications that aren’t already included in the package. Finally, Hallon lets you associate due dates and set alarms for anything you bookmark.

And you know what? The Hallon menubar icon can be used not only to add new bookmarks, but it also displays existing bookmarks in various useful ways! Just like you’d expect.

In other words, Hallon is an awesome product that has solutions to problems you may not even known you could solve. My only complaint about Hallon is that it, too, hasn’t been updated in a long time. However, I know that developer has been very busy on Smultron, and besides, he’s not asking for any money for his effort. (Though I’m sure Borg would appreciate a contribution if you are so moved.)

Version as tested: 1.0 b1.

Adobe launches Apollo, its web application runtime for the desktop I was too busy last week to report this in a timely manner, but it's potentially big news: Last October, Adobe announced that it would use Apple's open-source WebKit code (on which Safari is based) for a new web application runtime for desktop software, and it's now fulfilled that promise. Apollo can be downloaded in first-release alpha form from Adobe's Labs website, and there's one example application built on the platform that you can also try. Apollo installs as a framework on Mac OS X, and it's also available for Windows. Adobe intends Apollo to be a framework for building web-based applications for the desktop, and I don't know too much more at the moment, but do intend to find out. It sure seems odd to peer into the Apollo framework folder and find the WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks, which are the heart of WebKit itself!

Ajaxian » Cross Browser Keyboard Handler I may be in serious need of starting to capture keystrokes and mouse clicks/scrolls on this site soon... here's one possibility.

A quiet revolution has taken place for Mac OS X Safari users, but I haven’t seen anyone celebrate it… and I’ve looked! There isn’t even a mention of this dramatic change in Safari’s powers on the Surfin’ Safari blog, where the open source team that’s evolving the WebKit rendering engine used in Safari announce new features and updates. Lately, this team has implemented a number of really amazing features from the CSS 3.0 specification, and each has been trumpeted with some eye-popping examples. But not a word about this.

Well, I for one am celebrating the upgrade with this article and proclaiming to the world that finally, at last, Safari is gaining parity with the other modern browsers in letting users perform WYSIWYG editing whenever the application calls for it. Mac users like me who have simply done without rich-text editing in their WordPress blogs and Gmails, bristling with an unfamiliar envy at the vast majority of users who take this functionality for granted by now, can finally save ourselves some typing and edit in our web browser with the same ease we do in a word processor.

A Little Browser History

Since its debut in June 2003, Apple’s Safari web browser has had a hard time gaining respect among web developers. This has a little to do with its Mac OS X platform restriction, but it’s mostly because of incompatibilities in its underlying rendering engine that have taken its developers a long time to correct.

From the beginning, Safari was incompatible with a fairly large number of websites, but most of this was because those websites were poorly designed to work only in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Apple encouraged its users to report bugs, through use of a convenient toolbar button in Safari, and I’m sure its developers’ energy was consumed with bug fixes for the first year of its life—when they weren’t implementing novel functionality like a built-in RSS reader.

After Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, interest in that browser slowly began to turn the minds of developers away from pure IE compatibility to a more cross-browser mindset based on open standards. Thus, in 2005-06, Firefox began to eat significantly into IE’s market share, to the point that no one could ignore Gecko compatibility anymore. Most Windows-based developers are surprised to learn that the share of Safari also rose dramatically during that time (from 1.5% to 4.5%), though remaining at a much lower level than Firefox (which rose from less than 4% to more than 13%). In mid-2005, Apple open-sourced WebKit, the core rendering engine used by Safari, and since then, interest in—and respect for—Safari has steadily increased. (Note to those who know… the underlying HTML rendering engine in Safari is actually called “WebCore”, but it’s a distinction that would simply confuse this history and provides no useful information. If you want to learn more, here’s a nice, brief summary on the Apple developer website.)

Part of that newfound respect is due to the WebKit team’s vigorous pursuit of web-standards compliance, and this improved compliance with standards dovetailed perfectly with the shift away from developers’ reliance on IE’s non- and sub-standard implementations of CSS and JavaScript. Thus, by the time Ajax became a buzzword in 2006, consensus in the web developer community was strongly aligned with adherence to standards, and Safari was by then just as standards-compliant as the Mozilla browsers and Opera… and in some cases more so. (Safari was the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 test in 2005.)

Safari Remains “contentUnEditable”

And yet, many developers continued to grumble about problems dealing with Safari in discussion forums and blogs. When pressed for the reason, it nearly always boiled down to one of two things:

1. The developer hadn’t worked with Safari in at least a year, or
2. The developer was frustrated at not being able to deploy a web-based rich text editor that would work in Safari.

As far as number 2 is concerned, you can count me among the developers who’ve had that little problem. I’ve worked on development teams to build several Intranet systems for web content management over the years, and early on, we just had to give up on Mac users. Ironically, the scripting functionality that lets a developer make any element of a web page editable with WYSIWYG editing controls originated with Internet Explorer, beginning in 1999. After a fair amount of public nose-holding, the Mozilla team incorporated the Microsoft specification into its browsers fairly early on, and most projects developing rich-text editors for browsers were able to achieve Mozilla compatibility several years ago.

Yet still Safari lumbered on with little or no acknowledgment of the admittedly non-standard (but still vital) “contentEditable” property. And so the browser continued to receive scorn, even as it was leading the browser pack in other areas of standards compliance and functionality. It’s true that Apple incorporated what turned out to be very buggy support for contentEditable in Safari in late 2004, starting with Mac OS X 10.3.9. But this implementation was apparently so unreliable that it probably just angered developers who tried to use it more than it impressed anyone. (To find out just how angry, try Googling the phrase “Safari contentEditable” some time…) Fortunately, the new implementation appears to me as a user to be the real thing!

The Wait Is Over!

So it was with a great deal of surprise and delight that I awoke one morning a couple of weeks ago and realized that the long wait was finally over! On one of the Apple rumors websites, I read that a key feature of the latest beta release of Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”), is support for rich-text editing in Safari 3.0 that’s fully compatible with the “ContentEditable” specification.

But that isn’t the really exciting part for me personally. Since Safari 3.0 is simply incorporating the latest build of WebKit, I surmised that WebKit itself was probably now capable of handling standard rich-text-editing duties on the web. Perhaps all of those sites that couldn’t be made Safari compliant because Safari didn’t properly handle ContentEditable might now be opened to me without reaching for Firefox, Camino, or Opera!

At first I assumed that I’d have to turn on some silent default in WebKit to make this happen, as I did with the resize-textarea CSS 3.0 feature. Not the case. The latest WebKit nightly build can handle WYSIWYG editing with nothing more than a download.

Well, that’s not completely true, but only because many websites and WYSIWYG editing tools are hard-coded to not let Safari or WebKit use their tools. But nearly all of these can be “spoofed” into thinking WebKit is IE 6.0 or Firefox, and will then open their toolbox for me to use. About the same number of sites are built correctly—that is, to identify whether a given web client recognizes a given DOM property, rather than merely asking for its name and number—and would let me edit content with no spoofing at all. Among the badly coded pages is WordPress’ administration area (at least through version 1.5), and among the well coded sites is Google’s Gmail.

Not Something To Brag About . . .

For Mac users, this is huge news. We like to think our platform is the best there is, and that Apple is way out in front on new technologies and usability standards. But in this case, the Mac has been way behind for a long time, and it will be very pleasant to put this behind us.

I first started researching WYSIWYG editing tools in late 1999, and even though Safari and Mac OS X didn’t even exist then, finding WYSIWYG editing tools that would work on the Mac has been an ongoing struggle and source of embarrassment.

How could Apple have ignored such core functionality for so long? That’s a rhetorical question, but it’s a clear demonstration of the fact that Steve Jobs and the brilliant folks at Apple aren’t flawless by any means. I think I was on the early side of recognizing the key value to web-based content management of letting end users edit content using tools that mirrored what they were used to in a word processor. It was clear to me that if you want to spread use of the browser in an organization as a tool for managing content on your website or in a database, you have to give them something more than a course in HTML and a good book.

Given their druthers, they would return to Microsoft Word every time to do their editing. And why not? Why should a nontechnical user struggle to piece together an HTML table for her data, or be forced to type code to tease a bullet list out of her content, when this problem had already been solved in the computer interface? Of course, they shouldn’t, and support for WYSIWYG editing in the browser clearly had no champion at Apple for a long time.

The only other end-user technology that Apple, unfortunately, remains way behind the curve on is video screen capture. I hope someone there realizes that static screenshots no longer suffice for many purposes, and that the screencast is a tool of immense strategic importance for marketing and education uses in the 2007 World Wide Web. Yet Mac users still don’t have a free tool for simple video capture, as Windows users do. But the purpose of this article isn’t to grouse, so I’m not going to grouse further on this subject here.

Some Evidence for the Skeptics

For those of you who simply aren’t happy unless you can see what I’m talking about, as well as those who require physical (or at least visual) evidence of what I’m saying here, I’m providing a few screenshots that you can peruse at your leisure.

For the web developers out there who have built websites that shut Safari users out by name and number, now is the time to fix your site so that it asks the browser whether it understands the ContentEditable property. This will let folks like me who are using the nightly WebKit in, and will let the hordes who upgrade to Leopard see what they’ve been missing once Apple releases it. It will also let users of the WebKit-based shareware browser OmniWeb enjoy the new trick. OmniWeb incorporates WebKit code faster than Safari in most cases… or at least, on a different schedule… and the latest release supports WYSIWYG editing just as WebKit does. OmniWeb is the only WebKit-based browser I could find that does, however… the rest appear to use the core built in to Mac OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”).

For Mac OS X web users who’d like to start using Writely, Google Spreadsheets, and WYSIWYG editing in tools like WordPress and Gmail while staying in Safari or OmniWeb, by all means download the nightly WebKit browser or the latest OmniWeb release and start living life a little more fully!

From the Genii Software’s comprehensive list of web-based WYSIWYG editors, which they have been maintaining in recent years after “the list” started at the University of Bristol, I quickly tested the following tools which had online demos and were listed as supporting IE and Firefox but not Safari. Here’s a summary of the results when testing with WebKit (latest nightly build):

Free or Open Source:

• ConceptRTE. Worked when spoofed as IE 6.0.
• Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor (RTE). Worked fine without spoofing.
• FCKeditor. Couldn’t spoof.
• CMSimple. Worked fine without spoofing.
• TinyMCE. Worked fine without spoofing.
• Through The Web Rich Text (WYSIWYG) Editor. Worked fine without spoofing.
• whizzywig editor. Worked fine without spoofing.
• Xinha. Couldn’t spoof.

Commercial:

• Ektron eWebWP. Worked when spoofed as IE 6.0
• Rad Editor for ASP.Net. Worked fine without spoofing.
• WYSIWYG PRO. Couldn’t spoof with a recent enough client, but it’s clearly spoofable based on what happened when I spoofed as IE 6.0.

Web Kit DOM: Main Page This site is much deeper than it appears at first... in fact, the home page gives you no indication there's anything much at all. But start clicking the tabs: Namespaces, Classes, and Files, and you'll find yourself wandering through a Doxygen-created maze of documentation that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about how to make WebKit tick. Oddly, I haven't seen an announcement about this on the WebKit blog... of course, this is only version 0.1, so maybe they don't consider it "ready for prime time." But honestly, developers will froth at the mouth to get at info like this.

1Passwd: Password Manager + AutoFill for Mac OS X

Originally downloaded January 31, 2007. If you switch browsers a lot or use applications that don’t natively support Apple’s Keychain, 1Passwd may be just the thing to help you out. It not only provides unified password support—while still utilizing Keychain—but goes beyond that in a number of ways. 1Passwd lets you set up multiple identities for its autofill functionality, through which it can automatically fill in forms on various websites. You can specify how much or how little of the requested information is supplied by picking the appropriate user. There’s more, but at this point I’ve done nothing more than read the website info and watch the developer’s screencast. At the developer’s request, I’ll be trying 1Passwd out myself and will post a review of it here in a couple days, so stay tuned! One other factoid of interest is that you can use 1Passwd for free within certain limits, which is a very nice way of publishing shareware. Without registering ($30 for a single user, $40 for a family license), you can have 1Passwd handle passwords for a single user identity and for up to 12 web forms.

Update 2/2/07. Unlike most reviews here at Software Addicts, this review of 1Passwd is being paid for by the application developer through ReviewMe.com. This explains why I’m getting the review done so quickly rather than waiting months (sometimes)… But I assure readers that 1Passwd is subjected to the same scrutiny that all the Mac software we evaluate is, and I’ve shown the developer no mercy in putting 1Passwd through its paces. Fortunately for me, the developer, and the Mac community at large, 1Passwd is a delightful application that will does a great job of extending the Mac OS X keychain to several web browsers that don’t natively support it.

At first, I was skeptical, mainly because most of the apps I use and care about already support Keychain. But in fact, there are several big ones that don’t. Although I don’t use Firefox, Camino, Flock, or OmniWeb, I do use the nightly WebKit browser, which, like those other apps, doesn’t use the Keychain and doesn’t leverage Safari’s saved forms functionality. So I can see right away that 1Passwd would take away my main misgivings about putting Safari aside: It would let me use WebKit while still getting Safari’s form-filling and password-remembering smarts. The application lets you import all relevant Keychain entries from Safari, thus making them available to the other browsers as well. (I believe 1Passwd also imports Safari’s saved forms, but I wasn’t able to test this.) The only caveat here is that the process requires you to approve 1Passwd’s use of each and every Keychain entry, and if you have hundreds of these (as I do), it could take awhile… longer than you may want to spend, in fact.

I should note that one thing I didn’t like about 1Passwd is the demo restriction you work under, which limits you to 12 passwords and one identity. This restriction limited my ability to fully test 1Passwd’s scalability, or to see how it would handle import of information from multiple browsers. On the other hand, you can freely use 1Passwd with this restriction if it’s no problem for you… there is no time limit.

Besides its use in enabling Keychain for other web browsers, 1Passwd also has a unique feature that lets you set up multiple identities for yourself. This is useful if you want to set up specific profiles for web logins, or to specify what information you want to provide about yourself to a given website. Using a toolbar icon that 1Passwd places in your browser (different, customizable icons for each browser, by the way…), you can tell the software to log you in as “Bob” on this website and as “Dick” on another. On one website, you can log in with an identity that provides your address details, while using a different one elsewhere that provides only your name and email address.

Like Keychain, 1Passwd runs in the background, and it requires you to authenticate its use of information entered into web forms. If you decide to use 1Passwd, you may want to turn off your browser’s native support for this functionality… otherwise, you’ll end up authenticating several times. Fortunately, 1Passwd appears to have robust export features, so your data won’t be locked inside in case you decide to stop using it at some point. You can export your information to Passport Wallet format, plist format, and for use on a Palm or Treo, for example.

I did run into a few problems while testing 1Passwd, but none that significantly affected usability or functionality. Mostly, the list of Cons in the table below are suggestions for improving the user experience… They’re features I like to see in all A-Class Mac OS X software, so I try to encourage developers to adopt them. Especially for the family license, which covers your household’s use of 1Passwd for $40, this software is a good value. The following is a list of the pros and cons I noted during my evaluation.

Pros

Cons

Very attractive interface for managing identities, passwords, secure notes, and so on. Clear, detailed help pages do a great job explaining all the options and how to enable them. Great integration with the Mac OS X keychain, including advanced options such as .mac synching and import of passwords from other browsers’ keychains (Safari and Camino specifically). Supports smart folders for organizing your passwords and autofill form data. Although I’m a big fan of Apple’s Keychain application, I can see how 1Passwd’s interface would simplify the process of looking up form data you’ve saved. 1Passwd supports multiple identities, which gives users the power to “be” different people for autofill-form purposes in different circumstances. Simply use the button that appears in your browser’s toolbar to switch identities, and from then on 1Passwd will pull only the information authorized for that identity when filling forms etc. Like the Keychain, 1Passwd will fill in forms and password fields when it isn’t running, either automatically or through interaction with the toolbar icon it adds to your browser. The notes functionality supports use of a separate set of “categories”, which correspond to the folders you can set up in the Folders section. When working in Notes, you can set up folders independently from those you set up in Web Forms. I tested 1Passwd with Camino, Firefox, and WebKit (which doesn’t natively use the Mac OS X Keychain, incidentally… a huge difference from its commercial Safari sibling), and it worked great and reliably.

Importing keychain passwords from Safari will take forever, since you have to authorize each website individually. This may not be 1Passwd’s fault, but it sure is a hindrance to setting it up if you’ve been using the default Keychain and Safari pretty much exclusively for years… I ended up having to force-quit WebKit because I couldn’t wait while 1Passwd checked with me on all 666 Keychain web passwords (including web form passwords). Apparently, you must have 1Passwd running in order to use its keychain. This isn’t totally intuitive if you’re used to using Keychain itself, which doesn’t have to be running in order to manage your passwords and form data. Update: I must have been mistaken here… perhaps the issue is that 1Passwd must have saved a password using a given browser before it will make itself available via the toolbar icon? In any case, it does now appear even when the application isn’t running. 1Passwd’s 12-form restriction is too restrictive for a reasonable evaluation of the software, since it counts every saved password as a saved form. I was able to get a bit more flexibility by deleting two of the passwords imported from Safari; however, it wasn’t until I emptied the trash that 1Passwd recognized I had only 10 saved passwords instead of the 12 max. The software’s default naming system for autosave forms appears inconsistent. In one case, it saved the form as “Autosave form - username/passwd”, while in the next case, it named it from the HTML page’s Title. Fortunately, it’s easy to rename these in the main 1Passwd window. As with several Mac apps since Tiger, it’s unclear how to set up a smart folder. There’s no function for this in the menubar, and the “+” icon in the status bar just sets up a regular folder by default… doesn’t give you a choice. When I deleted the regular folder I’d made by mistake (see above), 1Passwd crashed. I was fooled into thinking 1Passwd supports smart folders because the application uses the “smart folder” icon… it turns out that you can’t set up smart folders, after all. I think the two folders that have the smart folder icon are indeed “smart” folders… that is, they contain criteria-based lists–one for all passwords and one for all “unassigned” passwords. To “assign” passwords to folders, though, is a manual exercise. Oh well… I’d like more contextual menus… for example, to delete a password from the list, you can’t Ctrl-click (or right-click) and use a delete function. Instead, you have to use either the menubar or the action menu icon in the pane’s status bar. The same is true if you want to edit an item. The developer could also make better use of the application’s toolbar… at the moment, you can’t customize it at all, other than collapsing it with the toolbar icon. Again, there’s no contextual menu associated with the toolbar, nor is there a function in the menubar. There are a number of useful features that could be added to the 1Passwd toolbar, since 1Passwd is a Cocoa app.

Version as tested: 2.3.5.

MiNews: RSS News Aggregator Originally downloaded January 22, 2007. Here's a cool-looking free RSS reader I hadn't tried when doing my roundup of RSS readers last year. The new update apparently takes care of some of the weaknesses in the previous version, such as the ability to import OPML files, while adding some neat new features such as a built-in web browser. Definitely worth a try.

Version as tested: 1.4.

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » CSS3 Multi-Column Support Storming right ahead, the WebKit team has now added support for CSS 3.0-specified multiple columns in the nightly builds. I gather that the Mozilla team has done something similar, although one of the commenters here declares that WebKit's implementation is superior. Being able to set text in multiple columns really enhances the page layout capabilities of web content. If we'd had this from the beginning, we never would have gone to table-based layouts! I can't wait to start using this one...

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Box Shadow Wow... this will save designers so much time! If you stop to think about the hours spent crafting decent-looking drop-shadows for boxes and the like... well, let's just hope this spreads to other browsers soon! And yes, this is already a CSS3 standard... it's just not something we've gotten used to using yet. I don't know if other browsers support it or not, but I know I'm gonna start using it as soon as Safari 3.0 is released!

Apple - iPhone In these jaded times, it's hard to impress people. But I sincerely doubt that even the most ardent Apple-haters will be able to look at these demos of the new iPhone by Apple, Inc. (yes, they just dropped "computer" from their name!) without giving in to awe... pure, marvelous awe. If the delivered product is half as good as it looks, I'll be standing in line for one, because it so far exceeds my expectations that I'm really, really... impressed! The iPhone is a misnomer, because this is the "convergent" product the market has been anticipating for years. The iPhone is:

• A widescreen iPod for video and audio, synked through iTunes
• A mobile phone (yawn) with integrated camera, voicemail and photo sharing
• A web browser (Safari), including email, Google maps, search, and widgets
• A technological marvel, featuring a new "multitouch" touchscreen system (no buttons), an embedded copy of Mac OS X, wireless computing (bluetooth, 802.11b/g, and Cingular's Edge network, and sophisticated new sensors that do a heckuva lotta cool things just by moving the device around.

Did I mention it comes with a Bluetooth headset?

Help! I can't wait until June!

Songbird Media Player: Play Music, Play The Web Originally downloaded 1/2/07. I just finished watching the excellent screencast for Songbird, and I have to admit, I'm excited about this little birdie. Songbird goes beyond iTunes by basically building the media player on top of its built-in web browser (which uses the Gecko engine from Mozilla). You can see playlists built on web pages you browse, if they have media files linked to them, and Songbird plays the files as if they were already on your hard drive. On top of that, Songbird has a search engine optimized for music searches, and you can of course easily subscribe to podcasts you encounter while browsing. Songbird also does video files similar to the way Democracy handles them. To top it off, Songbird has a plug-in architecture that supports skins (Songbird calls them "feathers"), as well as extensions a la Firefox. Oh, and when I first ran Songbird, it found my iTunes library and offered to import it! I don't think I'm ready to start using it as a replacement for iTunes yet, though... one of the big questions about such a move, of course, would be how well (if at all) it can sync with my iPod. In any case, this open source project, still in its infancy, looks very promising indeed!

Version as tested: 0.2.1.

Unsupported browser - Renkoo OK, so on the recommendation of Ajaxian.com, I signed up for an account with Renkoo. Now, they could tell what browser I was using at that point, but did they warn me ahead of time that I was wasting my time? Heck, no. I got my invite email and followed it back to Renkoo, but after logging in I got this page. Burns me up to think these silly people think Mac users should be left out of the party, or that we should have to wear what everyone else is wearing to the party. I hope their party crashes and burns!

Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » Introducing Text-Stroke Well this is certainly a useful addition to the type designer's bag of tricks when developing a web site design. I'm sure it'll be abused, but only after it's ported to Windows and all the PowerPoint-design hordes get hold of it. Now that the WebKit team's made this code available, it suddenly seems so obvious, I wonder why the designers of CSS 3.0 didn't think of it? Oh well, you can't think of everything, can you?

Creammonkey: Free Input Manager for Safari runs Javascript extensions

Originally downloaded 2/20/06. Many Safari users have gazed with envy at the plethora of add-ons for Firefox, though in the final analysis there are only 3 or 4 that I really wish would come to Safari. One was Greasemonkey… and now we have Creammonkey, which will try to fill those shoes… Worth a try!

Update 10/29/06. Well, eight months after launch, there are still only a tiny handful of scripts that work with Creammonkey. I’m going to watch it awhile longer, but if the usefulness quotient doesn’t go up soon, I’ll pack Creammonkey in. Now that SafariScript is available—with a lot more scripts behind it—Creammonkey may not make it anyway. The fatal flaw seems to be its lack of compatibility with the hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts that already exist. That’s probably not the developer’s fault, but it may doom the effort in the end.

p:OK, even though Creammonkey still isn’t anywhere near as useful for Safari as Greasemonkey is for Firefox, I’ve found at least two scripts that make me want to keep it around. The first one I stumbled on quite by accident… it’s a cool little script called Greased Lightbox, which adds the popular “lightbox” effect to any image you link to from the page. The site designer doesn’t need to do anything but add links to an image… which is quite typical on sites that show thumbnails with links to larger versions. The script’s page has some sample images you can test it with, and also suggests that Google’s image search is a good place to use it. Personally, I’ve been surprised to find how often Greased Lightning is invoked as I browse the web these days… The first time I saw it, I honestly thought it was another lightbox javascript that was being served from the site owner’s HTML page. Greased Lightning alone is worth installing Creammonkey for.

Yesterday, I went searching for more Greasemonkey scripts that are compatible with Creammonkey. Unfortunately, I didn’t find many. The large repository at userscripts.org turns up only a handful, and if you follow some of those links, you might find a few more. For example, this programmer’s site has a number of Greasemonkey scripts, and he believes some of them may work with Creammonkey. I installed a couple of them but didn’t have any success. (I didn’t have time to be exhaustive…)

Nevertheless, I did turn up one other very cool script that works great in Creammonkey: RSS Panel X. RSS Panel X reads the HTML page’s RSS meta tags and then parses and displays the linked feeds in a tiny floating, collapsible window that appears in surprising, bright pastel colors. The script also reads a selection of microformats you may have embedded on your page and adds them to the RSS feed info. I haven’t been able to get this script to work in “automatic” mode in the manner of Greased Lightning, so I added a bookmarklet to my Safari bookmark panel.

Creammonkey is free, has been improved to the point that it no longer degrades Safari’s performance, and now has at least two really useful scripts that lets it show what it can do. Here’s hoping more will be coming along as time goes on.

Version as tested: 0.8.

Rage Software: Over 6 Years of Mac HTML Editing

Originally downloaded 1/25/06. Dreamweaver has kind of lost its appeal for me over the last few years, and I’m doing more and more with just a text editor. Which is fine, but… CSS and other things need a visual editor. This is one I should check out…

Update 12/7/06. OK… this is about the third time this year I’ve opened WebDesign to try it out. Each time, I frankly get weary just looking at it. There’s more menus and functions and icons and buttons here than you can (or would want to) shake a stick at! WebDesign has a whole boatload of plugins and extensions that comes with the trial download, too. I’m sure all of this is good news to some people, but I’m looking for simplicity in my HTML editor… not a Dreamweaver-wannabe. For now, I’ll keep using Nvu, the open-source editor from the Mozilla group, because at least it’s got a nice, clean, compact interface. And it’s free.

But I’ll keep looking, because I know there must be something better out there…

Version as tested: 2.8.

Quartz Composer Programming Guide: Webpages and Widgets This is pretty cool... I don't think many Mac users know that you can run most Quartz compositions in your browser nowadays, if you're using a late-model version of Safari or WebKit on Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later. Now Apple is trying to educate us on how we can make those compositions interactive using JavaScript. This document explains how to embed a composition in HTML and how to manipulate it using JavaScript.

Protopage News Blog » Protopage V3 released As the find print notes, the Protopage developers "we highly recommend [that Mac users] use either the Firefox or Opera browser for the best Protopage experience." Nevertheless, this is progress, and Safari users no longer get a "no welcome" sign when they try this Web 2.0 personalized home page service out.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Safari better than Firefox? You may not even have noticed the type rendering glitches that afflict Firefox, but clearly they were contributing to your subliminal opinion that Safari simply looks better than Firefox. This guy's blog post does a great job of pointing the glitches out and attempts to explain the underlying problems in Firefox. In some ways, this is no surprise. The Mac has always emphasized excellent typography, which is one of the things that drew print designers to it in the first place. If you've never come to expect great type-handling (as Windows users haven't), you would never even notice the difference. But discerning Mac users can tell. (I hypothesize that one of the reasons Firefox sucks at type is that it doesn't use the Cocoa frameworks... but you could test this by trying the same pages in Camino.)

NetFixer: Get Originally downloaded 11/27/06. This neat little app does for free what some other tools will only do if you pay enough. Basically, it's a one-trick pony that captures a given URL... all of it, no matter how long the page extends. From a test on the Mars home page, it did a great job of capturing elements that had to be processed with JavaScript as well as basic static components. You can choose from several image formats to store the file, and it also apparently works as a bookmarklet (though I haven't tried that yet).

Version as tested: 0.1.