For all HTML/CSS geeks here is one of the most amazing things that I’ve seen done with CSS. It’s the face of Homer Simpson drawn completely with nothing but letters styled using CSS. If you click the animate buttons you can see how it’s been drawn.
Check it out:
http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200805/css_homer_animated.html
As you may or may not be aware, with the release of Safari 3.1 for the Mac, Apple started offering Safari for Windows as an optional install through its Windows updater for iTunes/Quicktime.
Initially, Safari was offered in the Updates list, with the selection check box already selected. So if the user simply clicked ‘Install’, Safari would be installed. It looked like this:
When that happened, many of the usual Windows/Microsoft shills got up in arms against this ‘heinous crime’. Most vocal however was Mozilla’s CEO, and of course he got the most attention.
Initially, I agreed that it’s not exactly good to offer new software as an update.
With the release of Safari 3.1.1, Apple modified their update panel to have a separate pane for new software and it was clearly labelled as ‘New Software’.
As far as I’m concerned, this change addressed all the concerns that I had about the previous behaviour. Safari is now labelled as New Software for those who hadn’t previously installed it. So it’s now completely up to the user to decide and opt-out of the install. And even if you install it by mistake, there is no harm done to you as a user. If you don’t actively launch it and mean to use it, it just sits there on your hard drive doing nothing. It wouldn’t affect your system in any way (other than the miniscule space it occupies on the hard drive). It doesn’t launch automatically and it doesn’t set itself as the default browser without your knowledge.
However, it’s still not all well in Mozilla-land (and quite a few other blogs). Few of Mozilla’s people spoke up about this recent change and they’re still not satisfied. They want Apple to set the check box as unchecked by default and make it up to the user to opt-in on the install.
The recent whining makes me almost sure that if Apple were to make this small change and unchecks the box by default, Mozilla people would still whine and would probably want Apple to stop offering Safari altogether.
In the early days, Mozilla with its Firefox browser was perceived as the underdog or the David that is standing up to Microsoft’s Goliath with its default Windows browser IE. Many, many webmasters like me pushed Firefox and managed to convince their visitors to switch to it. Firefox’s browser share rose and now it’s reported to have a world market share of 17%. I pushed Firefox on my site too. At one point, the site sat for three whole days on the top of Firefox’s referrers list. I still have the link to Firefox on the site’s home page. The effect of this support shows in my logs. According to my stats, Firefox users comprise 38% of the site’s users, double the average that Firefox enjoys. So my efforts have been very effective in supporting the Mozilla Foundation.
However, this recent whining and bitching by the Mozilla people is starting to annoy me. They are being selfish, greedy people. You may not know this, but Mozilla makes a ton of money from having people use its free browser. They make that money from search engines (like Google) that pay a referral fee to browser makers that send their users to Google’s search engine.
Obviously, Mozilla’s people are afraid that if Safari gains market share, that would mean that it could take some of that share from Firefox.
Personally, I don’t care about one company or the other. Apple has billions in the bank and Mozilla is making tens of millions of dollars per year (for a supposedly non-profit organization). So neither is poor and neither needs my support.
I’m supporting alternative browsers (alternative to IE) for purely selfish reasons and I believe you should too.
I’m a webmaster/developer. I create websites. I would absolutely love it if each of the four major browser engines (IE, Safari’s Webkit, Firefox’s Gecko and Opera) gets an even 25% market share. This way, no single browser would have a commanding market share, and web developers like me wouldn’t have to cater to a specific browser.
In a world where all the browsers have an equal market share, it wouldn’t make sense to cater to any one of them. Web developers would create websites according to standards and it would be the browser’s job to be compatible with these standards. This equality would benefit the internet community as a whole. It would take away any control that any browser maker would have on any part of the internet.
This benefits the users in an indirect way. As a user, you would have the choice of whichever browser you would prefer to use and all sites would work with it equally well. It would push browser makers to compete for your attention. Competition would mean better browsers and better features. When Microsoft had 90%+ market share, it stopped developing its browser and disbanded its IE group. The browser market stagnated and there was nothing new until Firefox came into the equation.
So think about where you stand.
To help my wishes come closer to becoming true, I’ve changed the way I support Firefox. It’s still linked to on my site, but now it has to share attention with a link to Safari’s download page.
For those of you who haven’t tried Safari for Windows, I suggest you give it a try. It’s fast, very fast. It’s elegant and the most standard compliant browser out there. It renders pages like Safari for the Mac, which in my opinion is the most beautiful web page rendering style there is.
Now that HD-DVD has officially lost the HD format battle, and Blu-Ray has emerged the victor, many Mac sites are speculating that Apple will soon implement Blu-Ray playback support into its system and start selling Blu-Ray drives in its computers.
I’m not sure Apple will implement Blu-ray playback into OS X any time soon.
One thing most people don’t know is the requirements to get the license to playback HD stuff on computers. The rules require that the playback device makes sure that the chain from the computer’s DVD drive, to the RAM, to buffers, to the graphics card, to the cable, to the display are all encrypted. That is all in order to close the ‘Analogue Hole’.
Did you know that Vista checks for chain encryption integrity for every frame when it’s playing HD contents? That’s 30 times every second (talk about paranoia). Try to buy a Vista system that can play HD stuff and see what onerous requirements you’ll find. You’ll have to buy specific graphics cards, specific monitors etc…
For Apple to implement Blu-Ray playback it has to do a lot of work to be compliant; and the requirements would put quite a burden on the system. I believe that’s the reason that currently, with iTunes rental service one can get HD rentals on the AppleTV only and not on one’s Mac. The AppleTV is a closed unit with an HDMI connection, meeting the stringent requirements for HD playback. Many people don’t expect this, but if you connect the AppleTV to your HD TV using the component video connectors instead of HDMI, the AppleTV won’t display rented HD contents in HD, you’ll get an SD version of the rented movie.
I’m not sure I want Apple to implement that kind of crap into the system that I use every day, in order to do something that I couldn’t care less about.
I mean really, does it make any difference if the stuff is true HD on a computer screen considering that the largest one currently is is 30″?
I would guess that Apple would implement Blu-Ray as a storage device on the Mac in order to take advantage of the huge capacity that it provides, and would leave HD playback to downloads and the AppleTV.
After a long and hard service for 14 years, my LaserWriter Select 360 died today 
They sure made them durable in those days.
I bought the printer in 1994 for $2300 Canadian and it’s been working every day ever since (about 5 days a week). Daily print run of about 15 pages minimum. That’s 50,000 pages over its lifetime at minimum. It had 11 toner cartridge changes.
So, any printer recommendations? It has to be laser and it has to be networked to a bunch of Macs, all running Leopard.
With Leopard 10.5.1, Apple’s developers changed the default status of html files downloaded from the internet from ‘safe’ to ‘Unsafe’.
While this may make sense from a security standpoint, for somebody like me that processes hundreds of html files downloaded every day, it’s a big annoyance.
I filed a bug with Apple, asking for a workaround. I was hoping that they would implement a preference somehow to enable me to either override the default settings or allow me to specify trusted servers.
Tonight, three months later, I received an answer and the workaround that I was looking for.
I turned out that you could have a user specific file to override the system’s default settings. The file is not there normally, so you would need to create it. It is:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist
The contents of the file need to be:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>LSRiskCategorySafe</key> <dict> <key>LSRiskCategoryContentTypes</key> <array> <string>public.html</string> <string>public.xml</string> <string>public.php-script</string> <string>com.microsoft.windows-media-wmv</string> </array> <key>LSRiskCategoryExtensions</key> <array> <string>xhtml</string> </array> </dict> </dict> </plist>
Hopefully that helps somebody else with this type of problem.
If you need to change the settings of other file types, here are the system-declared file types:
System-Declared Uniform Type Identifiers
For each type you add another <string></string> item to the above array.
For example, for jpeg2000 files you add:
<string>public.jpeg-2000</string>
Right below the other <string> line in the first array.
To declare files by extension, you add:
<string>odf</string>
Right below the other <string> line in the second array.
