Entries Tagged 'Safari 3 beta' ↓

Back in the days before OS X came out, there was Yellow Box. If it were available today, it could easily be described as XCode and Cocoa for Windows. There was also Red Box back then, essentially the same as what we’ve got now: OS X on Intel processors. To make things interesting, it is well-known that iTunes exists for Windows, and (somewhat infamously) also known that Safari exists for Windows. Apple even makes a utility for Windows to manage AirPort base stations.

“So, what!?”, right?

No. It’s bigger than that. What Apple is tinkering with more and more in their skunkworks is the development environment formerly known as Yellow Box. That technology never went away. It may have languished with time somewhat, but thanks to Microsoft’s determined support for backwards compatibility, most of what was ever in Yellow Box still works. Sure, some of it is crufty and all that, but the recent developments with Safari and on-going development of iTunes for Windows is indicative enough that they’re definitely toying with the idea of releasing Yellow Box once again.

This makes perfect sense. Macs run on Intel. Windows runs on Intel. Mac users can install Windows on a Mac. Why not develop the same application on a Mac, in Mac OS X, in XCode, then compile it for both operating systems at once!? That’s right. That’s exactly one of the things you will see coming out of Cupertino in the next year or two. If they don’t announce it at this year’s WWDC, you can expect it at the following year’s WWDC.

Like everybody else and their dog in Austin, I went to the Apple Store in Austin, at the Domain, to see OS X 10.5 Leopard on its debut day. Well, of course the Domain is an ultra-American, artificial-as-possible, prefab shopping strip with the same stupid chain shops you find everywhere else in upper-middle-class-suburban-America. It’s hip, trendy, popular, and 100% devoid of any real culture or humanity. A perfect example of why people hate Americans.

Unfortunately, Apple Stores are all in similar places in the USA. Fortunately, I expected this, and it didn’t come between me and my mission to try out Leopard and resist the temptation to buy anything.

The sad thing is, Leopard was kind of disappointing. In much the same way that Tiger was disappointing: Panther got most of it right already. Every new thing since Panther (almost) has been toy eye-candy. That’s not true, but that’s how it feels. Panther really felt revolutionary. Tiger was indeed evolutionary. But this Leopard… I don’t know. Maybe it will grow on me. That is after I get a new Mac that comes with it. I just didn’t see anything compelling enough to get me to buy the OS or even to get me to buy a new Mac NOW.

The Dock?
Yep, it’s a downgrade that is harder to make out visually.

Spaces?
Uh, needs a little work to make it smoother, but I get it, this little piggy cried “K D E” all the way home.

Time Machine?
Oh, I’m sure it’s as good as advertised. I saw the original Steve Jobs intro a year ago. It was neato-lookin’ and all that. But backup is not so critically difficult to me, clone a drive or use RAID mirroring, with cycling out. It’s not new. It doesn’t matter how you implement it so much, until you need to recover something!

Other features…?
Nothing really WOWed me. Really.

Bad stuff?
Well the Dock for one. But the GUI in general, has taken an ugly turn with the sharper corner radius on the rounded top corners and the lack of rounded corners on the toolbar. It looks like something pretending to be a Mac, like some KDE or Gnome theme that comes close but gets it wrong.

I can wait for the polish up.

The only compelling features to me were all the dev tools!! But unfortunately, the Apple Store that I went to did not feel compelled to display any of the dev tools. Talk about lame.

Objective-C 2.0 is coming this month and some of the most important features are Properties, Garbage Collection, and Iterators. Continue reading →

Safari 3 does have one bug I’ve started to see regularly. Favicons will sometimes hang around from the previous site visited. Result: you get to see the wrong favicon attached to a URI in the address bar. Hardly a big deal, but not cool.