First time I can ever recall having every item in my Dock running.
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So yeah, I played with Camino 1.5 for a week before I went crawling back to Firefox. And I've been off-and-on with Safari 3.0 beta all day. It's frustrating because all three of these browsers come very close to what I want in a browser but none of them pegs it perfectly.
Thus, my review of the current state of OS X browserdom and which pieces would make the Perfect OS X Browser.
Firefox 2.0.0.4
The best thing about Firefox: extensions. The second: cross-platform consistency. If I can make a site work in Firefox on the Mac, I know it'll look just dandy on the PC. Safari has matched that feature now, of course, but the extensions in FF are what bring me back. That, and the Undo The Tab I Just Closed By Accident command... it has saved me countless times.
However, it's a stupid memory hog. I don't care if it's the browser or the extensions I'm running... it's a mess. I hate the spinning beachball. The interface, even with GrApple, is still kind of a mess.
Camino 1.5
Love it. Great, great stride forward. Feels fast and zippy. Fits in to OS X very well. Feels leaner than Firefox. I appreciate that it's the same rendering engine, too... no having to worry about CSS breaking a beautiful layout.
But I can't move tabs? And I can still only store one username/password per domain name? And it's nice that there's a Flash blocker included, as well as an ad blocker, but (like Safari) that's not too useful if I can't whitelist sites.
I really do like Camino, but those little things just bug me a lot. Maybe 1.6 will fix 'em.
Safari 3 beta
Boy, does this look weird on a PC. I couldn't test it with a work app, which required an authenticated login - it crashed. On the Mac, it's very fast. Being able to move tabs? Great. The ability to move tabs off the tab bar into their own windows? Great! I still like the streamlined, clean interface. It's better at typography than Firefox and Camino.
But the new search? It kicks ass. It is easily the best search implementation I've seen in an app since Coda. They're tied, in my mind. Safari will actually highlight all the matches on a page and pop them up a bit. Once you've tried it, you'll think every other browser needs it too.
The cons? Uhm... hm. Other than what I've grown used to with Firefox... there... aren't... any really. It's a beta. Oh, that's one! It's a beta.
I'm going to stick it out with Safari 3 for a little while. But those Firefox extensions might be too much for me to miss.
The Perfect OS X Browser
It really is too bad that not any single browser has nailed everything perfectly. Firefox has a sucky UI; Camino's latest version just got outpaced by Safari; Safari's lacking expandability (to some degree.)
So for me, the perfect browser would include:
That's it. As you can see, things aren't too far off. Truly if Camino had extension support - the real deal - I think that would be the winner.
In any case I give Apple credit for their power play today, in making Safari the uber-platform for iPhone, Mac, and Windows web development. Well done!
So I switched back to Safari last week after using Firefox forever. I just can't seem to settle on a good browser on the Mac - I haven't been able to in a long time. I'll probably go back to Firefox though.
Two in one:
1.
On Thursday I stopped by an ice cream shoppe (yes, it was a shoppe) to get a milkshake after lunch. It was great - the people were friendly, the ice cream was tasty, and the milkshake was equally tasty. A curious thing happened when I was paying though: the woman ringing up my order asked, "Liquid lunch?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Liquid lunch?"
"No, no, this is dessert."
I thought it was a little odd. I guess given the time of day it was all right though; it was about noon, as I had taken an early lunch. But still, a milkshake for lunch?
2.
Sometimes it's the little things.
My MacBook, like all modern Apple laptops, includes the handy "put two fingers and flick your trackpad" scrolling mechanism. This, I love. It is a brilliant way to scroll versus having a dedicated scroll wheel (still fantastic). It works just about perfectly: put down two fingers, glide, scroll. There you go.
My work PC, an hp laptop, includes a scroll area on its trackpad. Originally when I got it I thought, "Huh, same thing!" so I just did the same two-finger scroll. That didn't work quite right. Turns out that within the scroll area (designated by white parallel horizontal lines), one just needs one finger. Okay. Fine. Still handy. Oh, and the pointer on screen changes into a little pointer working within a little scrollbar. Over the top. Unnecessary ("gee, I'm scrolling?!")
Oh, but it's finicky. If my finger falls out of the scroll area on the trackpad (possible, I am klutzy) then I stop scrolling. Worse - much much worse - is that the thing I want to scroll must have focus on the screen first. This is insane. The fracking OS knows where my mouse is pointed - why doesn't it just scroll the thing? And yes, the Mac implementation requires that the window has focus - that makes sense - but not the control itself.
So if I want to scroll my message list in Outlook, I can't just hover over the list and scroll. I have to move to the list, click it (selecting a message in the process, something I don't want to do), and then scroll. This extra step might seem small but it is, in fact, an enormous inconvenience.
It makes perfect sense from a programming standpoint, but just about zero sense from a usability standpoint. Awesome.
3. (a bonus)
I'm pleased that my rental car still has new car smell.
So I'm trying out OmniWeb 5.5 again, given it's on sale this month, and am a little surprised Vox still doesn't offer Safari (WebKit) support.
Here's where a problem I'm encountering falls into unfriendly territory.
Jeani has a VPN client set up on her machine for work, and she can connect fine. However when the time comes to Remote Desktop in to a Windows box on her Mac, the thing just stalls and eventually says that the computer wasn't found, blah blah blah.
I'm at a mild loss as to why this is happening. I can RDC in to the machines I have access to, without a VPN, just fine on either her machine or mine.
My best suggestion so far was for our landlord (who offers the wifi) to open up the RDC port, 3389, at the router level. But I'm not sure if this is the best course of action - certainly couldn't hurt (right?)
This stuff all worked at our last place, suggesting that there's a config issue. Anyone with some advice?
Last month I wrote about my experiences with Mac FTP clients. I'm afraid time is of the essence right now and I can't provide another medium-shallow-depth analysis; instead I'll leave my opinion to my medium-shallow Photoshop skills.
Update: Be sure to read this entry too, which is making me reconsider my use of Cyberduck.
When you work on web sites, there are a few tools you get to become buddy-buddy with. Your text editor. Your photo editor. Your browsers. Your FTP program.
Of course, your FTP program. Where would you be without it? You'd be up a creek without a paddle, that's where you'd be!
When I switched to the Mac six years ago, I first used InterArchy. It worked, but not too pleasantly for my tastes. I then switched to Fetch, whose website looks the same as it did in 2000. Fetch did everything I needed it to do, and did it without complaint. In time I became a beta tester for the 5.0 release and thought it was a solid improvement.
But no relationship is without its idiosyncracies, and the little Fetch dog occasionally made me growl. Like, for instance, when I was editing a file on the server with TextWrangler. Let's say I edit a file, and in the Fetch window navigate to another folder. I then go do something (gee, upload a file?) and head back to TextWrangler. I hit save. But wait! I navigated to another folder, right? Fetch took care of that. It helpfully navigated to where the open file was saved, and saved it.
Then when I needed to upload another file to that folder I navigated to earlier, I'd just drag it onto Fetch's window. But... you guessed it... the window had been pointing to where the TextWrangler file lived. Meaning I just uploaded it to the wrong folder, because Fetch "forgot" where I was. Oops.
I am a creature of habit, as are you, but I still toyed with the idea of switching FTP clients - particularly, Transmit. Transmit is, in a word, fantastic. It's beautiful (much prettier than Fetch if you ask me), it's useful, it is tightly integrated with TextWrangler or whatever text editor you'd like to use, and it costs money. $30, to be specific.
$30 is not a lot of money for an FTP program. But you know, I'd rather buy a pair of shoes for that $30.
I recall trying out an open-source FTP program called Cyberduck a year or so ago and thinking it really sucked. It did. It was awful. The interface sucked, the everything sucked. The icon? Well, I'm not a fan of too much cutesy-ness in my Dock. But a duck? Okay. Whatever. Say hi to Adium.
(I don't really use Adium; I don't really IM on the Mac.)
I totally forgot about InterArchy until Gruber mentioned it, and I will admit the interface looks absolutely fantastic. Its ability to look just like Finder has been a strength - or weakness - since its early days. But InterArchy, too, costs the money.
Something got in my noggin about 3 weeks ago, however, and Cyberduck was referenced in some forum or blog I was reading. I thought, "Why not give it a shot?" So for the past three weeks, the dog and the duck have been sitting side by side in my dock. (Fetch is to the left, so he can't see the Cyberduck; he's just fetching the floppy disk to the giant TextWrangler logo in front of him.)
I plunged into Cyberduck the same way I did RSS: wholeheartedly. I set up shortcuts for the FTP sites I used the most and saved them so I could use QuickSilver to access them. But a thought: "Gee, that display is fugly." I really thought that: "fugly". Vertical lines. No alternating row lines. No horizontal lines. Egads, it's 1987.
But wait! A preference? Yes! A preference for it. So I can make Cyberduck have pretty alternating row columns and no stupid horizontal or vertical lines, the way I like it. Great!
And I can make a double-click equal "Edit in TextWrangler" instead of "Put the file on the desktop" like Fetch - one of the most annoying things ever? Yes!
And it has a Transfers window! And a drawer for Bookmarks! Swell! Lovely!
And somehow, I got sold on this once ugly duckling. The little Fetch dog has been without his companion, Running Triangle, underneath him. He's been kind of nonresponsive, just sitting there mid-jump with his floppy.
There is one flaw with the Duck, though: I can't rename files like I do in Finder, by clicking the filename once. The first time I encountered this, I actually said, "Ooooooh," in a bad way. Instead I have to open an info window and edit it there. No preference for that, at least none I've found. (Note: after R'ingTFM I learned that I could click a filename and then press Return and then edit it. Lame.) The plus side is that I was able to submit a ticket for this, which is great.
Is it a deal-breaker? Time will tell. But my instinct says no. I'll trade the awkward renaming mechanism for the multiple little problems I had with Fetch, which all added up to a dull headache.
I will admit I'm pleased there are more than a couple of great FTP clients out there for the Mac. All I've mentioned in this post are great in their own ways but, for me, the Cyberduck wins.