“Experian Hitwise has released its yearly search term statistics and once again, Facebook and YouTube top the list. The remainder of the top 10 includes three more Facebook-related terms, a couple of Yahoo! variants, craigslist, eBay, and MapQuest. Of course it’s highly unlikely that all the millions of people putting those terms in the top 10 are actually looking for information or the latest news about them; they just want a quick way to the site without having to clumsily type dots and slashes.”

The fact that people do this boggles my mind. I remember the first time I saw it – when I was doing support for a local ISP as one of my first jobs in IT – someone searched for Google.com using the Yahoo search field. I nearly fell to the ground. I asked them why they searched for Google.com instead of just typing it into the location bar. They said “What’s the difference?”

I agree with Parish that people aren’t searching for information about Facebook, Youtube, etc. They are, in fact, using search as the location bar. But I disagree that people are doing it as a way to get away from the confusing “dots and slashes”. I’ve seen people type in “.com”. They simply do not know the difference between the search field and the location field.

Think about it. Most modern-day web browsers combine the location and search fields. Safari doesn’t but it only maintains a small marketshare. Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox combine the search and location fields into one field that you can type just about anything in and the browser will figure out what you are looking for. So, are they searching for information about Facebook when they type in Facebook? Or are they simply hitting ‘Enter’ too quickly and they really want to navigate to that URL?

I’m sure extensive user testing would be needed to determine the plethora of habits of people; novice and expert alike. One thing is sure, the browsers should be doing a much better job of taking people to web pages instead of search results in different situations. But, why would they? They make their money on searches too.

iOS 5 and up only.

/via Shawn Blanc.

Firefox 4 was released today and once again I’m made to feel this same nauseating feeling. Every single time a new Browser is released, well Safari, Chrome, or Firefox (we’ll leave Internet Explorer, Opera and others out of this), I’m torn between making the jump from one browser to the other.

I’ve jumped around a lot over the years. And it always comes back to one thing that determines whether or not I use a Browser every day; speed. I don’t use many extensions, themes, or add-ons in any Browser. I had used Safari before it even supported such things. Speed, however, keeps me loyal to a Browser until – inevitably – the next-fastest Browser released pulls me away.

On the outset Firefox 4 feels very snappy. Just about as fast as Chrome (if not faster) and a lot faster than Safari. Chrome and Firefox 4 are now neck-and-neck for winning my default Browser of choice. But that’s today and I’m sure that won’t last long and, once again, I’ll be left with the nauseating choice of jumping ship.

Here are the statistics for the last 30 days here on my personal site. Internet Explorer is still #1 in spite of every single geek on the planet wanting it to simply go away. But it isn’t winning by much. Firefox and Safari are pretty close behind and Chrome is catching up quickly.

The Safari number includes both iPhone and iPad as well as the Macintosh and Windows. The Mac and iPhone split up the biggest portion of this with Windows and iPad nearly tying.

Interestingly, if you combine Chrome and Safari, which both run the Webkit rendering engine, then Webkit clearly stands out as the #1 rendering engine for all HTML/JS on my site.

So it looks like it is Internet Explorer vs. Webkit – at this point – as being the two main contenders in this war. Firefox, which is doing very very well on its own, is beginning to show signs of lagging behind both Safari and Chrome in their growth rates. This could all change in one day with one killer update from Mozilla – but I’m not holding my breath.

So why do I say that there are ton of casualties in this war? Because the people who spend all of their time building websites and applications have more browsers to build against than ever before, not less. More screens, more devices means more problems. Choice for the end user means headaches for the builders.

This problem probably won’t go away even if every browser manufacturer united under the banner of Webkit. If they did the spirit and motivation of competition would be gone – leaving only the end-user to suffer from lack of progress.

It appears that this war is not going to end and the bodies will continue to pile.

“I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.”

It seems I’m going to follow the speed and it turns out that Chrome is faster than lightning. I’m glad to be back on Chrome as Safari’s address bar is, as Jonathan Christopher put it, annoying but I will miss the Top Sites screen and visual history search.

I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.

Until this latest release the Top Sites page in Safari was too slow for me to find useful. Now, however, it is much faster and I’m liking it very much. I liked Chrome’s New Tab page a lot. However, unlike Safari it wasn’t really all that useful for more than giving you a clickable tile to go to your favorite sites. Safari’s Top Sites page does a bit more.

First, it shows a ‘page-curl white star on blue’ icon to show which pages have been updated since you visited them last. This makes is quick and easy to go to the pages that have been updated rather than checking them yourself. Second, Safari allows you to choose how many sites show up on this page. Chrome does not. Depending on your screen size you can choose between Small, Medium and Large tiles for each site. Small is more, large is less.

Third, but not necessarily specific to the Top Sites page, Safari allows you to search your history in a visual way right from the Top Sites page itself. As you type in your search query a coverflow like window shows you a thumbnail of the Web sites that match it. It makes finding pages you’ve been to in the past much, much easier than in Chrome.

So, for now I’m back to Safari.

My Top Sites in Safari are (from left to right and down) this site, my WordPress admin, Twitter (although I rarely use this because I use Echofon so it may be replaced soon), Facebook, Gmail, Instapaper, Tumblr, 37Signals Launchpad, Flickr, Viddler’s Recently Uploaded page, GitHub and Google Reader.

The next version of Webkit that will be released will come with a new version of the Web Inspector, a tool used by Web developers to “inspect” an already-loaded Web page for debugging, testing, etc., that has some really great new features thanks in part to Joseph Pecoraro.

I love that I can choose either Safari or Chrome and I will still benefit from this update.

As it stands Safari is far and away the best browser available on the Macintosh. Firefox, which is a really solid browser and is much loved by many developers, just isn’t “Mac enough” for us real, devout Mac users. There are so many things missing when an application is not built as a native Macintosh application. Simple things, really. Being able to look up things from the built-in Mac OS X dictionary is one thing. Native spell check. Speed! These are simple things, since Firefox handles some of these things on its own, but once you’ve grown accustomed how real, native Mac applications feel – you want that from all applications on your Mac. Opera and Camino, both very respectable browsers, just are not as lean and mean as Safari is. The are other browsers, to be sure, but none that are backed by corporations with enough resources, or an active enough development community, to really push for the top-spot on the Mac.

Which is why it’d be great for a really, really good browser to emerge on the Macintosh to rival Safari. Both Safari and the Webkit teams are on a tear lately. They have made tremendous strides towards making Safari better and Webkit (along with Squirelfish which is now called Nitro) much, much faster. They’ve improved Webkit’s page rendering (or, how it displays the page based on open standards) to such a degree that it is the envy of all other engines. But, they could do better.

For example, Chrome renders pages faster than Safari. I don’t need a fancy graph or test to show me this – I’ve loaded pages on my Macbook Pro using Chrome and the speed at which the page becomes usable is hands-down much, much faster in Chrome than in Safari (and Safari is fast).

For example, Firefox has add-ons which enhance the features of the core browser. There are add-ons for everything like plugging into your favorite Web sites, aggregating content, security and privacy enhancements, music, calendaring, etc. etc. etc. All optional, based on your needs/wants. Chrome will also support extensions, which are similar to add-ons, that will use open standards (this excites me very, very much).

Competition. That is what it comes down to. Not just competition based on marketing or market share or even mindshare – but an all-out race to be the best. The unequivocal best even if you’re not the biggest. If Google Chrome for Mac is released and is only marginally better than the developer preview releases I’ve been using – the people that are responsible for making Safari will need to trot a little quicker to keep up with where Google is going.

Hooray for us.

Side note: Why I can’t use Google Chrome full time, yet

I’d be tempted to use the developer preview releases of Google Chrome for Mac full time but there are a few key things that are ultimately missing from the application that are vital to my daily browsing needs. Here they are, in case you’re wondering:

• Adobe Flash support is simply not yet available. I’m not sure what makes Google Chrome for Mac any different than any other browser but I’m hoping this is addressed soon.
• Google Gears support. Both Google Reader and WordPress, two applications that I use quite often, support Gears and make the experience of using them much nicer. Kind of ironic that Google Chrome for Mac still doesn’t have Google Gears support.
• Import from Safari. I could probably hack my way into bringing all of my bookmarks and preferences from Safari into Google Chrome – but I hope that an upcoming release has this built-in.

That’s really about it. If I had these things I could probably make the jump to do some real testing of Google Chrome for Mac. For now, I’ll stick with the best browser available for the Mac, Safari.

Glims, a plugin (read: input manager hack) for Safari, enables a lot of preferences around searching that Safari simply doesn’t have built-in. I originally installed it because I wanted to play around with Bing, Microsoft’s latest version of their search efforts. However, it came with a caveat that I can’t seem to find a solution to no matter what combination of preferences I choose. Keyboard shortcuts, such as those found in Google Reader, do not work when I have Glims installed.

So, I’ve uninstalled Glims – for now. The benefits of keyboard shortcuts in my most used Web applications outweigh those of trying out other search engines besides Google. I’ll be watching Glims for an update.

Glims for Safari is a input-manager hack (I think) that enables a few ‘nice to have’ features. First, it adds favicons to tabs. I am not sure about you, but the new tabs (when you have a lot of them) are really hard to tell one from another. This helps. It also does things like add thumbnails to search results and makes the search history/recommendations look like Inquisitor a bit.

I might give this a spin.

Source: Glims for Safari.
Via: Shaun Inman.

Caius, of Random Genius, recently published some of these hidden preferences including:

• A way to restore the old tab bar.
• Turning off the auto-complete search bar.
• Removing Coverflow.
• …and much more.

I am not sure why you’d want to change some of these preferences (as I feel they are some of the best features of the new version of Safari), but they are there, you can if you want, and Caius shows you how.

Source: Safari 4 Hidden Preferences.

Google’s Chrome, the new Web browser by Google, has been getting a lot of attention because of its simple approach to browsing the Web.  But there is more here than meets the eye. It is all about the approach.

The new application has its flaws, for sure, but what it gets wrong it makes up for in what it gets right.  Google has long been an advocate of speed.  ”Speed is a feature.”  Many other browser manufacturers, namely Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla, have continuously strived to push the needle on speed, faster page loading time, and overall memory usage of their software products. They’ve done this while also trying to jam more features into the browser.  What they’ve ultimately failed to do though, is what Google succeeded at; removing the application from the application.

Google’s approach here is interesting.  This is the first real step towards making the Web the application, and the browser just the “thing” that loads it into view.  Over on Daring Fireball John Gruber quoted this bit, which I find really interesting:

“In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.”

You know how the iPhone or iPod touch loads web applications with nearly no UI unless you scroll up?  That is sort of the approach that Google Chrome is taking.  Just render the page in an insanely fast and stable way – that is the goal.

Is Google Chrome a “Single Site Browser” the way the next version of Safari is going to be or the way that Fluid already is?  Sort of.  In the “Page control” menu (not sure I like that name either) there is an option to “Create application short cuts”.  You can install these shortcuts on your Desktop, Start Menu, and Quick Launch bar.  Personally I think it would have been neat if they automatically asked to setup Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, etc. when I installed – but everyone knows that they would have caught some serious heat for that if they did.  For those of us liking the SSB experience, Google Chrome works.

It is tough to say what Google Chrome “gets wrong”.  I’ve seen reports of various rendering problems, but I don’t think that is something Chrome got wrong.  That is fairly easily fixed in the next version so long as they iron out their use of Webkit.

To sum up; the approach Google is taking here is refreshing.  Clean, simple, and fast. A feature for feature comparison of Google Chrome against any browser would not be a fair way to gauge its affect on the marketplace.  Time will tell.

Now, when they release a Macintosh version, then I’ll really kick the tires.

It is obvious that Aaron knows WordPress down to its very core, including even the unused code, and that makes him perfectly suited for these types of updates.  He probably does research on each release before it comes out because his previous job position at b5media demanded that he know what was coming on the platform.  He still uses WordPress on a daily basis as he is the cofounder and lead editor for Technosailor on which this article is written.

These lists are extremely useful to those that do not have the expertise nor the time to focus on what is coming in each release of WordPress before they are released.

A note about WordPress 2.6: This, like 2.5, is an excellent release and I’m really looking forward to it.  I’m hoping that Apple updates to a version of Safari that Google Gears can run on, since Google has said it runs in the latest Webkit nightlies, soon since I won’t be able to use the Gears integration with WordPress until they do.

Source: Technosailor: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6.

But we haven’t seen that floor yet.

Downloading Firefox 3 today I have experienced, what I feel, is the quickest page rendering experience I’ve had on the Macintosh since, well, downloading the latest version of Safari.  Before that I thought Camino was the quickest at rendering a page on my Mac.  Just prior to that, it was Safari.  And, according to Ariya Hidayat tests, it seems like when the next version of Safari is released to the public it will again hold the top spot in this rendering speed war that is being waged.

Granted the tests Ariya ran on a recent nightly build of Webkit, the rendering engine beneath the Safari browser, are dedicated to Webkit’s ability to parse through JavaScript only (leaving out the all important HTML and CSS rendering speed capabilities) – but one can assume that Safari will feel much snappier when the next update is release.

So, the beat goes on and on and on.  Rendering speeds in these browsers are going to continue to get better until they reach some sort of limit. I suppose the limit could be considered “virtually instantaneous” but I wonder how long it will be until we see that.

When does it end?

Both Pierre Igot and John Gruber cover this topic in great detail; the fact that the first user interaction with Safari’s tabs while dragging ultimately determine their ability to either reorder the tab and/or open a new window/tab. But that’s generalizing it far too much.

If you’re an anal Safari nut, like me, I suggest you read both of their articles.

Source: Safari 3.0: Dragging tabs up or down to move them sideways.
Secondary, source: Safari’s Tab Dragging Modes.

John does an excellent job reviewing these two applications based on a number of factors including interface, design, feature-sets, and how well each fits into the Operating System.

“I love Firefox’s auto-restoration of tabs and windows. Quit Firefox, relaunch it, and your previously-open tabs and windows are restored. Safari 3 has this feature, but makes you do it manually via the “Reopen All Windows From Last Session” command in the History menu. I’m sure most Safari users have no idea this feature even exists. At least as a preference, Safari should offer the ability to do this automatically.”

He’s right. I never knew that feature was even there. It is little tidbits like this, and John’s superb writing, that have made me never regret my membership fee to Daring Fireball.

Source: Daring Fireball: Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3.

(Source: Comparing Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3 Beta 4 – Monday By Noon)

After lunch I decided to switch from Thincloud’s Twitter application to Hahlo and give it a whirl. Hahlo is great. It is quick, easy, and does nearly everything I need to interact with Twitter* and does it in an aesthetically pleasing way. I highly recommend using Hahlo.

Onto the Safari mobile bug. If you click a link in a tweet it will open a new tab in Safari mobile with that URL loaded in it. This is exactly as it should happen, because you wouldn’t want to have to navigate back to Hahlo. However, if you close the tab that it opened, Safari will replace Hahlo with the last tabs URL. This gets to be pretty annoying and I’ve found it happening in other applications besides Hahlo.

I have yet to figure out a sure-fire way to reproduce this in a consistent way and I can’t seem to find a pattern for successful opening and closings of tabs. But I can say this; this bug happens just about every single time a tinyURL is involved.

I’ve emailed Dean Robinson, lead developer of Hahlo, and he’s looking into it. I’ve also described the bug and submitted it to Apple Support.

Has anyone else seen this? Can you figure out why this is? Secondly, John Gruber recently stated that he’s finding the latest version of the iPhone’s software to be buggier than the previous – and I agree with him.

* By “nearly” I mean that Hahlo doesn’t yet have the ability to “friend” someone. Seems a little odd but Dean has assured me that it is in an upcoming release. Gauging from the work Dean has done so far on Hahlo – I’m sure it will be worth the wait.

Safari on Leopard. Screenshot by Skitch.

When I jotted down my wishes for Safari in Leopard I quickly mentioned the things I’d like to see changed and/or added in Safari to become my default browser full time.

That was then, this is now

Several of my opinions have changed a little since then, so I’ll go through those really quick first.

My stance has change completely regarding Apple’s decision to place the “Default Browser” preference within Safari’s preference panels. I wrote:

“This “feature” definitely gets on the nerves of many and really I can’t figure out why this resides in here. [...] …but this does not mean that this is the proper location for this preference. What if I uninstalled Safari?”

I now feel this is the best possible place for this preference and I couldn’t see it residing anywhere else. In fact, I think that all applications which rely on being a “default” for any protocols should handle these preferences the same way applications do with regards to filetypes. Photoshop has a preference setting for being the default application for opening JPG files as does Apple’s Preview application. Firefox, Safari, Camino and their ilk should do the very same when it comes to handling the various hypertext protocols that browsers typically utilize. Not only do I now feel that Safari should have this preference built-in, I believe all other browsers should do the same.

Just quickly; Me wanting multiple feed detection might be against spec. I have to do some research on this (not that I wouldn’t mind having the option still) but I’ll report on this in the future. (please see Update #2 below)

Onto features.

One of the things I wanted most was a searchable history. I’m a bit of a pack rat when it comes to my browser’s history (I keep about 120 days worth, see: my history in Camino) and so I like being able to quickly search it based on not just the URL but also the page’s title.

This is something that has been available in Camino for quite some time and I found myself using it a lot.

I’m happy to say that this is built into Safari and works as well, if not better, than it does in the latest Camino build that I was using. I had some people ask me if Camino slowed down the more history items were in it and the answer is yes. Browsing doesn’t slow down but URL lookup does. In Safari I’ve yet to see the lookup slowing down at all.

The other feature, which sadly did not make the cut in Safari on Leopard, that I wanted to see was bookmark keywords. Sure, I could use Spotlight to search my bookmarks but I liked having short words that I could type into the location field without using my mouse to find the bookmark in the menu or typing in the entire URL. For instance: ‘mysql’ was one of my keywords for a bookmark that took me to my phpMyAdmin installation on one of my servers, the URL of which spanned some 75 characters and the bookmark relating to it lies nested about four steps down. This is the thing I miss most when using Safari in Camino’s stead.

I’m not going to do a feature-by-feature review of Safari on Leopard because so many have done it better than I ever could. But I will say this: during my short stint with Safari so far, the only thing I’m now missing is bookmark keywords. I recommend giving it a spin.

Update: Something that I forgot to mention but was just reminded of while I was using Google Reader; clicking on a link from iChat, for instance, which is not currently loaded in Safari will result in a new tab with that URL. Perfect. However, as my friend Kyle Neath said to me last night:

“1. Can’t force target=blank to open in a new tab for some reason”

I never really had much issue with this because I can just “command”+click on a link and it will open in a new tab. Bad part is, this doesn’t work when using Google Reader’s default keyboard shortcuts. So I’m presented with a new window everytime I hit ‘V’ to view the original post.

Does anyone have a workaround for this?

Update #2: November 12th, 2007 – Another thing I had wanted was for Safari to handle multiple feed URLs and I thought this was against spec. I was wrong. And boy am I happy to say that I was wrong and it turns out that Safari does indeed handle this just fine out of the box. My friend Josh Pigford has more on theappleblog.com about this.

My precious!

Ok. So what do I think of the iPhone? As you might have already guessed, I love it. For the entire weekend I rarely got onto my Macbook to do anything except sync my latest settings of my iPhone to the computer. The iPhone is a great mini-computer for getting most of your core Internet activities done like checking/responding to email, surfing the web for information, or other simple daily tasks like this.

I won’t get into the speed of the EDGE network or how the virtual keyboard is. To me these are non-issues thus far and I don’t have much to compare these two things to since I have never had a cell phone that used the Internet, nor a full sized hard keyboard. I can type pretty fast on the keyboard and the Internet is nearly as fast as being home on Wifi. So again, both are non-issues.

Again, it is the little things

One of my fellow line-waiters John Gruber did a fantastic job giving his general overview of each feature of the iPhone the other day. My impressions are on par with John’s except that I’ve found myself typing just fine. Be sure to read his thoughts if you’d like to catch some of the nice things about each “feature” of the iPhone.

However, I’d like to extend his list a little bit to remark on some of the little things I’ve noticed while using the iPhone that I think make the experience all the more enjoyable.

The weight of the iPhone came as a surprise to some. Yes, it feels heavier than it looks. To me this make the iPhone feel tough and rugged when compared to the way it looks. I think the fact that we’re seeing people surprised at how tough the iPhone actually is, is because it doesn’t look very rugged. It looks elegant, which doesn’t usually mean tough. However the weight of the iPhone makes it feel very rugged to me.

The speed of the interface is something that I was very skeptical about. The commercials led me to believe that the interface was just as fast, if not faster, than switching windows on my computer. In my relatively little experience with mobile phones – the interfaces on these things have never been described by me as “snappy” or “fast”. However the iPhone’s interface, in general, is incredibly fast. When speaking with John Gruber in line, he remarked how the iPhone’s “one app at a time” focus really lent itself to being able to be very fast. The iPhone doesn’t need to show windows inside of windows or multiple layers or even windows on top of windows. The application that you are currently looking at is obviously getting the priority in the Operating System which makes the iPhone blaze.

The sleep, volume, silent, and home buttons are the perfect combination of buttons that were decided to be “hard buttons”. Although one can easily adjust the volume in most applications within the iPhone’s interface, you can also use the hard volume control on the side of the iPhone. The same goes for the silent and sleep buttons – I never have to “turn on” the iPhone to use these options. And the home button is definitely far better than keeping the “doc” visible and having a “desktop” button or something. I’m really glad the iPhone has a home button.

Within each application on the iPhone there are small, hidden gems that you will only find through experimentation or someone telling you that they are there. Like the ability to turn on the caps lock key, or tapping the top bar to auto-scroll to the top of the page in Safari (both tips came from John Gruber’s site), etc. None of these small interface features are handed over, but once you find them you love them.

Of course, I want more

Keeping in mine that, technically, this is iPhone 1.0 which includes all the hardware and software that came in those beautiful black bags on Friday, I have a few things that I’d like to see improved. I’m sure that, internally, this is build 10,000+ of the iPhone’s OS and its applications, but from my perspective it is still 1.0. Being such, I fully expected to have the wish list that follows.

• Better integration with Gmail. Right now Gmail marks things as “being downloaded” when I look at them either via Mail.app on my Macbook or on my iPhone. This causes some frustration since I’d like all of my email to be “everywhere”. To fix this, I think either Google or Apple will have to update it so that it marks it as being read on the iPhone or not. Either way, the email “works” – but it could work a little bit better. (Side note: On the first day of release, the Gmail integration was wrought with problems ranging from getting duplicate messages to simply not working with Google App’s hosted domain email. These issues have been fixed, presumably by Google, over the weekend. So ++ to them.)
• Though I haven’t used the “Notes” feature yet, I could see a huge amount of improvement being done here, which might make me want to use Notes on the iPhone. Simply saving the notes saved as RTF files that are synced to your computer into ~/Documents/iPhone Notes/ would suffice for me. Why create notes that you can’t really use? A work around is taking a notes contents and creating an email out of it, which can be done fairly easily.
• iCal integration seems to work “ok” but I have the same complaints as others. If I have separate calendars within iCal they should also be separate within iPhone’s calendar application. And, when syncing with my Macbook, I shouldn’t have to choose only one calendar that the iPhone can write to. I am not sure why there is this limitation. Something else I noticed is that if I setup an iCal alert on the iPhone it works perfectly but it doesn’t work within iCal. It shows up in the application but iCal never shows me the the alert when I asked it to. Not sure why, perhaps this is a bug.
• The camera feature should allow a photo to be taken by tapping anywhere on the screen. I think some people would hate this because it would cause a lot of accidental photos to be taken, but taking photos of yourself and someone else with the iPhone is very hard with only a small button to push. Perhaps this could be a setting? Can has Photobooth for the camera? I don’t care about the crazy bulging eyes and stretching chins stuff, but it’d be nice to have the ability to take black and white photos or something simple. Obviously this is a minor, minor update that I’d enjoy seeing to the Camera feature.
• Small browser cache? From what I’ve been able to tell Safari on the iPhone only caches the current page you are looking at. Reloading a page is fairly quick but the second you navigate away from a URL the cached version is lost. I have an 8Gb iPhone, I wouldn’t mind dedicating even a few hundred megabytes to Safari’s caching if it would mean that hitting the back button wouldn’t reload the page.
• Normal headphone jacks “don’t work” with the iPhone because the iPhone’s input jack is sunken so low into the casing of the iPhone. Jason Kottke resolved this by actually cutting his headphones a little bit to allow the jack to sink in deeper. There are several add-ons being offered to make this easier, but I am unsure why this was done in the first place?
• The iPod allows you to update your set of icons on the button of its menu. I think this should be an option in all applications on the iPhone including the home screen. There are a few web applications that are being released for the iPhone that I’d love to create a shortcut to from my home screen. The first button I’d get rid of from the home screen? YouTube followed by Stocks. I simply won’t use those things on my iPhone too often.
• Google Maps on the iPhone is amazing! But I feel this application will probably receive the greatest number of updates over time. It is perhaps one of the most “complex” applications on the iPhone and using it is a delight most of the time. However, there are a few usability problems when you switch from searching for a location to getting directions to that same location. (I’ve found that it is easier to save locations in your Google Maps bookmarks.) I’m sure these little things will be improved soon and that integration with the rest of the phone’s applications will happen in the future. One of the first things that comes to mind is to tell the camera application where you are using the Maps feature, which would in turn write the Latitude and Longitude to the photos.

I’m going to cut this list short because, as I said, this is a 1.0 release and one that I’m overwhelmingly happy with. I’ve found the iPhone becoming an extension of my laptop in ways I hadn’t considered before. I knew that I’d find the iPhone useful, I didn’t expect to want to use it more than my laptop.

What are your thoughts on the iPhone? Any wishes that I didn’t cover?

Not in this case.

I’ve tried a few Safari plugins over the years and most of them, if not all of them, have ended up making Safari not perform properly in various situations.

I’ve had plugins not load sites because of an installed plugin. I’ve had the user-agent for the browser inexplicably change to something else. I’m also hearing of other’s having upload problems when they have a plugin installed.

I think you will find that almost every plugin for Safari will somehow “break” your install. Perhaps not in anyway that you care about, or that you may even notice – but overall Safari plugins really do not perform well and are unstable.

As such – I can not recommend installing any Safari plugins. I know some of you will disagree, and that is ok with me, we can all agree to disagree on this particular issue.

[tags]safari, plugin, plugin, apple, macintosh, browser[/tags]
[slug]no-safari-plugins[/slug]

Fixes

I hope not to sound as if I use iChat begrudgingly because, on the contrary, I rarely find fault with iChat during my normal usage. However if I really turn a critical eye to it, I find:

Error messages should be more descriptive when a video or audio conference, or file transfer fails. Many times there are issues with NATs or Firewalls getting in the way of iChat trying to make connections. iChat typically reports with an error message along the lines of “blah blah blah”. If iChat could have a built-in utility to test your connection for possible problems, and then offer ways of solving those problems based on it’s findings – that’d be cool.

Better Address Book integration is something that I’ve long for since the beginning. Both Adium and iChat both pull your contacts address cards to add buddies to your list – however they also hold their own lists separate from the address book. I’d like to see every contact held within iChat to be in the address book, and vice-versa, by default. What typically happens is, if I sign up for a new AIM account, and load up iChat – I will be forced to go in and add each buddy from my address book into iChat – rather than it just recognizing them. Perhaps there is a reason that they do not do this (perhaps some would find it annoying) – but for me – I think it’d be neat to at least have the option.

File transfers that don’t work when video and audio do seems really strange to me. If I am talking to someone on video and I try to send them a file, and it doesn’t work, that seems strange to me. Why can we make a connection for audio or video and not for transferring files?

Update the tooltips which are used to show your buddy’s info. If you hover over a buddy, you can see some quick information about them – usually their AIM name, and current status. Like Adium, I’d like to see this updated to show a larger version of your buddy’s icon – along with a way to quickly send them an email, an invitation to an event in iCal, a link to the song currently playing in iTunes, etc. This could also be considered a feature request, but I’ll get more into that in a second.

Feature requests

There are a few of my feature requests that delve slightly into what we already know will be included in the next release – but bear with me because I think they need to be refined a little more.

System-wide iChat integration could go well beyond what we see now with Mail and Address Book. Currently you can see who is online from within Mail (if you have that particular email address associated with the current AIM username), and also from within Address Book. This is sufficient in my opinion though anywhere address book information is used (i.e. in the Address Book widget), it’d be nice to see a person’s online status as well.

However, there are many more ways I’d like to see iChat integrated into the OS. If we take a look at the four reasons I currently use iChat, perhaps we can see a way to integrate it more.

1. Text messaging. There are several ways I could see this being used. Contextual menus in Safari, as just one example, give you a way to “Search in Spotlight” and “Search in Google” when you have highlighted text. Perhaps “Send to buddy” would also be available instead of having the need to copy/paste all the time. This may seem like a very small thing, but just think of the amount of time it could save.

Perhaps this feature could be extended a bit further to actually be an option from within Pages.

2. Audio chat. Audio chat should not be limited to only sharing one’s voice. With a little jiggery pokery, or software like Audio Hijack Pro and Soundflower, one could potentially share their tunes with someone working remotely out of the office or with a computer not directly connected to the LAN. Or, maybe two people would like to collaborate on a project in GarageBand, and they could do so by “porting” the output of GarageBand in the current audio chat.

The implications could be fairly endless here.

3. Video chat. Just like with Audio chat, I’d like to see a way to share video via the video chat feature. I realize that the upcoming release will have some screen sharing, iPhoto slideshow, and other features. But being able to open iMovie and show someone a rough cut of a project their working on – could prove extremely valuable.

4. File transfers. What about being able to send a file from anywhere in the system to someone on your buddy list? You can do this now by dragging that file onto your buddy’s name in your contact list – but what if you could do it from within the application you are working on the file with. Say I’d like to send that same rough cut of the iMovie project to someone so that they can edit it further. Emailing it is not an option (too big). I could send it to him in iChat but that means I’d have to save it, open finder (or use Spotlight) and drag the file onto their name ect. What about a button to “Send to Buddy”?

Update (9am on Nov. 15): It turns out there is a product for doing something like this with Skype. It was written about on TechCrunch. Interesting.

I could also envision this feature being awesome from within iPhoto. Quickly send someone an entire album. Sure, this would bypass Apple’s .Mac photo-sharing service built-into iPhoto. But I think .Mac sucks.

Final thoughts

As I said, I really don’t have many issues with the current iChat. Not enough to make me jump ship to something like Adium (which I would have to write a 5-part piece to say what I don’t like about it). I’m going to stick with iChat – and I’m looking forward to the new stuff coming up.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, wish list, leopard, ichat, buddy list, aim, adium, audio hijack pro, soundflower, safari, spotlight, mail, garageband, imovie, iphoto, finder, itunes[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt3-ichat[/slug]

Fixes

Here are some things that I believe should be fixed in Mail.

Smart Mailbox rules are seemingly complete – though I find one oddity among them. When you select the “Message is in Mailbox” filter, you are presented with every Mailbox you’ve setup – even the Smart Mailboxes that you’ve already created. However, if you select the “Message is not in Mailbox” filter, you are not given the Smart Mailboxes as options. I’ve thought about this for awhile, and I still can’t figure out the reason.

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

The address book panel seems very OS 9-ish. It works, but I’d like to see the design of this updated a bit.

Feature requests

I realize that Mail is getting “a significant upgrade” when Leopard is release, though the major feature additions looked atrocious in my opinion. Here are some things I’d like to see.

The iLife Media Browser would be an awesome addition to Mail’s default set of icons on the New Mail window. Attaching photos from your iPhoto Library is quick and easy – if you already have iPhoto open. I envision a time where we can click on the Media Browser (similar to what you find in Pages, iMove, etc) and find a photo or photos and attach them with ease.

Side note: The new version of Mail will have “stationary” – and from what I can tell from the screenshots released so far there is a new button called “Photo Browser” at the top. I hope that this is not a brand-new, non-standard media browser that does not use the same frameworks that are used throughout the system so far. And, I hope that this button is not only enabled when you choose a particular style of stationary that allows for photos. We need this feature to be available any time we want to send normal attachments.

An all new way to attach files would be nice. Utilizing a media browser to attached photos, audio, and perhaps even video – would be nice. But I can see definite improvements that could be made to attaching documents, spreadsheets, and compressed archives too.

Imagine you need to attach an Excel spreadsheet, a PDF document, and a .Zip file full of product images to an email. When you do this, I would like to see a preview of the document that I am going to attach. (This does currently work with PDFs and Images) I’d like to see previews for Excel spreadsheets, Text files, Rich-Text Files, Word Documents, .Pages documents, Keynote Presentations, and anything else that usually resides in the document window.

As per .Zip archive files, it’d be nice to select a zip file in the “attach file” panel and be able to see the file names of the files within the archive. This would ensure that I’ve selected the correct file to attach.

Automatic compression of multiple file attachments is something that was “introduced” by AOL back in the mid to late 90s. I have not used America Online since then, so I have no idea if this feature still exists.

If I had an email with multiple attachments, as described above, Mail could automatically compress those files on send. This way, the transmission of data would be slightly smaller. On the other end, Mail.app would uncompress those files into their original state prior to displaying the message to the recipient.

Side note: The biggest problem with this feature in AOL (circa version 2 or 3) was that when you sent email to anyone that was not an AOL user, they’d just get a .zip file. Back in those days .zip files were not yet the norm, and so you had to have people go to winzip.com or something to download a utility to uncompress those files. In other words, their email client did not have the “automatically uncompress files upon receipt” feature. Annoying to say the least.

The other problem with this is, Mail would have to have a slightly proprietary compression format so that when a .zip, .tar, .bz (etc) type of file would come in, it wouldn’t always uncompress those files. If I was sent 1,000 text files in a .zip archive, I wouldn’t want those files automatically uncompressed by Mail.

Final thoughts

I’m trying not to be too picky, otherwise this list would get quite long. Any application that is used as often as an email client always gets more than it’s share of scrutiny. I’m fairly happy with my email client to-date, and I hope that the trend continues.

Side note: Leopard Mail will include Stationary, Notes, To-Dos, and RSS feed reading ability. From what I’ve seen so far, I do not “like” any of them (even though what I did see would be considered BETA).

The Stationary seems a bit superfluous though I can see people having a ball using them. The Notes doesn’t make sense to me yet simply because I do not email myself notes. There are hundreds of ways to “take notes” on the Mac OS ranging from widgets to small menu bar applications to full-blown GTD applications. The “to-dos” in Mail seem like they’d be better kept and updated within iCal. I’m sure the integration between iCal and Mail will be might tighter this time around – so I’ll have to see that integration prior to passing judgement.

RSS within Mail is a completely new headache to me. RSS feeds within Safari is only made for those people who keep track of a few web sites. With constant attention to feed management you may even be able to get away with having 100 subscriptions in Safari without pulling your hair out. Unless the integration of RSS feeds (which should be called “Feeds” but we’ve already talked about that), rivals that of NetNewsWire, then I see no improvement than using Safari for your subscriptions. Too much synergy may not be a good thing in this case.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, mail.app, mail, iphoto, ilife, safari, leopard, mac os 10.5, wish list, ical, gtd, stationary, notes, to-dos, rss[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt2-mail[/slug]

The first thing I’m going to tackle is Safari (though I believe that Safari should be updated as a separate application and not part of the OS). I’ll try to focus my thoughts from fixes, to actual bugs, to feature requests.

Fixes

The following are not “bugs” in the traditional sense. I believe that most of the following was done intentionally, I just do not think they should have been done.

Setting your default browser is currently held within Safari’s preference panel. This “feature” definitely gets on the nerves of many and really I can’t figure out why this resides in here. In order to switch from Safari to Firefox you’d need to first open Safari and tell it you want Firefox to be the default browser.

This isn’t to say that Firefox (and other browsers) do not ask if you’d like to use them as the default browser on your system – but this does not mean that this is the proper location for this preference. What if I uninstalled Safari?

The blue RSS button at the top of the browser is fairly misleading. Apple is attempting to “brand” a doc-spec. In other words, they are saying that all “feeds” are RSS. Obviously this is not true. I do not want that icon to change from RSS to ATOM to “WHATEVER” when it applies, I’d much rather see Apple use the unified feed icons to go along with the unified feed theory (another post I have to bring over to my local site soon).

Multiple feeds detection kinda goes along with the above. I suppose this could be filed under a new feature request – but I feel like they might have kept it simple on purpose. I wouldn’t mind seeing a short list pop up with the available feeds for that site. Obviously this would only be useful if web masters actually listed these feeds in their documents.

Feature requests

Safari is definitely a browser for the average user, but I’d like to see a few of the “not so elementary” features from other browsers find their way into the Leopard release of Safari. Why? Because I’d much rather use Safari than Firefox if it only had the following.

Bookmark keywords (click to zoom)

Bookmark keywords is something I use heavily in Firefox. I am not sure how widely used this feature actually is, since even browsers like Flock do not currently have this feature built in (and Flock is built off of the same engine and core as Firefox). Side note: I’ve been told that Flock 1.0 (due out sooner than later) will have these features as it will be built off of the Firefox 2.0 release.

To explain really quick, for those that are not familiar with this feature – Bookmark keywords allow you to setup shortcuts for your bookmarks. Let’s say that you had a rather long URL that you visited often, and you didn’t want to traverse your long list of bookmarks in order to get to that page without typing in the name manually, you can setup a shorter keyword for that. (see screenshot) You type in that keyword, and poof, you’re there.

Searchable history is not something I use every day, but when you need it – you find it very handy. I suppose I could liken a searchable history to Spotlight. Before Spotlight was introduced we never knew how much of a pain it was to find things on our local system. But, after having Spotlight for awhile now, I find it indispensable. Such is the case with searchable history. Safari’s history menu is crude – and needs a significant update.

Update: As Nathan pointed out the history in Safari is indeed searchable. But I would have never found it if he hadn’t told me where it was. So the UI needs to be adjusted to make this much more accessible.

Final thoughts

Really my requests for Safari are very light and don’t hold a ton of water when it comes to my decision to use Firefox instead of Safari. There are other, underlying, reasons why I use Firefox that are much more “under the hood” type of reasons. For instance, many WYSIWYG editors inside of various web applications do not function properly within Safari. Hopefully, with the very latest version of Web kit no doubt being included in the upcoming release of Safari, we’ll see some of this functionality made available.

I remember the first day I wanted to jump ship from Safari to Firefox. I wanted to use Google Calendar and couldn’t because Safari was not a supported browser. But now that I rarely use any online web applications – I may switch back and deal with my little niggles mentioned above until they become available (hopefully) in the next release.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]leopard, mac os x, osx, macintosh, apple, safari, wish list, browsers, flock, firefox, bookmarks, history, rss, feeds, atom[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt1-safari[/slug]

Here is a list of my 10 13 favorite applications for the Macintosh.

• Textmate
• NetNewsWire
• MarsEdit
• QuickSilver
• iTunes
• iPhoto
• Delicious Library
• Safari
• Transmit
• Colloquy
• PHP Function Index
• Chax iChat extension
• Mail.app

I was supposed to stop at 10, but oh well. There is no particular order to the above, I kind of just jotted these down as I thought of them.

I suppose I’ll ask Mike Stickel, Tantek Çelik, and Mike Rundle to do the same.

[tags]meme, apple, macintosh, applications, textmate, netnewswire, marsedit, quicksilver, itunes, iphoto, delicious library, safari, transmit, colloquy, php function index, php, ichat, chax, mail, email, programming, browser, text editor[/tags]