3 posts tagged “safari”

Okay, I admit it.  I'm a geek.  A Nyerd.  I actually bought an iPhone.  The funny part is, someone else stood in line for it and then called me the night they were released and asked me if I wanted one because they had bought two.  I said yes, went to his house the next day and wrote a check for $648.42 for the 8 GB model and carried it around with me all day while my friend and I were shopping in the Haight and various other places, looking for melodicas and other unusual, money loser musical instruments.

When I got home, I couldn't resist launching the new version of iTunes [7.3] to see how the activation process would progress.  For me, it was painless and without a single glitch.  Within 10 minutes of me syncing the Nokia to my computer's AddressBook app, I was up and running making calls with the iPhone with all of the numbers from my Nokia on my iPhone without even so much as a single hiccup.

I really like the phone but carrying around a piece of equipment that has an orientation sensor and a myriad of other sensitive pieces and parts, you get kinda nervous about dropping it.  I bought a couple of cases and decided on the Contour clear case that covers the iPhone and includes a belt clip that the sheathed phone clicks into.  You have to be careful when you, ahem, pull your pants down with the phone clip in your pocket or belt as the clip will find it's way out of your pocket and the case and phone go crashing to the floor;  Hopefully, from not too high of a perch but still, dropping a $650 dollar phone is not a good idea, even if there are videos that show how sturdy the iPhone is on PCWorld's website.

So, the iPhone is awesome.  Seriously.  It is.  Unfortunately, it's also a first generation phone [well, second if you count that Razor thing] and Apple still has the option to revamp the entire interface if they want to since it's a phone with only one button on the face, two on the side and one switch.  But seriously, there are some features that a more mature phone company like Nokia have included on their higher-end phones for some time now.

Some of the missing features include video and audio recording, customizable mp3 ringtones, the lack of a Salling Clicker remote control widget that allows me to control all of my computer's iTunes track selection, volume and playback controls from my phone [one of the coolest apps for a phone ever] in addition to providing support for a crapload of other features like iPhoto slideshow controls, Keynote presentation slide controls, iTunes muting/pausing when the phone rings and setting my status in iChat to Away when I move out of Bluetooth range.

Other items that are not supported now but might be in the future include voice dialing, although, this feature was always a pain in the arse on my Nokia.  There was some special mode that had to be entered via some secret key combination before I could bark commands at my phone and even then, the recognition of my voice was not always spot on.

I really liked the fact that the alarm clock feature on my Nokia would tell you how long it was until the alarm would go off from when you set it [such as 7 hours 56 minutes until 8:30AM].  At one point I had a crapload of games on my Nokia but the MMC cards [thinner than SD Cards] kept getting corrupted and there's no easy way to back up the Nokia to my disk.  The Nokia did have built-in memory and an MMC card slot for adding sounds and photos.

I do have to be fair and say that the video recording on the Nokia was terrible and almost unwatchable but I have seen some phones with fairly good quality recording capabilities.  I hope Apple gets on the video recording feature soon.  When making calls, the keypad and pause buttons were really nice.  Having a speaker phone is great too but the marge calls button; that's new and nifty.  My Nokia has a speaker phone feature too.

Visual Voice Mail is kinda neat but I don't get that many phone calls so I don't usually have a lot of voice messages.  I also noticed some minor artifacts in the audio recording that sounded like low bit rate or compression in the voice message playback.  Compression and low bit rate are hardly discernable by most non-audiophile folks so that's no big whoop.

I did run into one somewhat annoying aspect of the iPhone/iTunes/iPhoto connection; if you have your photos on an external drive and you don't have it handy, you might not be able to sync your phone, if it contains pictures and you want to sync.  I had this problem occur when I added a bunch of contacts to my Address Book and a couple of photos on my iPhone.  When I connected the iPhone, iPhoto launched and said that it couldn't find my library so I said Cancel [the other options were Find or Create new].  When I launched iTunes, which is where all of the syncing takes place, the iPhone didn't appear in the list of devices in the left column on the main iTunes screen.

Other than these few items, the phone seems to be really well put together and I've been having fun surfing for wikipedia pages while out with friends or watching You Tube videos from home via the WiFi connectivity that's built in; My Nokia didn't have WiFi although I am positive that current models of the N Series from Nokia do include this feature.

Now, if the iPhone just had HSPDA 3G compatibility instead of EDGE 2.5G, we'd start to see some reasonable internet access speeds over the air.

I just installed Firefox 2.0 on my iMac G5 after reading about the new version release this week and I was having a really hard time figuring out how to enable the new Session Restore feature that was mentioned in the Release Notes.  There's no documentation in the notes as to how to enable it to work like the now obsolete Session Saver add-on that I've come to love and rely on heavily in Firefox.  The application Saft for Mac OS X's Safari browser has a similar tab save and restore feature but Safari 2 just doesn't cut the mustard for many of the web 2.0 application sites, including Vox.  Hopefully, Safari 3.0 will fare better than 2.0 has with these new website applications.

So, I was just looking at the Firefox Add-Ons page for Session Saver and discovered that there is no new version of this software and no way to contact Rue, the creator of the Firefox Session Saver plug-in.  I also searched the Firefox Help via the Help menu and there's no entry anywhere for Session Restore which is really stupid.

Luckily, someone was nice enough to mention where the feature can be selected in the Session Saver user comments on the Firefox Add-Ons site and I have the scoop for those that are having the same difficulty I was.

In Windows, go to Options > Main > When Firefox Starts and select Show my windows and tabs from last time.  The default is normally Show my home page.  What this does is, every time you close Firefox 2 with one or more tabs open, the same tabs are opened again the next time the application is launched.  I absolutely love this feature.  Your mileage may vary depending on your personal taste.

For Mac users, the instructions are just a tad bit different: Go to Firefox > Preferences > When Firefox starts and select the Show my windows and tabs from last time option from the pop-up.

With the addition of Session Restore in Firefox 2.0, there are some really nifty features that are still missing from the add-on Session Saver and the Safari-only Saft application's equivalent tab saving feature.  Session Restore also restores all previously open pages or tabs after a crash of the browser which on the surface is very useful but sometimes, you need to be able to pick and choose from the list of pages that were open when the crash occurred because one of the open tabs may have caused the crash and you don't want it to be reopened and have the browser crash all over again.  Only Saft for Safari provides a pick list of pages or tabs that were open prior to the crash where you can choose which pages or tabs you want it to open and remove pages that might have been the source of the browser crash.

Another feature that is missing in Firefox 2.0's new Session Restore that Session Saver .2 and Safari's Saft include is the ability to save a specific group of tabs as a set.  When the tab is saved in Saft or with older versions of Session Saver, selecting the user-defined saved tab set item from the appropriate menu opens all of the tabs that were saved at the time of creation into a new browser window.  I like that feature but it's not nearly as important as being able to choose which pages to restore after a crash.

I hope someone find this information helpful.

So, I am a big fan of the new web 2.0, websites-that-behave-like-desktop-applications movement that's a foot right now.  I've got all the buzz words spinning around in my noggin too: folksonomy, AJAX, RSS, XML, Podcasts, Vodcasts, even OPML and tagging but one of my pet peeves currently is the lack of support for my favorite Mac-only browser Safari.

Safari is a fabulous browser and I use this wonderful $6 patch application called Saft with it that remembers all kinds of things like browser tab sets [some of you IE'rs don't even have tabs yet; how can you live like that!], crashed browser tabs resets, window positions, search without having to type Command + F and page dragging with the control key down for starters.  There are tons of other reasons why I love Safari and would hate to have to abandon it.  There's the fact that I've got the key equivalents down for changing from the current tab to the previous or next page and the page reload and back and forth and page source key equivalents are embedded in my brain as well.

But one unfortunate and somewhat major feature missing in Safari is support by a lot of the new web 2.0 applications that have been cropping up all over the place lately.  Here's a short list of new sites that don't support Safari right now:

Writely [online Word document replacement app]
Vox [this site's create post tool specifically doesn't function in Safari]
Google Spreadsheets [For you know, spreadsheets]
Gliffy [a Visio replacement]
Yahoo!'s new mail app [this app looks a lot like Outlook now]
Wet Paint [an allegedly wiki-based website creation tool that says nothing about wikis anywhere in the help]
Plaxo's new UI [it balked when I attempted to upload my .vcf file from Address Book]
...and I'm sure many more that I didn't mention here as well.

So, what I'm wondering is, what does Apple have to do to get more support for the open source Web Kit-based Safari application?  Right now, when I want to post to Vox, I have to open Camino, a little known star system where the clones were created, um, I mean a little known Mac-only browser that is a Mozilla variant to post to my fabulous Vox account.  I seriously hope all of us boutique Mac users get Safari support in some of these new apps soon or I'll have to find Saft for one of these other browsers and come in from the code jungle that is Safari and use Firefox or Camino for browsing the net.  That will be sad day.