safari posts

Recent versions of Webkit, the browser engine that Safari and Chrome are based on, have allowed for extensive use of CSS3, as well as some proprietary CSS tricks. The result has been some very innovative art created entirely using CSS. Take, for example, Louis Harboe's set of iOS icons created using some CSS3 properties such as rounded corners, shadows and gradients (among others). The finished set is stunning. Of course, the demo will only display properly in a compatible browser, so if you're using something other than an up-to-date version of Safari or Chrome (or Webkit, of course), you won't see much.

If you're not a web designer, this might not look like a big deal. What you're seeing, though, are images created entirely without images; they're built using nothing but code that defines shapes, gradients, colors, etc. You can hit View Source on the page to see the code that defines these things -- it's nothing but divs and the CSS to color and shape them.

If you are using a browser that can render these designs, you'll also want to check out Jeff Batterton's iPhone world clock, rendered in pure CSS3. Considering the rectangles that CSS has left designers stuck in for years, this is some pretty exciting stuff. I can still recall the first wave of people doing really innovative tricks with CSS2, and the push that they provided to the general web design community. I hope to see web design taking great strides forward as these new standards become accessible to an increasingly wider range of the web-surfing public. Modern browsers are pushing new limits ... we just have to wait for certain other browsers to finally be put to rest.

StatCounter's US browser share page shows that Chrome has now overtaken Safari in these United States, moving up into third place for browser share, behind Internet Explorer and Firefox. Astute TUAW readers among you will remember that Chrome already beat Safari once, but that was for the global browser share -- now Google's browser is bigger than Apple's right here among the amber waves of grain.

You have to wonder how much Apple actually cares about this. Lately, the company has called itself a "mobile device company," focused on iOS devices, and of course on those, Mobile Safari reigns supreme. Then again, if Apple does care, maybe Chrome's big surge will start up another browser war, which means we customers will win again anyway.

[via GigaOm]

As you've probably noticed, there are suddenly a lot of Safari Extensions floating around, thanks to the new features in Safari 5. PimpMySafari is ramping back up, and the Safari Extensions Tumblog is doing a great job of keeping track of all of them. I'm going to wait until the dust settles, the cream rises, and several other clichés come to pass before I dig in and start featuring my favorites. I do, however, want to offer a quick tip for dealing with Extensions that add toolbars.

Most of the Extensions I've tried that add a toolbar to Safari don't make it easy to show and hide it (and I don't really need every extension I install polling my keyboard, anyway). Aside from my url bar, my bookmarks bar, and my tabs, there's no toolbar in the world that I want to have open all the time. What is this, Firefox? Fortunately, there's a simple way to add shortcuts to show toolbars when they're useful, and hide them when they're irrelevant.

Just 48 hours after Safari 5's release, the first extensions are appearing; safariextensions.tumblr.com is keeping track and listing new ones as they become available. As of this writing, there are 13 that are either available for download or listed as in progress.

That's not a huge number to choose from, but a couple that caught our attention are Instafari, which replaces the Instapaper bookmarklet with a toolbar button, and Snapper, which converts the current page into a png for super easy screenshots.

Of course, the folks at Panic showed off their super-cool Coda Notes the other day, which lets users add annotations to websites. For now, Coda Notes is still unreleased.

Among the 'big dogs' in the browser extensions arena is Agile's 1Password utility; fans will be happy to know that version 3.2 of the tool is out now with full support for Safari 5. It seems that 1P is not actually using the new extensions mechanism for Safari, as it runs even if extensions are disabled.

The question is whether or not Safari extensions will take off. At the very least, it gives other browsers like Firefox some serious competition.

[Via MacUser]

Apple released Safari 5 for the Mac yesterday with with both obvious and not-so-obvious changes. Here's what we found while digging around.

Reader

The biggest change that you can actually play with is Reader. You'll notice that the "RSS" button in the address field changes to "Reader" when it's available. With a click, a new window slides up and displays the current article's reformatted text and images. It's printer-friendly, center-aligned and easy to read. From there, you can make the text larger or smaller, print the article or email it to a friend. It's similar to reading an article on the iPad with an app like Instapaper. Additional stuff on the page, like sidebar items, etc. is eliminated.

Actually, the email option didn't work for me. Instead of creating my message, Safari displayed a dialog box stating that I need to install Mail (it's installed). It's also kind of tricky to figure out when the Reader option will be presented. It won't work at http://tuaw.com, for example, but does for individual posts.

It got no attention in Steve's WWDC keynote, and it's not showing up in Software Update as of yet, but according to an Apple press release, Safari 5 is out for release today. Many analysts expected Apple to discuss Safari 5 (among other hardware) during the keynote, but iPhone 4 and iOS 4 got all the attention.

The press release details several of the new features in Safari 5, including updates to HTML 5 features, the Nitro JavaScript engine, and more. Overall, Safari 5 is supposed to have 30% greater performance than Safari 4, and it will also include Bing as an optional search engine. More info on the features is available not only in the press release itself, but also a leak from earlier this week.

We attempted to confirm the release with Apple PR directly, but we haven't heard back. Since this isn't showing up on apple.com/pr, and as of yet it hasn't been released to Software Update, it's understandable that the PR Newswire release might be fishy to some. However, I used to work for PR Newswire, and I can say with 100% confidence that this release is legitimate; PR Newswire's releases come directly from the companies themselves.

We should see Safari 5 officially released sometime today.

Update: The press release has been pulled from PR Newswire. Based on my experience there, most likely this means the release was published prematurely. It will most likely go back up in the next few hours, around the time it was originally intended to be published. Meanwhile, the text of the press release is still viewable on Engadget.

Update 2: It's live! Here's the link.

According to French Apple news site Macgeneration, Safari 5.0 will be released at WWDC. We usually don't post non-verified information, but I think that this might be true since we were sent specific release notes. With the understanding that this is a rumor, albeit a very good one, here's what Safari 5.0 purportedly contains:

Apple has published a new Web page meant to promote and show off the features of HTML5. There are seven sites featured in the "HTML5 showcase," each demonstrating a different function: video, typography, a photo gallery, transitions, audio, 360º product view, and VR.

Each demo includes some aspect of interactivity. For example, the typography demo lets you insert and manipulate your own text, while the video lets you scale the movie, apply a mask, and change the perspective. In addition, each demo explains how it was made and offers sample code from the Safari Dev Center.

Note that Safari -- mobile or desktop -- is required.

Apple has picked its horse and is sticking with it. It's a nice demonstration of what can be done with HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Here's the money quote:

"Standards aren't add-ons to the Web. They are the Web."

[Via Daring Fireball]

I'm a latecomer to the Safari party. I have used Opera and OmniWeb, but eventually, the siren song of Safari was too much to ignore. For the most part, I like it quite a bit, but there is one thing that has bothered me for a long time.

Safari has some ridiculous keyboard shortcuts. So, I made some better ones.

Exhibit #1: the Downloads window. By default, the keyboard shortcut to open the Downloads window is Alt+cmd+L. That's right, "L" for "Downloads." Does that make sense to you? Me neither. It should be "cmd+D" but ... that leads us to another problem.

Read on for more...

My friend Steve (no, not that Steve) just solved a problem I've had for awhile now: how to jump to a specific tab in Safari using the keyboard. Turns out that it's possible, and it's free, and it works pretty well. What else could you ask for?

The solution comes from Paul Kretek's website where he outlines how to use FastScripts to assign keyboard shortcuts to specific tabs. Paul and Steve both want to use Safari, but they like Firefox's method of numbering tabs 1-9 used together with the command (⌘) key . By default, Safari uses ⌘+[1-9] to jump to bookmarks on your bookmark bar, which I use all of the time so I'm planning to make keyboard shortcuts for tabs control+1-9 instead. (⌘+0 [zero] is used to set the zoom back to original size.)

Who knows, I might change my mind. I had found myself trying to use ⌘+[1-9] for tab switching in Safari because I was already used to tab switching that way in iTerm. The only bookmark keyboard short I use with any frequency is ⌘+1 which I use to invoke Quix which I've written about previously and absolutely cannot work without.

Paul's instructions are very thorough, and although they may look a little complicated, it's something you only need to setup once. Also note that FastScripts is free for up to 10 shortcuts, after that it's US$14.95 for unlimited use.

Our good buddy Jim Dalrymple over at The Loop brought up this useful piece of information for those developers who are rushing to sign up for WWDC 2010: As per Apple's own recommendation, don't use Safari 4.0.4 or earlier; use Firefox or the latest version of Safari.

According to Jim's post, he was contacted by developers who ran into issues when trying to complete their transaction. One developer went so far as to do an online chat with an Apple support person and captured the screenshot of their conversation that is seen above.

Apparently devs who were using Safari 4.0.5 didn't run into the problem, but it's still pretty funny when Apple's own support personnel recommend using Firefox rather than the official browser.

MobileCrunch noticed something interesting about the iPad User Guide hidden in the iPad Safari's bookmarks. It's a web app, but it doesn't feel like a web app -- the views scroll independently and smoothly, "clicking" is exact, and the whole thing runs much more like a native iPad app than anything web app developers have been able to put together yet. Why? Apple's got a secret -- Done21 is calling it "AdLib," after a file found somewhere in the source code, and apparently it's a library that connects UIKit to HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It's a go-between framework that has no documentation in the code at all, and uses practically unlabeled variables. In other words, Apple is putting their own magic into web apps, and while the code is there to see, they aren't interested in sharing.

At this point, it's not much more than a novelty -- Apple obviously is depending on Xcode and the iPhone OS SDK for developing iPad and iPhone applications, and there's no need for them to share the code magic that's making this happen. But it's interesting when you think of the original emphasis that Apple placed on web apps way back in the early iPhone days. If all of those web apps we had were as well-coded and responsive as this -- in other words, if they'd actually had ties into the UI -- then maybe web apps would have been just enough.

Following yesterday's "Concert" iPhone ad, Apple has released another ad called "Shopper." In "Concert," the ad featured a girl who was something of an impulse-buyer. The man in "Shopper" still likes to buy, but he's just got a little more self-control.

The ad begins with a man using Safari to search ProductWiki for an espresso maker as a gift for his wife. After doing "a little research," the man sends a text message to his wife's sister asking which color espresso maker his wife would like. After a terse Steve Jobs-esque answer of "Red," the man uses RedLaser ($1.99 in the App Store) to check to see if the espresso machine is cheaper anywhere else. The ad ends with the man exclaiming he's "a much smarter and faster shopper with his iPhone."

What have we learned? That shopping on the iPhone doesn't have to be all about the impulse buy.

• itms:// (this seems to be the most prevalent in my limited testing)
• itunes://
• itmss://

Then I went to the "Extensions" tab and disabled the "itms" extension, based on The Apple Blog's advice. I tested several iTunes web preview links and did not find any which still automatically opened iTunes. The other advantage to using RCDefaultApp is that the settings should work for all browsers.

Speaking of iTunes links, the folks over at Bjango have posted an article dissecting iTunes links and how to craft them. Great reading.

New browser time -- and unfortunately, time to restart your Mac. Safari has been updated (for 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 on the Mac side, and Windows XP/Vista/7 on the Win side); it includes the improvements noted:

• Performance improvements for Top Sites
• Stability improvements for plug-ins, and for sites with SVG graphics and online forms
• Fixes issues affecting settings changes to some Linksys routers and iWork.com user comments

There are also a slew of security fixes in this update; full list is in the continuation of this post, via the Apple Product Security mailing list.

The update weighs in at 31.8 MB on my Snow Leopard install, but your download size may vary. You can get it in Software Update or via the Safari download page.