Mac

Hints / Mac — 2 Comments
28
Jul 10

How-to remove a PDF password

Have you ever been given a PDF document, only to find you can’t read it on your device of choice because it’s password-protected? Most universities nowadays make course material available in PDF format. However, some insist on making their material password-protected, in order to prevent unauthorized users from reading it.

Unfortunately, the password protection can cause other issues:

  • Preview’s full-screen “Slideshow” view will display a blank screen (rdar: 7757682)
  • Not all iOS apps can open encrypted PDFs (although iBooks and GoodReader have both recently been updated to support this feature)
  • PDF Passwords aren’t saved – so you’ll need to look it up and enter it each time

But if you have the correct password and can open the PDF file, there’s a (slightly tricky) way to store a non-password protected copy for personal use. There are a few different ways you can do this, but after trying out several methods, I believe this is the easiest. Continue reading →

Hints / Mac — 3 Comments
14
Jun 10

Free OS X World Cup Vuvuzela Filter

If you watch TV on your Mac and been annoyed by the constant buzzing of the Vuvuzela’s during the World Cup games, you might want to try this tip.

I use the equinux TubeStick to watch TV (full disclosure: I work for equinux) so this tutorial was written for The Tube, but it’ll work with other software or online streaming sites as well.

Update:

My colleague has put together a small application that eliminates the need to use Garageband. Check it out for even easier Vuvuzela filtering.

Step 1: Install & Configure Soundflower

Download the free Soundflower utility from Google Code. This utility allows you to pass audio from all applications back into your system, allowing us to filter it using Garageband.

Once installed:

  • Open System Preferences > Sound
  • Select Output: Soundflower (2ch)
  • Select Input: Soundflower (2ch)

Your audio will now be muted – don’t worry, this is normal.

Step 2: Install VuvuX

There are other ways to filter out the buzz of the Vuvuzela’s manually, but Prosoniq offer a free AU plugin that takes care of it for you. Download it, then drag it onto the ‘Components’ alias:

Step 3: Start filter with Garageband

Prosoniq suggest using their filter with Audio Hijack Pro, but if you’d like to save yourself $32, you can use Garageband which probably came free with your Mac.

Simply launch Garageband, create a new real instrument project and adjust these settings:

  • Go to Garageband > Preferences > Audio/Midi and select Audio Input: Soundflower (2ch)
  • Go to your real instrument track, select the Edit tab and click a blank slot to add a new effect
  • Choose VuvuX from the drop down list and make sure it is turned on
  • Switch back to the Browse tab, select Input Source: Soundflower (2ch) and turn on the Monitor

You should now hear audio again. Now fire up The Tube and you will notice that Vuvuzela’s are a fair bit quieter. Turn the filter on or off to really hear the difference. You can also click the filter in Garageband to manually adjust the level of noise reduction – be careful though, too much reduction will cause the commentary and other game sounds to sound distorted.

Any there you have it! Enjoy a vuvuzela-free World Cup!

Follow me on Twitter for further updates and tips!

Featured / Mac / Opinions — No Comments
7
Jun 10

Search Chordie iTunes script

If you play guitar, you’ve probably tried the various tab and chord sites out there. I recently discovered Chordie.com and it has quickly become my favourite.

One thing I often do is look up chords for songs I’m listening to in iTunes. I do it so often that I decided to put together a little script to make it a bit easier to do.

Head on over to my Projects page to download Search Chordie and to find out how to use it.

Download Search Chordie

Search Chordie is based on Search Wikipedia by the fantastic Doug Adams – check out his other iTunes scripts at DougScripts.com.

Thanks also to Chordie.com – if you play the guitar, you’re going to love this fantastic resource.

Mac / Opinions / Reviews / UI Design — No Comments
27
Apr 10

Transmit 4 Review

For years, one of the most popular OS X FTP applications has been Transmit. Panic’s FTP workhorse is so well regarded and robust, it’s engine was even chosen by Apple to power the FTP upload feature built-in to iWeb.

But OS X has gone through a lot of changes since Transmit 3 was first introduced and the app is starting to show its age. Enter Transmit 4!

This latest update adds a completely new user interface, innovative new features like Transmit Disk as well as a slew of customisation options. I was fortunate enough to be a beta tester for version 4, so I’ve had a few weeks to play with the new version – here are some of my thoughts.

New UI

Panic is know for their sleek user interface design and attention to detail and Transmit 4 is no exception. First off, the biggest change of them all: A NEW TRUCK!

But the logo isn’t all that has been refreshed: The entire app feels brand new. Most UI elements have been given a 2010 update and the interface feels a lot tidier.

You start off with a list of your configured servers that uses a sleek black look that was made popular by apps such as Pixelmator, CoverScout 3 and SongGenie (disclaimer – I work for equinux).

You can choose an icon for your servers, or use the server favicon

Selecting a server puts you into a familiar file browsing mode – more on that below:

Buttons and features are usually exactly where you would expect to find them and unobtrusive animations and pretty icons round out the package and give the app a nice touch of Panic personality. Here are a few bits of eye candy I noticed during testing:

Progress indicator

Breadcrumb navigation

Nice use of icons in the replace dialog makes it clear which file you need to replace

File Browsing, Places & Quick Look

An FTP client fundamentally has two jobs: show me my remote files and allow me to move files between my local and remote storage. To accomplish that, an FTP application has to replicate a lot of the functionality of a regular file browser, so users can browser their local files as well as their remote files.

Transmit 4 offers single and dual file-browser layouts, (rearrangable!) tabs and the icon, llist, column and cover flow viewing styles you are familiar with from the Finder. But it also has a few additional tricks up its sleeve, that you won’t find in the Finder.

Here are some of the more interesting file browsing options:

  • Folders above Files changes the sort order, so that folders are always displayed before your files in a view
  • Quick Look makes it easy to see a file’s content and even works with remote files stored on your FTP server
  • Places can store shortcuts to your most frequently used folders, so they are just a click away. You can also drag files to a Place shortcut.

Places give you quick access to commonly used folders.

Places is really useful, but the way you add locations by dragging them to the breadcrumb area is a bit unconventional. Once you’ve figured it out though, it quickly became one of my favourite Transmit 4 features.

Transmit 4 offers enough view options to suit almost anyone’s preferred file browsing style. Whether you perfer to work with multiple windows, tabs, split layouts, column view etc – Transmit 4 has got you covered. While it’s debatable whether most users need so many options, file browsing habits are usually so ingrained that it was probably a good idea for Panic to include as many options as they could.

DockSend, Droplets, TransmitDisk and more…

Most of the time, I find myself uploading files to the same place over and over again. Transmit has a number of ways that give you an easy way to send a file to your FTP server straight from the finder:

  • Drag it to a custom droplet you can create in Transmit 4
  • Enable Docksend and you can drag it directly to the Transmit 4 icon in your Dock
  • Turn on TransmitDisk…

TransmitDisk is a nifty new feature, that uses MacFUSE to allow you to mount your FTP server as a volume that the Finder can see. Once mounted, you can interact with your FTP folders like you would with a drive on your local network.

In my experience this worked fairly well, but occasionally felt a little bit more sluggish than using Transmit’s own file browser – but your mileage may vary.

Conclusion

Overall this is a great upgrade to an already very useful application. The new features are well thought out and make working with your FTP server a lot easier and faster. While this isn’t a revolutionary upgrade, it is solid enough to make it worth your while.

You can buy or upgrade to Transmit 4 in the Panic Online Store.

Mac / Reviews — No Comments
25
Apr 10

Intel X25 SSD: The ultimate MacBook Upgrade?

Let’s be honest: most of you reading this have wondered how to improve your Mac’s performance at some point or another, whether it was while waiting for an application to load, or just the last time you saw the spinning beachball of death. For years conventional wisdom has been that adding RAM to your Mac would give you the most noticeable performance improvement.

But nowadays, RAM is no longer the primary bottleneck on your Mac – it’s the aging, mechanical technology that powers your harddrive. But conventional mechanical harddrives are slowly but surely being replaced by solid state drives (abbreviated “SSD”). Whilst early SSD drives offered limited storage capacity and had a finite number of read /write cycles,  The current generation of Intel X25 SSD drives are very compelling alternatives indeed…

Pros & Cons

Although still pricy when compared against conventional harddrives with similar capacities, SSDs have steadily been dropping in price and now only cost about 100-200 dollars more than a conventional drive. So what are the benefits? Well, speed primarily: SSDs offer blazingly fast read and write speeds. And unlike conventional drives, that can be damaged if jostled or dropped whilst in use, SSDs are extremely sturdy, making them ideal for notebook computers.

Installing the X25-M

It took me about 10 minutes to swap the stock Fujitsu harddrive in my 13″ MacBook for the X25-M. You basically pop the battery lid, unscrew one screw and pull your old drive. Slot the X25 into its place, close everything back up again and you’re done!

As my previous harddrive was larger than the 80GB review unit I received, I opted for a clean Snow Leopard install, instead of trying to partially migrate my data and settings from my Time Machine backup. The entire OS X installation was very fast (~10 minutes) and after a quick Dropbox sync, I was up and running with my most important apps and documents.

Crunching the Numbers

Intel’s X25-M is currently considered to be one of the best SSD drives on the market and the raw numbers tend to agree:

So how do the numbers translate to your everyday, real-world experience? I mean, are you really going to notice if Safari loads 0.4 seconds faster? Probably not.
But in my experience, the big difference wasn’t that any single task felt much faster, it was the fact that everything felt faster. Whether copying a file, opening a DMG or launching an application – everything feels very responsive and snappy.

Here are two videos to give you an idea of what to expect:

Cost vs Benefit

All this performance doesn’t come cheap though: the 80GB review unit I tested currently retails for about €200 / $250. The larger capacity models can be several times as expensive. But if you use your Mac professionally, installing an SSD is an easy way to give your Mac a speed boost. The Intel X25 is ideal for professionals and performance junkies who need the highest possible performance. Enthusiasts and casual users might want to look at some of the cheaper alternatives on the market instead. They still trounce the performance of a traditional harddrive, without making too large of a dent in your wallet.

Conclusion

The Intel X25 is a fantastic upgrade for your MacBook and will boost the speed of even mundane things like opening an application. It’s ideal for performance fanatics and professionals, casual users may want to wait a while longer until the price / capacity ratio improves.

Support the site and pimp your Mac with an Intel X25 from Amazon.com:


JetLinks / Mac / Opinions — No Comments
8
Feb 10

Jetlinked: Goodbye Macworld

From my day job: equinux has written about some of our Macworld experiences over the years and how we made the decision not to go back this year. It’s a good look behind-the-scenes at Macworld and worth reading if you’ve been or plan on going.

equinux blog: Goodbye Macworld

Featured / Mac / Reviews — 1 Comment
25
Jan 10

Review: Keyboard Maestro


If you use your Mac professionally, chances are you often find yourself typing out certain bits of text over and over again. Whether it’s a URL, a file path or email snippets, typing these snippets over and over again can waste a lot of time. That’s where utilities such as Keyboard Maestro come in handy: they allow you to define keyboard shortcuts that will type out phrases or execute commands for you.

Unlikea more general-use utilities such as LaunchBar or Quicksilver, Keyboard Maestro is designed primarily for text manipulation and keyboard shortcuts rather than general purpose file system actions and macros. Having said that, it can also replicate some of the functionality those programs offer as well, giving it a bit of an advantage over more basic text replacement tools such as Typinator or TextExpander.

Performance

If there’s one thing you need your text-replacement utility to do, it’s reliable text replacement. You want it to work immediately, regardless of which application you’re working in. If it causes any extra delay, it would interrupt your thought and you would probably be quicker off typing things out yourself.

Keyboard Maestro performed very well in this regard and worked instantly every time, regardless of which every application I tested it with.

Advanced Commands

Once you’ve become accustomed to basic text replacement, you start thinking about more advanced things.

I for instance use a number of text replacements that allow me to create URLs based on file paths I’ve copied. So by copying the path “/images/example.jpg”, I can simply type the shortcut “..imgloc” to turn that file path into the URL “http://jetplanejournal.com/posts/images/example.jpg“.

But Keyboard Maestro can also trigger non-text events, such as mouse movements, system events (e.g. volume, disk ejects etc.) open URLs etc. The Keyboard Maestro website has a number of ideas and suggestions to help you optimize your workflow.

But there’s more…

So Keyboard Maestro is a text replacement utility, a keyboard hotkey tool and a time saver. What other tricks does it have up its sleeve?
Well, it can also:

  • Store your clipboard history and manage multiple clipboards
  • Remote control your Mac from your iPhone using its built-in macro trigger webserver
  • Run regular scripts and jobs for you
  • Record GUI-based scripts

Gripes

Keyboard Maestro is a very powerful utility, but manages to be easy to use thanks to a fairly simple and straightforward interface. However, the UI could do with a little bit of extra polish here and there and one or two Macros that are enabled by default may be confusing:

  • Some of the icons could be more obvious, e.g. you enable and disable macros by clicking a (stateless) check mark. A “no entry” icon is used for delete instead of the conventional “—” icon.
  • To finish editing a new macro, you can either close the actions pane, or click the “+” icon, neither of which is particularly obvious.
  • By default, Option+backspace is remapped to forward delete, which left me scratching my head for a few seconds, as I generally use that shortcut to delete entire words.
  • Similarly, Ctrl+Tab is remapped to Keyboard Maestro’s own application window switching function (which is similar to the Dock expose feature in Snow Leopard) – I use that shortcut extensively to switch between tabs in Safari.

But these are all minor gripes that won’t annoy you at all once you have everything set up the way you want, so I offer them mainly as feedback to the developer.

What about the tools built-in to OS X?

I know a lot of users prefer to use the tools and functionality built-in to OS X whenever possible, so you might ask what’s wrong with those tools…

Well, although text substitution service has been beefed up significantly in 10.6, it’s still lacking the customizablity you’ll find in utilities such as Keyboard Maestro. You could also replicate a lot of the functionality in Automator, but in my experience, Automator is so slow to execute a command, it’s not worth the effort.

Conclusion

Keyboard Maestro is a great utility for anyone that spends a lot of time working with text on their Mac. Whether you might be thinking of using it to help you quickly answer repetitive email, create blog posts or just to map certain mouse-based actions to a keyboard shortcut, it’s definitely worth checking out.
I’ve tried a number of similar utilities, but in terms of extendability and scope, Keyboard Maestro seems to take the cake. At $36, it’s not cheap for a utility, but considering the time it’ll help you save I think it’s a fair price. I’d recommend you try it out and see how well it could fit into your daily workflows. A free demo is available.

Recommended.

Disclaimer: Peter Lewis, maker of Keyboard Maestro kindly provided me with a license for this review. All opinions are however, of course my own.

JetLinks / Mac / Opinions / UI Design — 2 Comments
16
Jan 10

Jetlinked: 20 Beautiful Mac apps

Designreviver has a nice list of 20 Beautiful Mac apps that is worth checking out. There are only a few picks I disagree with:

  • Pixelmator’s black icons on a HUD window background have always bothered me and seem like a bad UI choice
  • iStatmenus is pretty, but never feels very Mac-like
  • TuneUp is the antithesis of a beautiful Mac app. It leeches onto iTunes and looks & feels more like a Firefox plugin than a Mac app.

But the list has a few lesser-known entries as well, so it’s worth reading for a few gems that you don’t see on every other list (I’m typing this in blogo which I hadn’t heard of before…).

Link

JetLinks / Mac / The web — No Comments
12
Dec 09

Jetlinked: Simple Desktops

I just came across a nice collection of simple, clean desktop backgrounds that I had to share. For example:

Ohhh-Christmas-Tree_png_295x1600_q85 Snow-Flake__png_300x1600_q85

Head over to Simple Desktops to check them out!

Featured / Mac / Opinions — 1 Comment
27
Oct 09

5 Reasons the 27″ iMac Could Be Your Next TV

  1. stariMacA twenty-seven inch screen is big enough for dorm rooms & apartments
  2. Add an equinux TubeStick TV tuner to watch over-the-air HD or cable TV
  3. You may be able to use it as a display with your blu-ray player / games console
  4. It’ll be perfect for watching Hulu or those movies and TV shows you’ve downloaded off bittorrent purchased online.
  5. Front Row rounds out the package as your living room media center

It won’t fit the bill for everyone, but I can see a lot of college kids or people with combined office / livings rooms considering the new iMac instead of a regular TV.

In our house, my desk is positioned that I can swivel my display around to face the couch. The iMac would work really well in this kind of apartment layout.

Like this idea? Support the site and buy your shiny new 27″ iMac at Amazon.
(Who are we kidding? Get the quad-core version)

Featured / Mac / Opinions / iPhone — 3 Comments
7
Oct 09

First look: Mobileme vs. Google Sync

sync

In my post Free alternatives to MobileMe earlier this year, I looked at some free alternatives to Apple’s MobileMe service. One crucial piece was still missing though: The seamless over-the-air syncing and push email experience offered by MobileMe on the iPhone.

Google Sync – the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?

MobileMe’s biggest advantage to date has been its support for push email and over-the-air syncing, which ensures that emails and changes to calendars and contacts are synced to iPhone users instantly.

But with Google Sync, Google aims to offer GMail and Google Calendar  users the same over-the-air syncing feature that MobileMe does. To accomplish this, Google is basically taking advantage of the fact that the iPhone (and most other smartphones) natively support Microsoft Exchange syncing. So Google are offering their own Exchange-compatible service, that acts as an intermediary between your data stored in Google’s services and your iPhone. Configure Google Sync as a new exchange account on your iPhone, enable Push support and Google will Push any new email messages, calendar or contact updates to your phone.

When you consider that iCal, Address Book and Mail on the Mac also natively support syncing with Google’s services, Google Sync starts to look like a very interesting alternative to MobileMe. Change a contact in Address Book or add an appointment to iCal  and those changes should be synced right up to your phone, without requiring a slow, USB iTunes sync – just like MobileMe. Emails should also be delivered right away, circumventing the 15 minute fetching interval limit. Or as Google sums it up it a cutesy comic:

sync-comic

But how well does it work in the real world?

mobile_138740d_en

Setting up Google Sync on your phone isn’t particularly difficult and Google offers easy step-by-step instructions. Enter your details, ignore a certificate warning, enter some more details and you’re done.

Emails

But mysteriously my Gmail inbox would only show 3 messages I had received this morning, with no sign of any messages I had received earlier in the week or later today. The same problem affected my other mailboxes as well. I was able to coax a few more messages off the server by selecting to only sync a week’s worth of email messages, but that does severely limit habitual emails hoarders such as myself. A know current limitation of the service is also the fact that drafts can’t be edited, once synced.

Contacts

My Google contacts showed up fairly quickly in my Contacts application. But new contacts didn’t seem to sync back up to Gmail, no matter how often I tried to coax Google Sync into action.

Conclusion

Judging by the discussions going on over on the Google Sync messageboards, it looks as though the service has been pretty flaky for users the last few days, so these are most likely serious teething issues. But until these reliability problems are sorted out, it’s hard to realistically see Google Sync as a serious MobileMe alternative anytime soon.

Having said that, it’s promising to see Google taking the initiative and trying to offer an Exchange-like experience for non-corporate / non-MobileMe user – so Google gets a gold star for trying. It’s also worth remembering that MobileMe (a $99 per year service) had its own fair share of teething issues, so let’s hope Google is able to really challenge Apple in this area in the near future.

But for the time being, I’ll be sticking with regular Gmail IMAP syncing for my emails and MobileMe syncing for my contacts and calendars.

Featured / Mac / Reviews — 1 Comment
1
Oct 09

Review: CameraBag Desktop

Digital photography has made it easier for us all to take hundreds of near-perfect shots. But digital photography lacks some of the elements that made each photo taken with an analog camera unique. The type of film, processing techniques and photo-paper used all contributed to give each image a distinctive look.

CameraBag, by Nevercenter, gives digital photography enthusiasts an easy way to introduce some of that flavour back into their photography. Like its iPhone sibling (App Store link), CameraBag Desktop is designed to be straightforward and easy-to-use: Instead of presenting users with a confusing number of options, exposure settings, histograms and color profiles, CameraBag has 9 styles, that can all be applied with a single click.

CameraBag-14

CameraBag-styles

The styles are based on a mix of classic analog cameras and media formats. The manual describes as such:

Helga: Square-format toy camera with washed-out highlights and old-school vignetting.
Lolo: Shoot from the hip and take life as it comes with vibrant, colorful shots.
Mono: Smooth, refined, balanced black and white
1962: Dynamic, high-contrast black and white from the photojournalism of a bygone era.
Colorcross: Hazy, chemical color-swapping straight from the darkroom.
Instant: No need to shake this instant-developing film.
1974: Your father’s camera: faded, tinted, and hip.
Cinema: Dramatic, moody coloring with a widescreen aspect ratio.
Magazine: Rich tones for glossy pages.

Once you’ve dragged your image into the main window, apply one of the styles by simply clicking its preview thumbnail. Each style will crop your image and apply a variety of filters. You can also mix & match styles by checking the “multi-filter” option. This will allow you to apply multiple styles on top of each other, creating distinctive looks and styles. If you want to start over, simply click the “original” thumbnail, to discard all applied styles.

styles

CameraBag also applies a crop and border to your image, based on your style. If you prefer, you can also pick these manually though, allowing for even more image variations. If one of the styles doesn’t suit your taste, you can also “Reprocess” an image to see variations of that style. If a style produces an image that is too dark or lacking in contrast, reprocessing your picture will often deliver a much better result, so if you’re not happy with the way a photo turns out, try reprocessing it!

Some styles may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and I found myself using some more often than others. But most styles do a really good job of adding some flavour to your images.The CameraBag Photo Blog has some great examples of the kinds of results you can achieve, with nice before/after comparisons.

The UI is nicely laid out and very easy to use (although I’m not quite sure why the designers found it necessary for a user to “turn on” reprocessing). EDIT: @CameraBag clarifies:

“[...] reprocess auto-enables when clicked. It’s more about the off switch to get back to each filter’s signature look”

Styles are applied nearly instantaneously and while you’re finding the right style for your images the application feels very fast. Rotating and saving images causes a slight bit of delay, but both are extremely minor. For those who enjoy a good manual with their software, Nevercenter includes a detailed PDF guide, which I personally find a lot more useful than trying to find information with OS X’s built-in help system.

Overall CameraBag is a great and affordable way to liven up your shots. It’s an interesting new type of photo stylizer that works well as a complementary tool to traditional photo editing applications such as iPhoto or Picasa.

Available for just $19, it’s a must-have for every wannabe photographer.

Download CameraBag

Featured / Mac / Opinions — 1 Comment
25
Aug 09

Thoughts on Snow Leopard marketing

As predicted, 10.6 will be released August 28th, slightly earlier than promised. It certainly makes sense for Apple to release 10.6 before Microsoft Windows 7 marketing can hit: Rather than trying to compete with Microsoft for reviews and media attention, release early and hog all the attention for yourself.

However, the extremely short lead-up between announcement and release is a bit surprising: both the 10.4 and 10.5 releases had longer marketing build-ups, with big release countdown clocks dominating the Apple homepage.

105countdown

But the slightly more subdued marketing plays into the way Apple has positioned 10.6 as an incremental release: If you stick a big countdown clock on your website, people are going to expect huge fantastic changes. But with so few visible changes to Snow Leopard, that’s clearly not the kind of message Apple is trying to send. At the same time, early reviews have been very favorable and at the unbeatable price of $29, it’s hard not to be far more impressed by the new “fine-tuned” version of OS X, than the marketing would lead you to believe.

106teaser

I guess that the goal of this positioning and marketing strategy is mainly to allow Apple to under-promise and over-deliver – a great way to prepare for Windows 7 this fall.

At any rate, existing Mac owners have some great improvements to look forward to, potential first-time customers will be reminded which OS is the pundits’ favorite and developers get some under-the-hood improvements to play with. All-in-all it should be a very solid release for Apple.

If you enjoyed this article, support the site: Purchase your copy of Snow Leopard at Amazon with free shipping via one of the links below:

Snow Leopard (requires 10.5 to be installed on your Mac)

Snow Leopard Family Edition (requires 10.5. to be installed on your Mac)

Mac Box Set (Full version of Snow Leopard, iLife ’09 and iWork ’09)


JetLinks / Mac / Opinions — 1 Comment
25
Jul 09

JetLinked: Installing applications on the Mac still broken

Lukas Mathis has posted some thoughts on the issues Mac newcomers have with .dmg files. I also talked about this issue a while back in a post on the most common issues switchers have, but it’s worth noting it again. I agree with his followup post that adding another file format isn’t really the way to go either –   DMG files are a great feature to have – once you’ve understood them. But from a usability and customer support perspective, a simple zip file seems to be the better choice.

I’d still be interested to see what kinds of customer support issues you run into with zip files though:

  • Do people using alternative browsers, that don’t automatically open “safe” files like Safari does, struggle with them?
  • Do users who prefer to manually download updates have several versions of the same app sitting in their Downloads folder?
  • Are there any issues if users have a 3rd party archive tool installed (I’m looking at you StuffIt)?

But despite those questions, I think there is a valid reason to reconsider whether .dmg files should still be considered “best practise” for app distribution.

Mac / Opinions — No Comments
26
Jun 09

Thoughts on the Safari 4 release timing

Safari 4 logoApple announced and shipped the official Safari 4 release on the first day of WWDC. This was preceded by an extensive beta period, where Mac and Windows users could download the new version and test their websites and web applications with the new Webkit engine included with Safari 4.

Apple received a lot of useful feedback in terms of bugreports and also regarding the user interface changes the beta included ((Customer uproar notably lead to a reversal of the decision to place Safari’s tabs at the top of the browser window.)).

However Apple and website developers aren’t the only stakeholders with an interest in any new version of Safari: Many OS X and iPhone applications rely on Safari’s Webkit underpinnings, e.g. to display web content or generate HTML previews directly within an app. Safari provides the default system-wide Webkit framework, so any update to the browser will also affect those applications reliant on Webkit.

As expected with any major update, many 3rd party apps and plugins required updates to deal with the changes introduced by the Safari 4 beta. This is par for the course and most users expected a few glitches – it was a beta, after all.

But when the final Safari 4 release was announced at the WWDC keynote, it was quite different than the beta versions that preceded it. Cosmetic changes aside, a number of changes had also been made under the hood: The final release (which was automatically distributed to all OS X 10.4 and 10.5 users via Software Update) used Webkit version 530.17 – a notable jump compared to the Safari 4 beta releases, which used Webkit versions 528.16 & 528.17.

Bertrand announcing Safari 4

However, it would be wrong to try to blame the Webkit project in any way: Whilst a large part of the team does consist of Apple employees, it is a separate entity that isn’t directly tied to Apple itself. The Webkit and Safari release schedules also do not seemed to be directly related ((For example: The Squirrelfish JavaScript engine that Apple is touting in Safari 4 (under the “Nitro” marketing name) was announced by the Webkit team well before the Safari 4 beta was released.)).

It’s understandable that Apple would want to include all the bugfixes and improvements the Webkit team added as a result of the beta, but it is a bit disappointing that 3rd party developers weren’t given a chance to test those changes in the shape of a release candidate. As a result, a number of applications, websites and web applications needed to be re-tested with the final Safari 4 release and as usual, some of these required minor updates to restore compatibility with Safari 4 ((Apparently, even the iPhoto team hadn’t been able to thoroughly test 4.0: Safari 4.0.1 was released to specifically address compatibility issues with iPhoto’s Facebook integration & Places feature.)).

Webkit has become such a crucial OS X framework that releasing an update without extensive testing seems careless. To release such a large update on the first day of your own development conference, which developers spend a lot of money to attend, seems downright callous ((And releasing a browser that crashes when customers visit your online store, on the day you release a bunch of new products seems – well, just plain stupid.)). It effectively means that any testing and possible bugfix releases are delayed by at least a week, after developers have returned home from WWDC (and sobered up).

Is this a big of a deal as I’m making it out to be? Probably not: In the grand scheme of things, I’m guessing most developers and users couldn’t care less. But Apple does a much better job in this respect with other products, giving developers ample time and opportunity to thoroughly test their apps against most major iPhone and OS X updates before they’re released. Let’s hope a similar strategy can be adopted for Safari in future as well.

Update:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet has also written a post outlining a number of Safari 4 issues. More indication that the final release was slightly rushed?

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