Sunday, March 1, 2009

SAFARI 4 BLING OR iCANDY I don't know what's happening at Apple, but after delivering a bugged iLife09, Apple has now released Safari 4 beta. Like the Faces and Places in iPhoto, the Top Sites feature seems to be made especially for people with an amateuristic way of using the internet. It is a bling gadget that does not add efficiency, it is flashy junk that is only of any use when the number of items in stock is small. Top Sites defeats its own use when the number of pages becomes larger than 20 or so. Anyway, I have my favourite sites in a menu bar and one click is enough to open them. When I had installed Safari 4 I noticed that several sites were indeed loading faster, but other sites loaded very, very slowly. Strangely enough it was the Apple sites that loaded much slower in Safari 4 than in Safari 3. So where's the advantage in that? I simply reinstalled Safari 3, which I don't use very much either. Safari 4 has trouble loading several websites and is even causing trouble with the Mail app. Firefox is still the best browser in town. CNet: "Apple promises much with its Safari 4 browser, but it ultimately underdelivers. I've seen reports that it's faster, but again, I didn't get that feeling while I was using it. It was actually noticeably slower on some sites (like NewsNow, ESPN Soccernet, etc.)." PoliGazette: "Last week I published a post praising the new Safari 4 Beta browser. It was, so I wrote, a fast browser and an improvement over Safari 3. Well, after using it for a couple of days now I take my words back. This browser is horrible, especially for bloggers. It doesn't work well at all, it seems to make a habit out of crashing when you're almost done writing a lengthy post and it has trouble loading a variety of webpages. It's insane. Very often it doesn't even show the buttons on my wordpress writing dashboard; seemingly. In other words: don't get Safari ... unless you're someone like me who enjoys testing browsers and who has a variety of other browsers that do work well. In that case download it but be prepared for a lot of crashes. OK - I tested Safari 4, I did my best, I'll delete it now and reinstall 3." More from MacFixIt. Moreover, Apple is preparing build 10.5.7 of its OS X Leopard, but Safari 4 will not install on it. Duh! The funny thing is that most Safari 4 users are now trying to get the old look back and disable Top Sites, Tabs on top and more. MacDailyNews: "Apple fanatics - you know, those idiots who would buy anything with an Apple logo on it - will get all giddy and clap like little girls at a Hannah Montana concert when they see Top Sites, the new default Safari 4 home page. And speaking of pointless visual effects, allow me to point out the most recent and most egregious use of Apple's Cover Flow display... it makes absolutely no sense at all in a browser." OSNews: "A few days ago, Apple surprised everyone by releasing the first beta of Safari 4, the company's latest version of their WebKit browser. While I generally love Safari on the Mac (my browser of choice on that side of the fence), I've never felt as comfortable with it on the Windows side of things. In any case, this latest beta has made a very bold move in the interface department, and I'm sad to say that it's not for the better. Let me explain where it went wrong for Apple. When Google pushed out Chrome, it had the tabs in a different place than most other browsers. Wait, let me correct that - it had the browser controls in a different place. Instead of the browser controls being located atop the tabs, they were placed inside the tab. The result was that each web page had its own set of controls. The difference between 'moving the tabs' and 'moving the browser controls' may seem arbitrary, but as it turns out, it seems to explain perfecty well why Safari 4 is such a UI disaster. This is where it goes wrong for Safari 4. There, the tabs are the titlebar, leading to a rather schizophrenic UI widget: it has to act as a titlebar and a tab bar, and consequently, does neither of the two very well. Since you have to be able to drag the window via this new tabtitlebar widget, Apple had to create a special and small handle for moving tabs, while making the tabs themselves the place to drag the window. This design decision is something I expect from a 6 year old who writes his fist tabbed text editor - not from a company that prides itself on UI design. To me, it seems like Apple had heard that "Chrome has tabs on top", but instead of just being honest and admitting that Google got it right, they set a goal for themselves to make as many arbitrary and useless changes as possible so they could still claim they were innovating. All these changes resulted in this botched and confusing tabtitlebar abomination that not only looks horribly out of place on both Mac OS X and Windows, but is also a functional disaster. I hope Apple's Safari engineers recover from this monumental design frak-up quickly, because if this stays the way it is, I won't be using Safari on my Mac anymore. Which is a shame, since Safari 4 comes packed with lots of other interesting and useful features. I also like the effort to make Safari moe native on Windows, but it's two steps forward, ten steps back." From an Apple discussion forum: "iWeb 09 has started crashing moments after opening. The longest iWeb has run today is about two minutes. The only new piece of software on this computer is the beta version of Safari. I removed the beta version of Safari and now iWeb works perfectly. DO NOT INSTALL OR RUN THE BETA VERSION OF SAFARI. IT CAUSES PROBLEMS WITH THE iLIFE AND iWORK APPLICATIONS." Well, also iWeb3 has its bugs. What Apple has produced with Safari 4 is bling, eye candy - or should I say iCandy? - for the hardcore Apple groupie. For a beta it is allowed to crash and cause trouble, but isn't Apple coming very close to the unstable behaviour of Windows? 12:22:27 PM

CHANGE AND PORN Now this is a t-shirt I would like to have. It's witty. And this is funny: ABC: "'Wen it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are more the same than different,' says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard Business School. However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. 'Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,' Edelman says. Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election - Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama." Which shows how hypocritical conservatives are. 12:03:12 PM

The CROOKED LETTER Free book for you: The Crooked Letter by Sean Williams. It seems to be a fantasy novel. 11:55:07 AM

MURAKAMI'S SPEECH Some time ago Haruki Murakami accepted the Jerusalem prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, despite opposition as he would be accepting the prize from the hands of political authorities who are engaged in ethnic cleansing. Haaretz: "Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them. So let me tell you the truth. A fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came. The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The UN reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens - children and old people. Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott. Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this: 'Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.' Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be? What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor. This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically. Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System. That is all I have to say to you." Though it is a very polite critique, and he did shake hands with war criminals, Murakami nevertheless is clear about where he stands when the Zionist System is crushing unarmed civilians. If you want to know more about the regular Israeli violence against Palestinians bookmark the site of the UN, Occupied Palestinian Territory. A translation of this book by Shlomo Sand is in preparation. At present it's only available in French. 'How the Jewish People was Invented' is a must read. 11:49:48 AM

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