I recently saw 2012, and it was a rather good movie, in my opinion. Warning: there may be some spoilers in the following review.
Continue reading ‘2012: A Review’
Welcome to the blog of Dan, a designer, artist, blogger, and rabid Apple fanboy.
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Archive for the 'Review' Category
This post is a followup review of sorts. I bought my iPod Touch (1st-gen) last year in August, and I’ve had it for about one year now. It still works perfectly and I love it more than ever. Read on to see my thoughts on it.
Continue reading ‘One Year Later…’
Born of Osiris’ second album, “A Higher Place” was released on July 7, 2009, to much anticipation from the fans, myself included. In summary, it’s a superb record, and a worthy succesor to “The New Reign.”
Continue reading ‘A Higher Place Reviewed’
The Safari 4 Beta has been out for about a month or so, but I’ve been too lazy to write about it until now. I’ve been using it for the past week or so, and it has won its way to being my main browser. With the addition of Glims (a plugin for Safari to give it some Firefox-esque features), Safari’s become better than Firefox.
Pages load much faster, and even though it’s a beta, Safari 4 never lags or freezes, even after opening ~100 tabs. The develop menu, when enabled, is amazingly useful for web development. I can easily disable images, javascript, and styles with just one click. Safari also has the ability to change its User Agent, so that websites see it as a different browser. For example, I could masquerade as IE 6 for those annoying websites that require IE. The web inspector is almost exactly the same as Firebug, but it looks a lot nicer. See the two screenshots below for comparison:
Firebug (Firefox)
Web Inspector (Safari)
The new tab placement is very much like Chrome’s, with the tabs at the top of the window. After using Firefox for so many years, it feels a bit awkward to have the tabs at the very top, but after using it for a day, I got accustomed to it. My only gripe with the tabs is that I can’t drag the tabs around unless I use the little drag area on the right of each tab.
Safari Tabs
Now Glims adds some nifty features of its own, such as the ability to reopen a recently closed tab with cmd + z. Having closed many tabs by accident, I cannot even begin to stress how useful this features is. Another useful feature is the ability to switch between tabs using only “,” and “.” By far the most useful modification is the expansion of the search bar. I can now choose from dozens of search engines as well as Wikipedia. When I start typing, a whole auto-suggest overlay pops up, which looks cool as well as being quite useful.
Search Suggest
As with all good things, Safari has some annoyances, the main one being its annoying form-handling. Whenever a form element is focused, an ugly glow appears around the element. Unless explicitly defined in the CSS, Safari will always display the glow. It would be nice if Apple gave us the option of turning off the annoying glows.
Safari 4 also has the “Top Pages” view enabled on new tabs and windows by default. It shows the top 9 sites in a rather gimmicky, faux-3D kind of way. Cover flow is also enabled in the history, which is actually quite useful, as it allows me to see previously visited sites rather than just looking at URLs.
By typing any letter (when not in a form, of course), Safari activates the page search and dims the website, highlighting the found terms. Esc closes the search. Very useful and efficient, as I don’t need to use the mouse.
Page Search
So far I’m really pleased with how Safari 4 is turning out. I’m hoping the final version will be even better.