Looking back,This is an update to the article I wrote last summer, when Safari 3.0 was first released. In the 9 months since then, a lot has happened, and I wanted to try to keep this info up to date. 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.

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: Any
   can be made round.
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 new ones:

1. Adopted last October, WebKit introduced its first take at CSS Transforms, which it has submitted to the W3C for consideration. With CSS Transforms, <DIV>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.
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 support this geeky, but highly practical feature.
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.

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I’m releasing this in advance of Crystal Clear 1.5 since it’s ready to go and there may be one or two folks who are tired of dealing with the “roll your own” menubar from version 1.2, even though it did eliminate the ugly menu-extra smudgies of previous releases.

With Crystal Menubar, you just drag the application to your hard drive (the “Applications” folder, maybe?) and click it. This will put the nice, clear Crystal Menubar in its rightful place at the top of your screen. After that, you can just forget about it. Use whatever desktop picture that strikes your fancy!

If you decide to use it, just add it to your Login Items in System Preferences (the Accounts pane) so it gets launched when you log in.

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One question that might pop into your head when you contemplate the fact that there are at least two dozen different software applications for Mac OS X that want to be your iTunes controller is, “So, why not just use iTunes to control iTunes?” If you’ve never used iTunes before, you might also be wondering, “What’s wrong with iTunes that makes so many people avoid using it directly?”

This is indeed a curious paradox at first blush. iTunes is the world’s most popular digital music jukebox software. It has a screaming wonderful interface that just gets better with each iteration. Its innovative design practically defines “ease of use” in this category. So, why have so many developers expended so much energy and creative imagination on redefining how we interact with it?

There isn’t just one answer to that question, but here are a few possible ones:

• Mac users are too impatient to switch applications in order to change songs. They want an application that can overlay whatever they’re currently doing, providing immediate access. Call this a variation of the “Instant gratification” impulse.
• Because the iTunes API makes building external interfaces to it so easy. You often get the impression that some iTunes controllers are their developers’ first foray into xCode and/or Cocoa programming. Call this a variation of the “Because we can” impulse.
• Because a programmer had a new idea that was too cool to pass on. Either the idea was really new, or it was building on someone else’s idea. Some of the iTunes controllers are clearly attempts to improve other ones that already exist. Call this simply the “Urge to create.”

Notice that none of these possible motives is an attempt to remedy a shortcoming in iTunes, or even to add significant functionality to the application. The only thing that comes close is the addition of tools to fetch album art from the web, or to integrate with a social music networking system like Audioscrobbler. Instead, they’re simply tools that extend the iTunes interface into every aspect of a Mac user’s workflow… making it practically ubiquitous as we work.

A couple of weeks ago, I set out to survey the market to identify all of the iTunes controllers that are currently supported. (There are still old links to some phantom controllers on MacUpdate, but I won’t tell you which.) Having found 24 of them, I clearly don’t have the time to prepare a full snapshot of each as I’ve done for other software categories recently. In order to keep this workload sane for me, I have to skinny it down to the basics–my notes, a link, price info, a version number, and a recommendation.

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After all, who would ever install an opaque window? In the real world, a window by definition is clear—you can see through it. If it weren’t clear, you couldn’t very well call it a “window.” In other words, an opaque window is an oxymoron. Yet, that very oxymoron is the norm on our computer desktops today. As Crystal Clear evolves, its aim is coming closer to making opaque windows as much of an oxymoron on your desktop as they are in that wall over there.

Computer desktops have slowly evolved since 1984, when the first Macintosh was introduced. With each operating system release, Apple has added more realism to the graphics that make up application windows, the desktop, and their various “widgets” and icons. Microsoft and other GUI-design-wannabes have followed along as closely as they could. Through this process, our software windows and icons have gained a little 3D through primitive shading, higher resolution displays, larger icons, better shadows, alpha transparency and compositing, smoother animation and transition effects, and so on. These changes have produced a dramatically more “realistic” look-and-feel today than we had in the beginning. Undoubtedly, this evolution will continue, and desktops 10 years from now will make today’s look similarly primitive.

The Crystal Clear experiment is asking the graphical question, “How about using transparency to improve realism, while enhancing the beauty of our desktops at the same time?”

Up to now, the Crystal Clear theme for Mac OS X has brought clarity to your Aqua window toolbars, titlebars, and menubars. Crystal Albook icons clarified your system and application icons. And there has been much rejoicing.

However, a common question from early users of the theme was, “How about the window edges? How about the status bar? How about Safari’s bookmark and tab bars?” Unfortunately, none of the tools in a Mac OS X themer’s bag of tricks (chiefly, ThemePark ) can help affix transparent colors or graphics onto those bits of Aqua windows, so I had to throw my shoulders up in a major, sad shrug.

Fortunately, my little experiment in alpha transparency didn’t end there. The SetAlphaValue software that’s been a key part of Crystal Clear’s magic from the beginning has led me on a merry (well, mostly merry) romp through Objective-C and Cocoa Land, the world of geeky wonder that lies behind each object on your Mac OS X desktop. With much open-source Cocoa software code, two excellent books, and the rich universe of web Cocoa resources in hand, I’ve been slowly absorbing the syntax and grammar of Objective-C, the programming language of choice for Cocoa application development. As I got deeper into the “messaging” framework that’s a key part of Cocoa, I realized I could hack SetAlphaValue to do much more than just adjust window transparency.

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This article introduces the latest version of Crystal Clear, which features an enhancement to the system menubar transparency that was described in an article last week. Although I didn't find time to work on the Crystal Albook icon set since the last release, Crystal Clear has a large number of enhancements in various button elements, as described below. I do hope to get some work done on Crystal Albook next time around.

• An experimental approach to solving the problem of "extra overlay shine" on most menu extras in the system menubar (statusbar). This approach can eliminate the visual discord created as menu extras overlay their own "toolbar" over the preexisting one. In opaque toolbars, this isn't noticeable, but it's bothersome in any toolbar with alpha transparency. (This part of the update is described in the recent Mars article, "Desperately Seeking Clarity: Wiping the Dirt from My Crystal Clear Menubar."
• Crystal Clear toolbar elements for Camino.
• New design for menu selection highlights in Crystal Clear Dark. Similar highlights also appear now in the Finder sidebar.
• Completion of pushbutton and popup button elements for Carbon apps (such as Photoshop). (The buttons were already complete for Cocoa apps.)
• New Crystal designs for the bevel buttons (butted and otherwise) that are the bane of my existence when theming Mac OS X. (O! Apple... Please make these go away in Leopard!)
• Reworking of the large metal buttons.
• Various other tweaks and fixes, plus a few more menu extras.

Future releases will work on standardizing the appearance of various otherwise-similar button elements, reducing the height of some pushbutton elements, and completing unfinished work on the slider elements.

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Since releasing of Crystal Clear and VacuumMail earlier this year, my download traffic has overridden my .Mac account ... and twice (so far) I've had to upgrade my account to accommodate the bandwidth. I don't mind that, nor do I mind the additional traffic on the Mars Downloads pages. What I do mind is the time it takes me to keep those pages updated! In fact, it takes so long I haven't been able to keep them in sync with the new stuff I was making.

I've been a pro webmaster for, well, a long time... since 1994, in fact. So keeping a couple of simple pages updated shouldn't make me break a sweat, right? Damn right! Problem is, the Download pages started as an experiment with Apple's iWeb software last year, and iWeb and WordPress don't mix well. To help them get along, I devised a simple checklist so all I'd have to do was:

1. Generate the raw HTML from iWeb
2. Massage the HTML by
   1. Tweaking a few CSS styles,
   2. Doing a few search/replaces,
   3. Doing a bit of reformatting, and
3. Plopping the iWeb HTML in the WordPress template, and
4. Moving the iWeb graphics and other files to the server.

At least, that's how I thought it was going to go. As it turns out, the convoluted HTML and CSS code that iWeb generates invariably causes problems when running inside Mars. This means each update can turn into a 2-3 hour scavenger hunt, with each contestant (Me, Me, and Me) trying to find a lost px in a huge block of unreadable code.

So last week I vowed to find another way, and I think I have. The end solution means more work up front in generating the site to begin with, but should make it very easy to rearrange, add, or rewrite content or images on those pages.

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I recently completed a review of all the currently available tools that add a class of functionality that I’m calling “window tricks” to your Mac. Such tools have existed for years, but last year saw some new tools in this category, as well as more visibility thanks to an increase in the number of new Mac users who’ve migrated from Microsoft Windows.

What these users are looking for typically is some freedom from the Mac OS X user interface constraints on how you can move and resize your application windows. As new Windows users discover, Apple’s user interface guidelines prescribe very specific parts of the window that can be used to move it (usually, just the toolbar and titlebar) or to resize it (just the lower right-hand corner of resizable windows).

Longtime Mac users (me included) generally agree that these guidelines are sensible and work well. Unlike MS Windows windows, Mac OS X windows typically don’t have “chrome” on their sides that can be used for grabbing, and that’s precisely where Windows users are accustomed to resizing and moving theirs about. Apps that do have “sides,” like the Finder, can indeed be dragged about from there. But they can only be resized from the lower right.

Even so, all Mac users have likely experienced an occasion where they’ve managed to drag a window to a location from which it can neither be resized nor moved. Don’t ask me how at the moment, but believe me, I’ve been there. There are also occasions when it would be more convenient to resize a window by its lower left corner rather than the lower right. It’s not hard to imagine what kind of configuration I’m talking about there. And in these circumstances, it’s no doubt crossed your mind that it would be sure nice to have some way to grab that freakin’ window and move it without having to do a major dance, reshuffling other components of your desktop in order to make that one simple change.

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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.

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With the recent launch of Windows Vista and its new Aero interface, everyone who knows of it is thinking about transparent/translucent windows. Indeed, folks who are into theming have known of Aero for years, since, well, it’s taken Microsoft years to get it to market.

Mac users have already enjoyed transparency in their applications for years now, though not as part of the window “trim.” (As I discuss briefly later on, Aqua doesn’t actually have much “trim”.) Rather, it’s just something we take for granted in applications like the Dock, Dashboard, and Expose, and QuickTime Player (which pops up throughout Mac OS X to present slideshows, image thumbnail views, and of course full-screen video), as well as in Apple’s growing use of “HUD” displays, which use a transparent black interface.

Then, of course, there are apps like Quicksilver, which has taken advantage of transparency in its Bezel interface for years, and more recently in its amazing, animated Cube interface, Growl, which uses Apple’s bezel framework in several styles, and numerous others like DropCopy (whose whole interface is transparent), QuartzClocks (which lets users adjust the transparency of your chosen clock), and AlarmClock (which again uses the bezel framework to great effect).

Nevertheless, when I first saw Mac themer/designer Ice Specter’s attempts to develop a transparent theme for Mac OS X that would duplicate the look of Aero, I was “hooked on transparency” in a big way. At the time, I didn’t realize that Ruler Aero, Ice Specter’s theme, was emulating the new Windows “look,” but it wouldn’t have mattered in any case. For one thing, as cool as Ruler Aero was, it wasn’t usable enough, and it had this disconcerting blend of transparent toolbars (in metal apps) and opaque ones (in everything else). It was a proof-of-concept, and a terrific one at that.

But from the get-go, what Ruler Aero made me lust after wasn’t Windows Vista Aero-style translucency, but rather totally transparent windows. In addition, I wanted a theme that would give me transparent toolbars in both metal apps like the Finder, QuickTime Player, and Safari and in regular Cocoa apps like Preview, Mail, Activity Monitor, Keynote, and Pages (in other words, in most of the apps I use).

However, after experimenting off and on for a couple of years to achieve the look I had in my head, I had pretty much given up. Every thread I followed in the theming forums concluded that transparency wasn’t possible in a Mac OS X theme except in the few places Ruler Aero had achieved it. I concluded that Apple had designed Mac OS X and Aqua so as to completely thwart all attempts at my transparency nirvana.

Then, quite by accident last month, I stumbled onto a setting in Apple’s Cocoa framework that finally unlocked the secret of transparency for Mac OS X’s toolbars. I’ve now finished applying that setting to a Mac OS X theme that enables totally see-through windows, and I’m calling it “Crystal Clear.”

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What could be more logical–or more beautiful–than crystal clear windows on your Mac? Were grey metal windows something we yearned for? Of course not! Windows were made to see through.

Coming soon to a Mac near you… Crystal Clear, a new experiment in alpha transparency for Mac OS X.

Here are some preview shots of a few of my favorites.

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I’ve been intrigued by the concept of virtual desktops since encountering them in a Unix system many years ago (I think it was an SGI Irix system), and then later when I set up Linux about 5 years ago to play around with that OS firsthand. Then, a couple of years ago I saw an early build of Virtue Desktops and thought it was pretty cool. I really loved the nifty transition effects and all the desktop customization you can do with Virtue.

However, Virtue seemed pretty flaky at the time, so I looked around to see what other virtual desktop environments there were for Mac OS X. To my surprise, there were several in addition to Virtue… including some commercial implementations. After trying all the free ones (I wasn’t interested in paying for this feature, since I didn’t even know if I’d like it), I decided Virtue was the best of the bunch.

But I also decided that Virtue’s flakiness was simply adding more time to my routine rather than helping me organize my work, and I finally broke down and decided to try You Control Desktops. Now, it may be a total coincidence, but just after I installed Desktops and restarted my system, the whole OS began to flake out, and I ended up having to trash my hard drive.

Needless to say, whether that was You Desktops’ fault or just a bad hard drive kicking in, it soured me on the whole idea of virtual desktops for awhile.

Then, when Apple announced in August that one of the premier features of its forthcoming Leopard OS would be a virtual desktop system called Spaces, I thought that maybe someone would finally get this thing done right on Mac OS X. Maybe the problem has been that the implementations I’d tried just weren’t intuitive enough, or right-featured enough, to be useful to me. I even said this out loud in an article of video snippets from the WWDC keynote that I published in mid-August.

Apple’s initiative with Spaces also made me question my previous conclusion that virtual desktops were not worth the effort. If Apple is investing the energy to bring virtual desktops to “the rest of us” someone at Apple must believe that they are a user interface enhancement that will really benefit “us.”

So, I opened my mind once again to the idea of virtual desktops. As a member of the select Apple developer group, I’ve been getting the Leopard “seeds” as they’re released, and I’ve taken the opportunity to try out Spaces along with other new features of Leopard. Given my nondisclosure agreement with Apple, I’m not going to say anything about Spaces that isn’t revealed in Apple’s own presentation of it on the Leopard website. Instead, I’m going to spend a few minutes sharing my impressions of virtual desktops in general and of four other specific VD applications that are already available for Mac OS X:

• CodeTek VirtualDesktop Pro
• Desktop Manager
• Virtue Desktops
• YouControl: Desktops

At the outset, I’ll confess that my note-taking for this exercise wasn’t as rigorous as usual… I didn’t test for the same set of features in each application. Unfortunately, I can’t go back now and refresh my memory for the commercial products, because their demo licenses have expired. The reason for my relatively sloppy approach probably reflects my renewed conviction, after thoroughly testing Spaces, that for most computer users, virtual desktops are a waste of time and effort. Simply put, they’re an idea whose time has passed.

That’s a pretty harsh judgment, I realize, and one likely to make a good number of fellow geeks stop reading right here. After all, some users of virtual desktops feel strongly that they are highly valuable and necessary—for them. And I suspect that’s true. Given the probability for misunderstanding when expressing an opinion on a topic like this, I want to begin by exploring why virtual desktops arose in the first place and what benefits users get (or believe they get) from them. I also want to explore the expectations users have of virtual desktops like Spaces, in the very likely event that they’ve never actually used such a system themselves.

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If you’re a Mac user who’s wandered in to this article and don’t know what Growl is yet, you might want to stop by that essential open-source project’s home page to get acquainted. Once your Mac starts Growling, you’ll understand how fitting it is that Apple’s naming all their OS X releases after large cats.

If you’re a Windows user, you’re still welcome to read up on Growl and why it’s become a standard component of so many Mac users’ desktops even though it’s still only at version 0.7.4. If you find Growl cool, too, you know what to do.

This article isn’t about Growl, though. It’s about Growl displays—the part of Growl you actually see when an event occurs you’ve asked to be notified about. You see, like many other cool apps nowadays (Adium, Synergy, Menuet, etc.), Growl is “skinnable.” Part of the fun—and the utility—of Growl is that users can customize the appearance of different kinds of alerts. In fact, Growl provides you with an astonishing degree of control over your customizing, and this flexibility is one of Growl’s coolest aspects. Using the Growl Preference Pane, you can:

• Set a default Growl style as your starting point.
• Customize certain aspects of each Growl style. Some styles let you set different attributes for up to 5 different priority levels.
• Assign a default style to each different application that’s registered with Growl. (Here’s a growing list of Mac OS X applications that now include support for Growl event notifications.)
• Override the default for any specific notification event, or for a given event priority.

Growl notifications can take several forms: Email, speech (using the Mac’s built-in vocal chords), or visual displays. The visual display types are roughly broken down into two kinds:

1. Displays you build with AppleScript or xCode (those with the extension .growlView), and
2. Displays that are basically just little web pages (those with the extension .growlStyle).

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You’ve heard about one or two of them, and you may even have seen a YouTube video of Safari 3.0’s tab tricks. But let me tell you, as part of my Building Leopard project, discovering Safari 3.0 has left me with an insatiable desire to work in Leopard full-time. There are three standout features that I really miss when I “degrade gracefully” to other modern web browsers on my Mac—and that includes Firefox 2.0x, Opera 9.x, and Safari 2.x as my regular web companions.

Even though Firefox has enough cool extensions to keep a software addict fed from now until next year, none of them match the upcoming features Apple has cooked up for Safari 3.0 in Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”). Likewise, Opera and its talented development team is going to be left behind the curve for awhile, as are better-than-Safari wannabes like Shiira and OmniWeb on the Mac. (It took Microsoft 5 years to add tabs to its browser, and from the way they’ve implemented them, I still don’t think they quite get it. So, no, I’m not expecting any innovative new ideas in web browsing from Redmond any time soon.)

Ok, with a buildup like that, I can hear you Safari naysayers out there beginning to clear your throats in preparation for throwing out some canned dissults about Safari. Save ‘em.

I’m not sharing these in order to put down anybody else’s browser of choice (well, IE is so far down it’s hard to do anything else!), and I’m not suggesting they are going to revolutionize web browsing, even remotely. The ideas Apple has implemented are not so unique that the company should have taken out patents or anything. Rather, these are incremental innovations of the sort that keep the art of web browsing moving forward. It’s ideas like these that could potentially jog the minds of other creative programmers, who will then go off and imagine some other cool new enhancements for Firefox or Opera or Shiira or OmniWeb.

In the end, it’s all good for web surfers like you and me. (Hey! Are humans and martians who browse the web “web browsers”? If so, when do we get new features?)

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If you’ve been hoping Blacktree would enable the planned customization feature for Quicksilver’s Cube interface, I’m happy to report that the wait is over!

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Another day, another cool new WebKit-related application that made me stop what I was doing and take some screenshots! In this case, I also took a couple of home movies to demonstrate features that words may not quite do justice to. What am I talking about tonight? Much to my delight, I’m referring to the new public beta release of Shiira 2.0, an open source web browser based on Apple’s WebKit and its WebCore/JavaScriptCore framework.

Most of the folks who wander into this blog from a Mac OS X background have undoubtedly tried Shiira before. The project’s humble goal is “to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari.” That goal has been elusive in the past, although Shiira 1.2 has certainly put WebKit through some powerful experiments and come up with a few features that Apple would do well to emulate (draggable tabs, anyone?). But mark my words… if the Shiira team finishes version 2.0 before Apple unveils Safari 3.0 next spring with the launch of Mac OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”), they will have accomplished their goal—at least for a little while.

This prediction is based on no more than an hour of browsing and tinkering with the as-yet-unfinished Shiira 2.0 beta release. I’m not going to go through a blow-by-blow of Shiira 2.0 here. (For that, check out this useful “visual preview” of Shiira 2.0.) Instead, I want to highlight a couple of the features that I think could very well lead me to switch from Safari to Shiira once the developers complete a few more of the missing functionalities (e.g., bookmark bar). In my opinion, this browser is that good.

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Like many of you who develop on the Mac, I was amazed and very impressed by the WebKit team’s Web Inspector tool when it was unveiled in January. However, it was clearly not yet complete… two critical tabfulls of data were missing, which kept me turning to other tools—like the excellent Firebug for Firefox—when getting into a serious debugging session.

Well, tonight I was delighted to discover that the wait is over! On downloading a new build of WebKit today, I found that Web Inspector finally can provide those critical Metrics and Properties of each DOM element on my web pages. And boy, have they done a great job in the implementation! Every bit as cool and functional as the original bits, so I can now get all the details on any element of the page with a right-click of my mouse (control-click for some folks) and a simple selection of “Inspect Element.” Now come on Firebug fans, don’t you wish you could inspect an element that easily? Not that it’s hard with Firebug, but I always say, “Save a millisecond here and a millisecond there, and pretty soon you’ve saved a whole second!” (Just kidding… I never said that before.)

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I’ve been hooked on the idea of screencasting ever since Jon Udell started pushing it a couple of years ago.  He pointed out some very effective screencasts that others had made and posted several excellent screencasts himself, interspersed with articles on best practices, tools, and tips.  As Udell pointed out in “Movies of Software,” Apple has done a less-than-stellar job at making screencasting on the Mac as super-simple as other creative and educational tasks are.  He was also dismayed–well, at least, I was dismayed–to report that he was doing his screencasting on a Windows machine mainly because Microsoft had provided superior, free tools for doing so.  *Groan*  Let’s see… that was a year and a half ago!  I thought surely someone from Apple would have read his blog post and rushed an update to QuickTime Pro to make amends.  Not that it’s completely equivalent, because QuickTime Pro isn’t free, but at least Mac OS X users wouldn’t have to go hunting and pecking for a tool to do a basic job like screen-capturing.  The problem is, you see, that the world has moved on from Grab, and when I think “screen-capture” today, I don’t just think still pictures.  Heck, no.  I want to capture motion… I want to capture sound.  I want to capture software.

The sound part is easy, thanks to the truly superior tools Apple provides in iLife… in this case, GarageBand.  But the video… Like I said, *Groan*!  On a Mac, you can capture yourself making funny faces in both stills and videos… You can create little video miracles of your family at play… You can turn yourself into a budding American Idol with GarageBand and iMovie.  But you can’t do a simple thing like capturing the beautiful animations and user-interface delights that Mac users enjoy while working with their software.  In other words, you can’t capture videos of Mac OS X in action.

So, one of the categories of software I’ve been keeping an eye on–and cataloguing possible purchases in–has been video screen capture products.  I don’t think I’d ever have the time–or talent–to prepare true screencasts in the Jon Udell mold, but I have found myself wanting to capture small videos of Mac OS X software in action on many occasions.  In fact, little videos have been creeping into my software reviews and other blog posts for the last 6 months or so.

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I admit I was skeptical when Yahoo took over Konfabulator last year.  Apple had released Dashboard for Mac OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”), which had some clear advantages over the old Konfabulator widget model.  The first time or two I tried the Yahoo widgets, I was singularly unimpressed not only with the performance of the widgets but also with their quality. They reminded me of why I had never been impressed with Konfabulator, although I’m sure Konfabulator’s wanting money for their product had something to do with that, too.

Also there was Yahoo! itself… a company that until the last 12 months or so had been growing more conservative, more commercial, more corporate, and less fun than the Yahoo I started loving 10 years ago. Not only that, but Yahoo appeared to be less and less friendly toward the world’s Mac-minded minority. I had grown so disenchanted with Yahoo mail that I finally gave up last summer and packed my bags for the terrific IMAP mail service called Fastmail. So it was a bit of a surprise when Yahoo wandered into territory that originally had been 100% populated by Mac-type aliens. Clearly, the visionaries had regained some influence at the company, as other recent smart moves testify (see all the cutting edge Yahoo goodies at the Yahoo Developer Network).

So, when I downloaded the Yahoo Widget Engine (YWE) 3.0 in December, I was pleasantly surprised to notice that things had changed quite a bit.  Setting it aside until last month, YWE 3.1, the latest release as of this writing, confirmed my first impressions. YWE widgets are now very well behaved, for the most part, and take no more system resources than Dashboard widgets do.  Plus there are actually some widgets that don’t have good Dashboard counterparts.

But finding more great widgets isn’t the only thing that’s made YWE a standard part of my desktop.  What I really admire is the YWE implementation of widgets, which has firmed up my longstanding view that Apple needs to modify the Dashboard concept to make it more flexible, if they want Mac users to truly embrace widget-dom.  The particular traits I admire are nothing new… they were standard in Konfabulator, and there’s one application for Mac OS X called Amnesty that will emulate the concept. I have stubbornly refused to pay the $20 that Mesa Dynamics wants for Amnesty, especially now that I use YWE, which does most of Amnesty’s tricks for free.  So what exactly are those tricks?

• Run widgets like normal applications outside of Dashboard
• Easily change a widget’s “window level”–meaning, where it resides starting from the desktop itself up to a window that floats persistently above all regular windows, with several layers in between.
• Ability to lock a widget in place
• Ability to set transparency for a widget.
• Ability to access widgets–and their preferences–from a handy menubar item.
• Ability to stop and start the widget layer as the need arises.

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Since my original report on the browser and platform compatibility of some 50 Ajax JavaScript libraries in March, the market has continued to produce new toolkits at a rapid pace. I recently finished grading all (but one) of the 8 libraries added since March, and I’ve revisited the scores of another 8. With that, the time seemed right for a report on how Ajax library developers are doing at achieving cross-browser, cross-platform compatibility in the tools they’re giving us–tools which programmers around the world are using to hammer out their unique vision of Web 2.0.

I’m very pleased to report that the trend is moving strongly toward full compatibility. Of the eight new libraries, a full five of them achieve top grades of “A”. That’s a much higher percentage of the total than in March, and of the three non-A libraries, only one was a D (D+ actually). One was graded C+ and the other B. Of the revisited libraries, I was able to raise grades for three–Backbase, ICEfaces, and MochiKit. Only one library had a lower grade (Rico, down from A- to B), and the rest were unchanged.

Only two of the 8 new libraries have commercial licenses you’d have to pay for, and in one case you are really only paying for the IDE. Three of the new libraries require a java server architecture in order to be happy, one would prefer Cold Fusion, and the others are pure client libraries that are agnostic with respect to the application server. One library was added just a couple of days ago (Jitsu), and I haven’t had time to review it yet–but you’ll find it summarized here with the rest. Only one of these 16 libraries is DHTML with no Ajax controls–Uize. Even without Ajax, however, I think you’ll find Uize to be one of the most interesting here–especially in terms of visual richness.

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, the whole Ajax/Web 2.0 thing that’s happened this last year reminds me vividly of the mid-1990’s. Back then, the web was brand new, it was exciting, everyone was learning how to build web applications, developers were totally turned on and creative, everybody was pointing out cool new apps and sites, and the potential of this new computing platform seemed unlimited. Leading the charge was a young company that built software for every operating system under the sun, and they clearly had a solid vision of where they were headed. During 1994-96, Netscape introduced one astonishing new client-side technology after another to what a web browser could do–tables, animated graphics, client-side imagemaps, frames, cookies (yes, these really were a vital improvement to the web client), and something they called Javascript.

Each of these technologies offered dramatic new ways of presenting information in a web browser, and developers who loved new gadgets glommed on to every advance, racing each other to see who could do the coolest things with these first. A lot of mistakes were made–a lot of really ugly eggs were hatched–but excitement and optimism were the buzz feelings. With Netscape in charge, you felt like you do when working as a protege with a master hacker: Does this guy ever stop pulling amazing tricks out of his sleeve?

One of the promises of Netscape’s vision was that the web–and, in particular, the web browser–could make one’s choice of operating system irrelevant. The web could level the computing playing field, since applications built for the web were applications for all, regardless of what OS you happened to prefer. What worked for NeXT, OS/2, Irix, Solaris, and Windows would also work just fine on Linux, Mac OS, Be OS, HP-UX, and BSD. The web browser could be the OS, and the only limiting factor in what you could do would be your hardware and connection speed. Microsoft’s lock on the computer desktop could be broken, and new competitors in operating systems and computers could unleash the full potential of the personal computer to improve our lives–both at work and at leisure.

Only, it didn’t quite turn out that way.

This article inventories the Ajax/DHTML toolkits now available and grades each from A to E on the degree to which they adhere to a cross-browser ideal. The good news is that if you want to build astonishing Web 2.0 applications in 2006, you’ve got a lot of fine Javascript libraries to choose from! And nearly all of the Grade A libraries are open-source, so you can build without shelling out a license fee for the privilege. The bad news is that some of the most prominent players in the field fall far short of that mark.

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