To Safari or not to Safari?

One OSX application I’m starting to have a love-hate relationship with is Safari. I like Safari’s speed and I like it’s integration to the OS. Here are some things I don’t like:

• For some reason, I like to move my mouse over the link and look at the bottom of the window where that link goes. A weird habit, I know. But it prevents some anguish when Bloglines
  doesn’t render a link correctly.
• Bad ad blocking. There are probably better ways to do this. Saft does a good job, but sites like Omaha.com and IMDB have pop-ups and moving ad thingies galore. Highly annoying, yet these are sites that I like and/or need to go to sometimes. Safari/Saft doesn’t quite do everything that I need it to.
• I’m spoiled by extensions, especially GreaseMonkey and AdBlock. I could get very used to Scrapbook as well.

With those things in mind, I spent some time with other browsers:

FireFox

I downloaded FireFox early on. Though all the things above would work, the browser itself was slow. Quite slow. I think it wasn’t a Universal Binary, so it had to run through Rosetta. I’m not offended by that, but that doesn’t help performance. And using XUL probably didn’t help either. Maybe I should try this one again.

OmniWeb

Ironically, I remember using the OmniWeb browser on NeXTStep oh so many years ago, but this is not an outdated browser! This is what I liked:

• Tabbing brought to a whole new level. You really have to see it to understand it.(Movie link)
• You can setup preferences per site. Need pop-ups on one site? Turn them on and you don’t have to worry out it again.
• Great built-in ad blocking.
• Workspaces — save all the sites you are currently on to a workspace, and then you can go back to them at your convenience.
• Though I didn’t try them, you can write AppleScripts for it. Sorta like FireFox extensions, I think.

What I didn’t like:

• There isn’t a Universal Binary version yet, so it was running through Rosetta. I didn’t think performance was going to be a problem, but it was. They are going to make a Universal Binary version in 5.5.
• Some of the sites where I have an account wouldn’t log in, even though I had the correct username and password. Safari worked fine.
• It crashed a few times. The first OSX app that I’ve run that did that.
• The $29.95 price tag. Yep, I’m cheap.

I think middle two issues stem from using Rosetta. The features almost outweigh all of them — except the performance. Well, and the crashing. Maybe worth another look when 5.5 is out. Yep, I know there is a public beta, but I’m going to wait for
the real thing.

Update I’ve tried Omniweb 5.5beta2, and and I like it

Camino

Camino uses Mozilla’s Gecko engine running but uses the Mac widgets for the GUI. It has a Universal Binary, so things ran well.

The pros:

• Fast, very fast. At least as fast as Safari.
• CamiTools is a plugin that adds a GUI to some advanced options. Very, very nice stuff in here.
• Good ad-blocking, especially with CamiTools.

The Cons:

• Still no extensions, though GreaseMonkey will be embedded someday.
• Okay, really only one con. But extensions are big with me. But it doesn’t have another big WOW! with it.

Opera

Yes, there is Opera on OSX. I’ve only used Opera for small amounts of time, and it was with older versions on Linux. To make this overview fair, I decided to download it and try it out. I was impressed, to say the least.

Opera has always had a different philosophy of web browsing, but their tabbed browser, sessions, etc. now seems to be normal.

Pros:

• Quite fast. Maybe a little slower than Safari and Caminio, but certainly faster than OmniWeb and FireFox and very usable.
• I liked the buttons that show up when you are in the address area. It seems intuitive and it clutters your windows a little less.
• A new tab button straight on the browser.
• Remembers your browser sessions from one page to another.
• Wonderful built-in ad blocking.
• No extensions per se, but you can make User JavaScripts. There is a somewhat active community making them. They even say that Opera can run basic Greasemonkey scripts, though I haven’t tried it yet.

Cons:

• No address display on the bottom when hovering over a link. This may seem like a minor nit to you, but it gets annoying to me. This JavaScript seems to do what I need, and even more.
• Scrolling up with my mouse doesn’t seem to work very well. This is a high-annoyance factor for me.
• It mysteriously crashed on me. I just installed some third-party buttons, so maybe that’s why. I restarted and reinstalled the buttons and now has been fine for a while.
• Can’t view YouTube videos posted in a blog. Yet it works find from YouTubes site.

The Verdict

I could and should see if FireFox is a Universal Binary, but I may not — I’m still going to have speed issues just because it uses XUL. But that XUL is what gives extensions a chance.

I’ll probably end up trying to use OmniWeb when 5.5 comes out so it can have a fair comparison. I want OmniWeb to work and work well. But it’s going to have to be really, really good for me to shell out $30 for a browser now days.

Camino was good, speed-wise, but it didn’t offer me much else.

Opera, on the other hand, is fast, has JavaScript hacking, and has much usability add in. Surprisingly to say, I’m turning into an Opera fan — I’m going to be using it for a while.

Cool MacOS Apps

Because my blogging has been light lately, and it’s the start of a long weekend, how about some cool OSX apps? And these are all free, of course.

• It’s hard to explain what Quicksilver is, but once you get used to it, it’s hard to go back. For instance, instead of going through my Applications list to find a program I want to run (that isn’t on my Dock), I just hit Ctrl-. and Quicksilver pops up. I begin to type the name of the app, and Quicksilver finishes it, and I hit and I’m off and running.

  Of course, there’s more — if I want to email a link to someone, I copy that link, then hit Ctrl-. . I paste the URL in, then in the next field start typing “Email”. Quicksilver is smart enough to know what I want to do. In the third field I start typing the name of the recipient, and hit . iMail magically creates an email to that person with the link as the subject and in the body.

  Want more? This entry has a better explanation.

• I’ve just downloaded XShelf, which is a temporary spot to place files and text that you are copying and pasting from one place to another. A similar shareware program is DropDrawers. One thing that I think XShelf has over DropDrawers is that XShelf has a program that lets you copy files into it from the command line. IOW, you type “XShelver ” and that file is copied to the “shelf”. I’m sure that DropDrawers has a lot more stuff that XShelf, but the command line interface is very important to me.
• I’ve used MPEG Streamclip to convert video from one format to another and it works very, very well. Even where VLC has failed. Also, MPEG Streamclip is easier. That said, VLC is a great program in it’s own right.
• iTerm is a wonderful replacement for Terminal. You can have tabs open for multiple command lines in one window (because one command line for me is never enough). There is scripting support for iTerm as well, but I haven’t use it (yet).

Not officially on list above, because it’s not free, but Saft is a wonderful plugin to Safari. It remembers what sites and tabs you had open when you closed Safari, and will open them up again when you start it again. It also does good adblocking, let’s you drag the tabs around, etc.

Printing from Mac OS X to Linux

I still have my Ubuntu Linux machine with a printer hooked up and I thought that it would be a good idea to setup the new MacBook Pro to print on that printer via Cups and that, in theory, it should be possible. In fact, that’s really what Cups is for! However, I have little luck with printers so I didn’t get my hopes up. And, naturally, it was harder than it should have been.

First you have to set permissions on the Linux machine so other machines. That was easy — I just added Allow from 192.168.1.* to my /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.

The next part wasn’t so easy. This page was a major help, and I ended up doing both things. However, that page describes what you need to do, not why you need to do it. What happens is that the DeviceURI that Cups on OSX refers to is ipp://machineIP/ipp/queue name while my Ubuntu machine refers to it’s print queues as ipp://machineIP/printers/queuename. There isn’t a way to do this in OSX besides editing the /etc/cups/printers.conf directly. Once you make both the Cups on OSX point to the device on the Linux side, things start working.

It took me a week to figure this out! I hate printers — have I said that before?

Happy Hacking Keyboard on a MacBook Pro

I have an old Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite (that looks mostly like this Lite2 model) that I just love. Even though the keyboard itself is small, the keys are normal size and it feels really good to type on. Just enough resistance and noise to make it fun. and the CTRL key is on home row, which has become a good thing for me.

But I couldn’t hook this to my new MacBook Pro because the keyboard has a PS2 cord and the MBP doesn’t have a connection for that. I didnt’ want to get a new one (because there was nothing wrong with the old one), but then I searched around and found that these little things exist.

Unfortunately, the one I bought at CompUSA was much more expensive than Amazons. Oh well . . .

The dongle has two connection. I just needed to hook up the keyboard but just using one hookup on the dongle worked fine. But now I had both of my USB connections use — one for my Mighty Mouse, and one for my keyboard. I found an old USB hub and, with no power to it, plugged that in and plugged the mouse and keyboard into that. Both worked wonderfully (I was sorta surprised, since I’ve had problems with unpowered USB hubs before, but a keyboard and a mouse don’t use as much power as a card reader, so that was probably why it worked).

I did have to change the DIP switches so the command key worked. And, because of my Emacs habit, I ended up switching the Alt and the command key. Woe to the person that uses my keyboard.

Overall, this is a great setup for a great machine.

An Easier way to install Ruby on Rails on MacOS

Yep, I’m going to do some Rails stuff on this new MacBook Pro. More posts on that later — maybe after I learn a few things.

This page explains how to install it on Tiger by downloading and compiling everything manually. I already had DarwinPorts installed so I decided to use that instead. It really came down to just a few simple commands:

sudo port install rb-rubygems # this installs Ruby too, of course.
sudo gem install install rails --include-dependencies
sudo port install rb-rubyfcgi # Ruby's FastCGI module, also installed FastCGI
sudo port install lighttd
## install MySQL using the official packages
sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

This was much easier than doing the “download; ./configure, make install” dance over and over and over again.