Tag Archives: Apple

In review

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When Apple silently released their new Podcast app there were many detractors, but I was not one of them. In fact you only need to go one post back to read my defence of this long awaited app.

Sure it was a bit buggy and quite laggy, but fundamentally it got the job done. Well, it did.

Today I bit the bullet and removed all content from the app and finally deleted it from my iPhone 4. Not because it was slow and not because sometimes it didn't seem to register my button taps but because it was unreliable and uncommunicative about downloading new podcast episodes.

I'd open the app and see a new episode was available for one of my subscribed podcasts. Tapping the download arrow would sometimes do nothing (even though the icon would react), sometimes bring up the download control, but rarely actually download the episode. The download control could usually be toggled between a pause and a stop symbol – which confused me – but that never achieved anything. Besides which, hadn't I set things to download automatically? When would it do that?

Therein lies the real problem with this app. It's clearly designed to 'just work' – there are settings that suggest everything should be automatic – and therefore does not provide proper 'manual' control capabilities nor any real sense of state. So when it 'just doesn't work' you're left wondering what on earth is going on and, far too often, with nothing to listen to on your commute.

I should reiterate, it is only the downloading that I had problems with. With episodes already downloaded I could reliably select, play, pause and manage the episodes. I just had trouble getting them in the first place.

I say I could manage the episodes. I never had trouble while on the go, but while attempting to delete the content from the app (around 50 episodes of about 10 podcasts) it crashed multiple times and appeared to corrupt its view of what podcasts were left. For instance when I finally deleted all subscriptions, there were still four podcast episodes in the unplayed playlist, which should not be possible.

Tonight, in about the same amount of time it took me to wrestle the Podcast app off my iPhone, I reinstalled iCatcher! and added back my podcasts. I've tried both Downcast and Instacast and found them a little overwhelming and not entirely intuitive. iCatcher! is very much like Apple's app in it's simplicity – except it's behaviour is much better. Not flawless, but much better. And snappier.

I'll switch back to Apple's app just as soon as they give it a serious going over as I'm sure when it does 'just work' it will be the superior solution for me.

Think different

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Around the time that Steve Jobs died, I became aware of some historic Apple advertising (I’ve only been in the Apple camp around 5 years now) which formed part of their “Think Different” campaign – of which I had heard.

The most compelling version of this particular advertisement was apparently previously unknown to most as it was never aired, but was voiced by Steve Jobs himself.

Since viewing this, I have really taken to heart the message it contains because it’s a reflection of the way I have been thinking in recent years.

It’s not that I believe I’m going to necessarily change the world or advance the human race, but rather that I recognise two key things:

  1. The status quo is never an end game.
  2. An unvoiced idea has no value.

Some will see me as outspoken, full of crazy ideas. That’s okay. That’s who I am. Call me crazy. To me, that’s a compliment.

 

Guten tag

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Earlier this year I purchased Apple’s Aperture software and began using it exclusively instead of Adobe Lightroom. As a result of this change I have come to learn the real differences between the two packages.

One of the primary differences which I notice every time I import photos into Aperture is how tagging is handled. In short, I find Lightroom’s approach to be far simpler and, most importantly, quicker. In this article I use the term “tag” where both applications actually refer to them as keywords.

Once you learn the big ‘gotcha’ of Lightroom tagging (when selecting multiple images to tag, you must be in the library module grid or it will only tag the first one) it is very efficient to tag your photos. On the right of the screen are two fields: a list of tags already applied to the currently selected images and a place to enter new tags to apply. You may either directly edit the complete set of tags in the first field (though this gets interesting when selected photos have differing tags) or you can simply type new tags in the second field and press Enter to add them in. Importantly, as you type, Lightroom offers auto-complete based on tags you have already used. If the tag has never been used before, it doesn’t matter. Just type it anyway and it’s added to the known tags for future auto-completes.

It is this simple addition of multiple tags with auto-complete which gives Lightroom its speed. Type “boe” and “Boeing” appears and is quickly selected with the Enter key. Type “7″ and you can quickly use the cursor keys to select from “727″, “737″, “747″ etc. Type “air ” and you have most airlines available to choose. A few more letters narrows down the choice. Always, the arrow keys and Enter quickly select the desired tag. Once you’ve entered the required handful of tags, a further press of Enter adds them to the selected photos and you can move on.

Moving to Aperture, tags require a different approach. To be fair, there are three ways of adding tags in Aperture (and as far as I am aware they always apply to all selected photos). However, none of them offer the speed and simplicity that Lightroom does.

First, there is the “keyword HUD”. This is a floating window which contains a list of all defined keywords. You select one or more keywords and then drag them to the selected images (or a single image if none are selected). Sounds simple enough, but when you have several hundred keywords it can be cumbersome to scroll constantly to find those you want. There is a search box provided, but clicking, typing, clicking then dragging is inefficient when selecting multiple keywords one after another. Worse, if you need a new keyword you must click a button at the base of the window and you get a new ‘untitled’ tag which you can type over to create your new one. Once you hit Enter your new tag joins the list but the list does not even scroll to the new tag! This whole method of tagging might be fine for your family snapper in iPhoto but it’s just not good enough for Apple’s professional application.

The other two ways involve the “keyword bar” which you can bring up at the base of the Aperture window. This offers sets of buttons which represent sets of tags you can add, each with a single click. This is very quick for a VERY small selection of tags. There are nowhere near enough for me to handle a typical photoshoot at my local airport. Next to these buttons is an entry field where you can enter individual tags. Auto-complete is offered for already-used tags but the field is tiny and you must commit each tag before proceeding to the next. This sounds, in description, awfully close to the Lightroom functionality but it’s just not anywhere near as efficient because you can’t easily see which tags are already applied to the selection.

Stefan Lesage of the iTutor Podcast created a great screencast which shows how to use hierarchical tags in Aperture – something Lightroom cannot do. Stefan made this as a result of my moaning about the subject while we chatted with others during a live recording of the NosillaCast podcast. I hadn’t really considered this option and Stefan’s excellent screencast showed me just how powerful they are – and their weaknesses. His contention was that having “Tomahawk” as a sub-tag of “PA-38″ which in turn is a sub-tag of “Piper” meant I could just tag the image as “Tomahawk” and then both “PA-38″ and “Piper” would be implied – thus tagging the final image, for all intents and purposes, with “Piper PA-38 Tomahawk” which is indeed what I desire. It’s a lot quicker than adding three tags.

The weaknesses are that the hierarchy is both strict and implied. Being strict means I cannot have a Saab 340 and an Airbus 340. “340″ must appear only once or the hierarchy doesn’t work. Some particular aircraft model numbers go under different names depending on sub models, yet some different model numbers have also shared the same name, making the order of the hierarchy difficult to determine. For example, Piper PA-28s go by the names of Cherokee, Archer, Arrow and possibly others, yet Cessna produces a whole range of model numbers which all have the name Citation, and yet some of those have additional names also. How would I handle the Citation Mustang versus the North American Mustang? The intrinsic nature of aircraft designations is not a strict hierarchy. Nor is it stable. Companies get bought and names change. Roughly speaking, a BAe 125-800 and a Hawker 800 are the same aircraft. Throw Beechcraft and Raytheon into the mix at various times and you pretty much have to just go by the shape and not the name.

Stefan’s example used geographical names, where a town may be in a region, then a country, then a continent. Even this can change. What country, for instance, would your photos from ski trips to Sarajevo fall into? It depends on the year! By having the hierarchy only ever implied by the current structure, it would be impossible to have your 1991 ski trip tagged as Yugoslavia and your 1993 trip as Bosnia & Herzegovina.

So, in summary, Lightroom allows for far quicker entry of multiple tags in the real world despite Aperture’s attempt to cleverly utilise a hierarchical structure. As my brother said of Lightroom version 1 when first using it – “This is one seriously sorted out piece of software.” I honestly think Adobe are the only ones who have sat down and studied workflow, rather than just trying to invent cool stuff like Faces, Places and hierarchical keywords.

Best versus biggest

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OK, here’s the deal. The topic of this post is completely unimportant. It’s way less important than middle east revolutions or Pacific natural disasters. It doesn’t, cosmically speaking, matter at all. And yet, regardless of all the more important stuff, this topic gets beaten to death every week.

Facebook. Good or bad? Sainted or evil? Dead or alive?

Let us first divide the (digitally aware) population in two. Those who use social networks and those who don’t. Those who don’t will have their reasons, almost always ill-founded, but cannot help answer my questions. If you don’t use a product, how can you judge it? You can’t. The other group, social network users, will choose one or more networks to participate in. It seems the overwhelming majority of them choose to participate in Facebook. Why?

A big part of the answer lies in my last statement. If you want to connect with most of your friends easily then clearly you have to go where most of your friends are. That’s certainly the reason I participate on Facebook. It is also a very similar reason to why, about 12 years ago, I bought my first PC and a copy of the Windows operating system. Not my first computer, my first PC. Almost everybody else was buying the same and, at the time, I felt it inevitable that I should go in that direction also. A little over 4 years ago I reversed that decision. I bought a Mac. I did that because I was convinced there was a better alternative to what I had been using.

Back in the days of the VHS versus BetaMax battle, VHS won and everyone who had a VCR soon ended up with VHS. It made no sense to own a BetaMax when the infrastructure (tape manufacture and distribution) was clearly going to favour a single format. Two competing formats for a single goal was an inefficient model. Cassette tape versus vinyl was a little different because there were clear differences in portability versus quality. An audiophile would choose vinyl every time. Then Sony came along with the Walkman. No way was vinyl ever going to go that portable, so the two formats co-existed for their respective markets. When CD arrived in the 80s, it promised high quality and portability and ultimately won over both preceding formats. Once again, the infrastructure to produce the physical goods went the way of the masses for efficiency’s sake and vinyl and cassette tape quickly faded.

Around the time CDs were taking over the music industry, personal computers were hitting their stride. No longer game-playing curios, they began to show promise in other areas and we saw the beginnings of the ubiquity we now know. One “format” became dominant – the “PC”. More specifically, the IBM PC-compatible. While many people talk of the “PC versus Mac” battle, in fact the battle occurs on a different level. The Mac and PC are merely infrastructure – much like the VHS and BetaMax players, the turntables and decks. The media in use was now software. Just like you couldn’t stick an LP in a cassette deck or CD player, neither could you put software written for Mac on a PC.

Making my jump from PC to Mac was not a simple one. Actually, that’s not true. Convincing myself to make the jump was the difficult part. The actual transition was quite easy. I did have to consider the software angle but fortunately I had previously made that problem a lot easier for myself due to a little thing we like to call the Internet. I had already begun using GMail for my everyday email and had progressed my web sites to using online tools instead of relying on specific software on the PC. I had moved much of my computing onto the infrastructure of the internet. Most of the rest of my computer use at the time was simple and task-based. Converting a FLAC audio file to MP3 is not difficult to achieve on any personal computer and once it’s done, it’s done.

Now let’s fast forward to today. What is the infrastructure that social networks rely on? The Internet, of course. So looking back at our history, we see that infrastructure was the primary reason that any format or platform became dominant. Seeing as all social networks make use of the same infrastructure there is no significant technical or mechanical barrier to change. You only need to look at the fortunes of Alta Vista – the internet’s premier search engine until Google came along – to see that massive swings can occur for very simple reasons and in relatively short timeframes. Google was better and was not hog-tied by the need to overcome any delivery infrastructure problems.

In my recent experience, more and more people are choosing to forsake the world of the PC (i.e. Windows) for the lure of Mac (i.e. OS X). With very, very few exceptions, none are looking back. Whether you like it or not, OS X is a better experience for most people. If you’re a super geek with a penchant for changing everything, making it bend to your will, then go download a Linux distro or two and leave us regular folk to discuss this politely. I’ve used computers for about 30 years now, professionally for over 20 of those years. I’ve made many personal studies of “stuff that works” and “stuff that doesn’t” – usually by accident and mostly by using them. I can honestly say that in my objective view of today’s personal computing landscape you don’t have to, and shouldn’t, suffer the myriad dramas that the Windows operating system offers. I haven’t yet experienced Windows 7, but all previous versions are more trouble than they’re worth when there are simpler, better alternatives to be had. For most people.

But that’s not the (long delayed) point of this post. The point is this. There is every chance that you only use Facebook because everyone else does. Many of you are using Windows for the same reason. In both cases, it’s not the only and certainly not the best platform. Most people I know on Facebook complain about it at one time or another – some frequently. Well, you have the power in your hands. No corporation or cost stands in your way of jumping ship. If Facebook sucks, you have only yourself to blame for sticking around.

Twitter is not a replacement for Facebook, it’s something different. But it may be all you need or want. Don’t disparage what you haven’t tried. (Merely signing up is not enough.) Disapora, on the other hand is a replacement for Facebook. It’s early days yet, but this largely functional product runs rings around Facebook for simplicity and does the key things most people join Facebook for – communicating with their friends. Let’s call it “social networking.”

Does Diaspora have games, quizzes, pokes and likes? No. Does it have complex and ever changing privacy controls? No! Does it make it hard to control who sees what? No!! It’s a very simple platform that does social networking the way you probably thought Facebook would. The product came about precisely because of all the drama Facebook has caused. The primary reason I am using and supporting Diaspora is because I want to see Facebook have a decent competitor. I believe this will be it. Once it hits its stride, all that stands in the way of success is social inertia. Well, that and they’d better not start making the same mistakes Facebook did.

And that brings me to a final, related point. I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the government.” The premise of the statement is reasonable only if vote casting is done from a position of knowledge. Of all parties. Indeed, how can you claim a representative stands best for your views if you do not know the views of his opponents? By the same token, I don’t think it is fair to complain about Facebook if you haven’t made an honest attempt to look at alternatives. And much as a large section of the voting public pay little attention to detail, instead mopping up campaign slogans and propaganda, so, too, do many of the social networkers assume Facebook is the “cat’s whiskers” simply because that’s where everyone is. I don’t even have to tell you it’s not. Most of you are complaining already.

And this is where I come in. Think of me as your independent candidate. I’ll stick to the issues and all votes will be conscience votes. But rest assured, I will be out there campaigning. If I see discourse on the nature of Facebook, please expect me to make my point. If I take it too far, then tell me to pull my head in. I don’t mean to offend, I just mean to educate so you can make the best choice for you. Yes, I continue to suffer Facebook for your benefit. You bet I will complain.

 

Not even looking for droids

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A tinge of excitement occurred when I was handed a boxed phone on my first day with my new employer. A small, green robot was present and I thought, finally I can see what all these people have been talking about. In all honesty I was expecting to make comparisons with my iPhone and find some features which were better on each. I knew I’d be unlikely to give up my beloved iPhone 4 but was prepared for an objective comparison and, hey, with a free phone to use for work, even enjoy using both.

Then I turned it on.

Android evolution

The trouble was I had preconceptions about Android. My impression from the voluminous tech press on the subject was that it would be like comparing Ferrari with Lamborghini or Angelina Jolie with Natalie Portman. (OK, girls, maybe Hugh Jackman with Leonardo Di Caprio?)

In reality, to go back to the (simplest and safest) car analogy, it is more like comparing the Ferrari 458 Italia with the combined model line-ups of Porsche, Mercedes and BMW. The Samsung Galaxy 550 I had been handed is a comfy, if not terribly tricked out, BMW 3 series. It looks OK on the outside, but it’s actually not such a flash car as sporting a flash name (and price tag). It does a passable job of getting from A to B. But it’s not an M5 or a Mercedes SLS or a Porsche 911 Turbo. What all the cars (excepting the 458) share is the famed “German engineering.”

I’m used to my Ferrari 458 (in yellow, BTW). I get in that baby and I don’t want to get out. Sometimes I make up reasons to go places just so I can drive it. The experience begins moments after you are given the keys and if anyone dares to mention the owner’s manual, they are greeted with a glare. This car knows how to drive and it knows how to drive well. You just get in, push a button and go.

OK, OK, enough of the car analogy. I don’t have a yellow 458 (though I really wish I did). I do, however, have an iPhone 4. It’s not perfect. Just check out the tech press for today’s complaint about the controlling, greedy hands of Apple and how they’re crippling my iPhone. I think you’ll find the flavour of the moment right now to be Apple’s 30% commission on subscription sales. I won’t get into that here but, if you would believe the complainers, it’s ruining their lives. Once that dies down it will be something else. As I said. Life is no bed of roses for an iPhone owner. (Ferrari 458 owners still have to pay tax and insurance.)

The iPhone is like the 458. No manual is required. Indeed, none is provided. It’s larger cousin, the iPad, has been shown to be intuitive enough for a 3-year-old to pick up and use without instruction. The iPhone is no different. Sure there are arcane settings buried in multi-level menus and some features are not customisable as they are even on a basic Nokia candybar, but when you pick up an iPhone – any iPhone – you instinctively know how to use it. There’s one very simple reason most people find it this way. The user experience.

Most of us have heard the term “GUI” for Graphical User Interface. In these times when most user interfaces are graphical, many just use the term UI. Something that looks good and is easy to understand is said to have a good UI. Further to that, however, is the term UX. User Experience. UX goes deeper into how comfortable and enjoyable the UI is. If a device has a good UX then you’re pretty much going to enjoy using it – again and again. The iPhone has a great UX. The Galaxy 550 has a passable UI and a horrible UX. I believe the reason for this is because it’s not an Android UI/UX but a Samsung one. Android doesn’t have a UI, let alone a UX. Samsung have produced something arguably pretty but horribly counter-intuitive and inconsistent.

This article was originally going to cover a lot more ground but I realised I was just getting into details which don’t really serve to make my point, but merely provide evidence. What I have discovered is that Android really is a flavour of Linux. Linux is all things to all comers. Whilst the kernel is consistent, different people layer different software on top to provide an experience they want. One of the key differences between traditional Linux distributions is which window manager they include. A friend once told me “You can make Linux look and behave like any other operating system.” Therein lies the problem.

Samsung have taken an Android core and tried to make a smart phone interface with it. They failed. Whether HTC or Motorola do a better job is something I can’t judge without an example in my hands – but I sure hope they do! So it is not a matter of whether iPhone is better than Android. That’s a pointless comparison like comparing apples with vegetables.

Your HTC or Motorola or Kamakuza phone may indeed run rings around my iPhone (for your purposes) but when you start claiming “Android is outselling iPhone” I’ll happily point to the fact that far fewer Ferrari 458 Italias are sold than BMWs, Mercedes and Porsches combined. I’ll still take my 458 in yellow and I don’t care about the Germans.

iPad today

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This post is being written on an iPad. Yes, it’s a bit of a test post, but I also thought I’d share my view on where the iPad sits in my world, and hopefully that helps others.

The first advantage I note is that my far-from-accurate typing is being helped a lot by iOS’s auto-correction features. Win! However an immediate downside is that I am having to compose this post in HTML mode – the WYSIWYG editor simply doesn’t work. I say it’s a downside, but really I am perfectly comfortable in HTML myself. It’s no trouble to me to throw in a few tags to achieve emphasis or add a little colour. (Mind you, the keyboard layouts are not intended for writing HTML!)

So the task is certainly doable, but not as straightforward as one might hope for such a revolutionary device. And therein lies the rub. This is a new class of device. Not the form factor as such, but the tools it provides. It is, after all, primarily a media consumption device. I am sure that, in time, many of the hurdles will be overcome because, from where I sit, it can all be accomplished in software.

It is an unfortunate truth that Apple do hold the keys to some of this. For instance, the blog editing task would be much easier if they were to implement an editable HTML control as the desktop browsers do.

So, today, the iPad is a top notch media consumption device, has excellent games and some really very clever software, but still has a way to go before it could replace most laptops.

“Macs are expensive” – my side of the argument

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I was just reading an article on Technologizer about the “Apple tax” and whether it really existed. The conclusion came out pretty much as I expected (no it doesn’t) and the comments are pretty much on par as well.  There are numerous people on both sides of the argument having a polite(!) debate about the topic and about the Microsoft advertisement which prompted this latest article.

So to my views.

I’ve been using a computer of one sort or another since about 1981.  I’ve owned a computer of some sort since about 1988.  In that time I have owned exactly 4 computers. My first was an Acorn Archimedes, then an HP Pavilion (333MHz class), a beige box built to order (1.3GHz class) and now an iMac (2.1GHz dual core).  The Archimedes ran RISC OS, the HP ran Windows 98, the beige box Windows XP Home and the iMac runs OS X (first 10.4 Tiger and now 10.5 Leopard).

So which is the best bit of hardware? Well, actually quite obviously, it’s the iMac.  That’s because it is the most modern by a long way. In terms of reliability the only system I ever had issues with was the beige box, on which the USB ports failed one by one.

So there’s no major advantage to one piece of hardware over another, other than the relative price-to-performance ratio. The article pretty much clears up that there’s no major difference in purchase price between the compared models. If you were to go toward the cheaper end of the market, I am fairly confident you would find the same to hold true, though I suspect the differences in lower end hardware specs would be more substantial as there are more things to ‘leave out’ to keep the price down.

So that leaves software.  I used RISC OS for about 10 years, Windows (98 & XP) for about 9 years and now OS X for about 2 years. In my work I have used OS/2 for a couple of years and otherwise some flavour of Windows.  Given I have been working for 22 years, that’d be 20 years of Windows in the workplace.  So, with all that under my belt, which do I believe is the best operating system?

Well, that depends on one factor.  The best operating system for today is clearly OS X.  The best operating system for its time was clearly RISC OS. As RISC OS is not a viable option today, I’m sticking with OS X. It’s not perfect though. Far from it. OS X annoys me at least every week, but then Windows (and other Microsoft products) annoy me on a daily basis.

OS X could learn a thing or two from RISC OS, and indeed many of the differences between Windows and OS X are in the direction of RISC OS, but it still has a long way to go.

So, back to the original question. Is a Mac more expensive? No. Macs do exist at the higher end of the market though.

My question for you is “can you afford a Mac?” Because if you can, I think there’s no better choice.

Mac in the enterprise

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I don’t often just point to others’ articles as a blog post of my own, but this Computer world article really caught my attention.

I’m not sure I understand why the main attractants are as listed near the start of the article – I wouldn’t consider them defining factors myself. But as you read on, it makes more and more sense.

Perhaps the key point is that users who know what they’re doing prefer Macs.  Ironically, Macs are the better platform for users who don’t know what they’re doing.

One thing I would add, though, is that you do need to test a Mac setup and I wouldn’t let ‘users manage their own boxes’ for precisely this reason. I’m still a fan and daily user of Macs, but you can make them unstable.

More annoyances from Safari 4

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I’m still sticking with it, but I can add three more annoyances to the list.

  1. When I click a link in tab ‘A’, it opens tab ‘D’ and shifts the focus there.  When I close tab ‘D’ it takes me back to tab ‘C’.  I want to go back to ‘A’ because that’s where I last was.
  2. Cut & paste of HTML seems dodgy.  I want to copy my shownotes from Evernote to Mevio.  In Firefox, I just copy it and all is good. Safari (and versions prior to 4 do this as well) strips the HTML and leaves me with plain text.  I note that one improvement in Safari 4 is that is shows the formatted text in the Mevio editor, but as soon as I save it, it reverts to text.  This is one task I am going to have to use Firefox for every week.  Grrr.
  3. I like that my browser remembers what I type into fields.  It took me a while to learn how, in Firefox, to remove remembered entries that I no longer wanted.  I can find no way to do this in Safari.
  4. I’ll have to retrain myself not to use double spaces after full stops, as Safari likes to render the second space at the start of a line if the line break falls there.  Why?  In HTML, whitespace is all equal!

Safari 4

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Ever since I got my Mac a little over two years ago, I’ve used the Firefox browser as my default.  I used it on Windows before, and liked the fact I could pretty much carry on as I had been.

Firefox 2 on OS X, however, was a pig.  It ate memory like a zombie, crashed often and occasionally took over the machine – something not incredibly common on a Mac.  Firefox 3 came around and changed all of that.  No, I lie.  Most of that.  The memory thing is a distant memory.  The crash thing still happens, but rarely.  But, oh the machine-sapping, go-nuts, CPU-bashing take-overs are all too common.

I had tried to switch to Safari before and had problems.  I don’t quite remember all of them, but one was the inability of Google Notebook to work with it.  Not Safari’s problem, I know, but a problem for me nevertheless.  Well that problem has gone because Google Notebook is gone.  At least for me.  It’s end of life.

So when I saw some of the neat features of Safari 4, I thought it was probably time I gave it another go.  To be fair, Safari 3 had improved since my early attempts.  Some of the controls for using tabs had improved and that’s a big thing for me because I use lots of tabs.

So far, I’ve made it through a couple of days with Safari only, and here are my pet peeves.  Some are merely what I am used to, some I maintain are poor behaviour in Safari.

  1. When opening a new tab, the tab focus changes, but the content of the tab you were on remains displayed until Safari has something to replace it with.  This is visually wrong.  I should see a blank canvas as soon as the tab focus changes.
  2. The downloads window does not allow me to pause downloads and restart them.  Sometimes I download many files at once, and may wish to pause some to let others finish earlier.
  3. The downloads window does not allow for easy clearing of downloaded files.  You can click on an entry and press delete to get rid of it, but the highlight disappears with the entry and leaves no easy keyboard navigation to quickly weed items out.
  4. When I have more tabs than can be displayed across the width of the window, Safari just hides them in a menu at the far end of the tab bar.  Firefox allowed me to scroll across as well, a feature made practical because of the Apple Mighty Mouse with it’s scroll ball!
  5. Although Safari has a plugin architecture, supposedly, there are nothing like the number of add-on features I could use in Firefox.  At it’s most basic, this makes tools I do have harder to use.  The Evernote clipper, for instance, is a handy icon in Firefox, or can be selected from a context menu.  On Safari, it’s only available as a bookmarklet, which means I have to keep it well placed in my bookmark bar.
  6. Despite the fact that Safari is measurably faster than many other browsers, I note that if I open a lot of tabs at once (Shift/Cmd-clicking links) Safari seems to ignore later tabs for a long time, preferring to load pages in a more left-to-right fashion.  Firefox would inevitably finish in this order, but elements of far-right tabs would begin to appear much sooner, allowing inspection to see if you had the right page(s).
  7. Although there is a setting to open other applications’ page requests in a new tab instead of a new window, Safari can’t seem to open it’s own links in a new tab.  By this I mean when I click a link on a web site that says “open in a new window” (an HTML target of “_blank”), it does indeed open in a new window.

As far as the plus side goes, it does seem to render faster if you’re only using one tab at a time, and the new “features” of Top Sites and Coverflow history are brilliant.  The latter two are what sparked me into action to try this out.

In Firefox, I used to leave a certain number of tabs open most of the time. My GMail, Google Reader, my Flickr page, podcast page, blog page and a few more.  I used Firefox’s automatic restoration of the last session to keep these active.  Now, I have set up Top Sites to have all of these pages pinned in an order that suits me and whenever I need one, I simply Cmd-click the Top Sites icon and visually find the page I want and click that.  It’s two clicks on the mouse, and two ticks to accomplish.

The visual history is great.  When researching material for my podcast, I’ll often open lots of pages and close them again but may later find I want to go back somewhere when I realise it had something that pertains to a new page I have found.  I actually had this very issue last night and I can tell you that page thumbnails are way more memorable than URLs!!

So on balance, I’m doing pretty good with Safari 4.  I think this may finally be it.  The time I stick with it and don’t look back.  I’m also proud to support a browser that is truly embracing the future with spectacular standards support for both current and upcoming standards (an area it has always excelled in).