I’m really happy with Firefox 3.5, which was born about a week ago. Get it here (free).

Speed

The first thing I noticed was speed. Since Safari 4 beta I’d been using that for its speed. But Safari’s developer tools, while much improved over 3.x, aren’t quite as good, and the extensibility isn’t in the same universe. So when Firefox 3.5 seemed about as snappy as the quick Safari 4, I was all smiles, and back to using it full-time.

Extensions

The second thing I noticed is that many most of my extensions are ready for 3.5, a thing that had plagued me on all the 3.0.x increments. I LOVE how Firefox reports on extension problems before you upgrade, and helps you get the new ones with one click after an upgrade. Outstanding. Mac-like.

Shadows

The third thing, and one I never read about anywhere else, is support for the text-shadow CSS attribute. I was shocked this morning when I looked at one of my sites, and the headers had shadows. I thought “ooops I’m in Safari”… but no, it’s the new 3.5 support for this magnificent text-shadow. I love things that allow me to make sites look great while keeping them lightweight and SEO-friendly.

Download Songbird 1.1

New Features

On demand Fetching of Album Artwork
Songbird can now fetch album artwork from the web at your command. Simply select or right-click a track and choose “Get Album Artwork”. You can also select your preferred source of artwork. By default, Songbird will retrieve album artwork from Last.fm but you can install other sources such as amazon.com via an add-on.

Watch Folders
You can choose to watch a folder hierarchy for changes and the content will auto-magically be imported in your library. If a file is removed from the watched folder, the corresponding track will be deleted from your Library.

Better Sorting
Library sorting supports unicode collation and better handling of leading definite and indefinite articles such as “The” and “a”.

Replay gain support (normalization)
If a track’s metadata contains replay gain (including iTunes-specific) information, Songbird will adjust the playback gain appropriately.

Improved Media Core & Better gapless playback
We rewrote the low level media core component for Windows to improve playback performance and lower cpu usage. Also, if an mp3 encoder places metadata information to indicate the exact beginning and end of the audio, Songbird is able to read it and use it to skip padding data that does not contain audio, leading to perfect gapless playback.

MTP Device Support
We fixed many bugs affecting MTP devices on Windows. We’ve also added the ability to synch authorized Windows Media DRM’ed content to your MTP device. To see if your MTP device is supported, or to report your findings, visit the MTP device page.

7digital MP3 Store (Beta)
Buy high quality MP3s (up to 320kbps) from the 7digital store in Songbird. The 7digital store in Songbird uses your most recently played tracks to recommend albums to you. Plus, 7digital contributes a portion of every purchase back to Songbird’s development. Every song you buy supports your favorite artist AND our development. Woot! The UK store is fully stocked, but the US and other European stores are still continuing to populate a complete catalog of music.

Performance Enhancements

We’ve continued to make the application more stable and zippier in all sorts of ways. Amongst other things, you should notice a smaller memory footprint and decreased CPU usage.

We made some substantial gains this release:

• Reduced memory use with a large library by 40%
• Cut CPU usage during playback by half
• Fixed playback memory leaks
• Made library caching configurable
• Added batching to the media importer, reducing memory use by 60%
• Reduced Mac download size 45%
• Fewer Crashes: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix ten of the most common crashes in Songbird.

For Developers

• You can now invoke Songbird from a url. For instance,

  songbird:open?url=http%3A%2F%2Flast.fm

  will launch Songbird and open a new tab pointing to http://last.fm. For more information, review this article in our developer section.

[Apple] announced that it would no longer enforce its non-disclosure agreement for software it has released:

The NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success.

Software that hasn’t been released is still covered by the agreement.

That certainly sounds like a sensible distinction: Companies have a right to keep things that are secret a secret, but once the cat is out of the bag, it can’t be a secret any more.

There have been an increasing number developers complaining that Apple is making it too hard for developers, such as in this blog post on Ars Technica.

Despite its Soviet style of communication, Apple is certainly signaling that it understands that needs to keep its developers’some of its most fervent advocates’from becoming so angry they will switch their efforts to Google’s Android or other projects.

Earlier this week, Apple tweaked a few policies that had made some developers feel that the marketplace in the iTunes App store was unfair. Now you have to have bought the application to be able to review it. And a developer can’t simply make a minor modification in a program to jump to the top of the list of new applications.

See story.

It was, and I did. I had so many cookies the deletion took over 20 seconds on a 2.2GHz MacBook Pro.

I was spurred to action by Firefox taking 10+ icon dock “bounces” to launch.

I’m now using Firefox Add-On CookieSafe 3.03 to limit the cookie build-up.

This news.com story details a bold Steve Jobs poke at Flash, Adobe’s ubiquitous web content delivery technology.

Jobs used the Apple shareholders’ meeting to publicly dismiss the the full-blown PC Flash version as “too slow to be useful” on the iPhone. He then went on to describe the mobile version–Flash Lite–as “not capable of being used with the Web.”

That’s an unusual–albeit refreshingly frank–way to talk in public about a business partner. Give Jobs credit for speaking his mind, although I very much doubt Adobe appreciated his candor.

That jolted me into looking at where Flash stands today.

No iPhone Flash Support

Flash didn’t debut on the iPhone, and it looks like it’s not going to be part of what many say is the World’s Best Phone for some time, if ever.

YouTube is Moving Away from Flash

Months ago, in an effort to support the iPhone and AppleTV, YouTube began the massive task of re-encoding its millions of videos in the much-more “open” H.264 standard.

It’s Still Big, Bloaty, Proprietary, and Update Hungry

And resource-hungry: watch your processor activity move up fast when you use it. Adobe/Macromedia (Flash’s former master) had years to make it run fast, but instead they chose to add features, a conundrum that is the result of one of the Laws of Programming: you can have features or light weight, but not both. Flash is a 5MB download.

That’s not to say that right now we’re seeing Flash in decline. Its installed base is absurdly broad. But if it’s not on revolutionary devices like the iPhone, we’re probably seeing the early writing on the wall. And that wall is graced with the likes of RealPlayer, Quark Immedia and other names on it.

[by Silvarios] [taken from Dear lord: iCab 4.0.0 beta!]

Warning, it’s going to take a fair bit of words to get my point across. Here’s the modern web attention span version. iCab 4.0.0 beta has been released to registered iCab users. It is a universal binary and requires Mac OS 10.3.9, while some features require 10.4 or 10.5. Version 4.0 of iCab is a complete rewrite in Cocoa as compared to version 3.0 which was built with Carbon. Version 4.0 uses WebKit and the older versions use the proprietary iCab rendering engine. Here’s a screenshot from the iCab 4.0.0 beta:

Continue reading »

I used it last night and again today. I’m getting a bunch of files back from the otherside.

I emailed PhotoRec author Christophe Grenier asking if it recovered . NEF (Nikon Raw) files. The documentation says that it does, but in the file types listed in the “choose what you want to look for” in the application’s interface, there is seemingly everything but .NEF.

no .NEF choice here

He emailed me within 10 minutes and said that format is a child of .TIF, so just select that. And voila, it started recovering my raw files.

The names of the recovered files are different, but I can live with that.

Now to give myself 100 lashes for letting this whole thing happen in the first place. Note to self: get data re-org projects done in one day, not 30. The longer that window is open, the more likely a fly will come in.

Nathan, thanks for the PhotoRec tip.

My host (Dreamhost) either doesn’t allow me to store drafts/sent mail on the mail server, or I simply can’t find the setting to allow this in their control panel. No worries, I can store drafts locally.

If you see this in Mail.app when composing email, and you use IMAP-style email, here’s the fix.

Preferences -> Accounts -> Mailbox Behaviors -> (uncheck) Store draft messages on the server.

As you can see in the image above this can work for sent mail too.

Obviously this will not store drafts or sent mail on the server. Think carefully about this — if you retrieve email from different Macs/PCs often this may not be the solution for you. This solution works fine for me because I always use the same Mac for email, so if I write a draft it will be stored locally on my hard drive and accessible.

If you’re using a Plesk server for email, see this fix.

That’s right, the Apple Mac browser Safari will be released for Microsoft Windows.

Steve Jobs made it his signature “… one more thing” announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference just 4 minutes ago. More on this later.

My white-hot, burning, filthy love for Apple’s Aperture became even more so (!) today with the release of ApertureToGallery.

ApertureToGallery is an Aperture plug-in that automates the process of getting photos from Aperture into Gallery.

Be still, my beating heart.

I use Gallery2 on several of my sites including my fine art photography site, and this is just what the doctor ordered for my workflow. But it’s not going to help with my filthy thoughts. Thanks Ubermind!

I was reading this 5thirtyone.com blog entry about Mailplane, a new desktop app (currently private beta, alas) that controls your Gmail mail account, thinking “wow, pretty neat, but not great.” Then I came upon this:

Anyone who uses screenshots to supplement their emails will enjoy the convenience of the ‘Screenshot’ functionality built right into Mailplane. ‘Screenshot’ will automatically open Apple’s Grab utility. Once you’ve made your selection, Mailplane automatically attaches the image to your current email.

Whoa, now that’s utility. And there’s more, including integration with Adress Book, iPhoto and more. <Drool>.

See a 5 min. (29MB) live demo of the application.

Upon sitting down at my fav cafe, I found myself opening my browser (Firefox 2), clicking Applekey-T three times (to create three more tabs), and clicking on  the following bookmarks to load pages:

1. Google AdSense — checking my vast revenue from yesterday
2. Google News
3. Google AdWords — see how my ads fared yesterday
4. Gmail

In that order.

And it struck me

Not only am I visiting four Google properties, I’m visiting them first, before any other pages on the Web (which is rumored to have tens of thousands of pages).

It’s a sign either of Google’s incredible domination of the Web, or of my predilection for the company’s services. Or both.

Am I putting too many eggs in one basket? What do you think?

I needed to test a site in Internet Explorer 7, on Windows XP. Since I use the remarkable tool Parallels Desktop for Mac, and it gives me for all intents and purposes an actual Windows PC, I reviewed my options before installing IE7 on my XP/Parallels install. Rumors had been swirling in my head that installing 7 would deactivate IE6 forever.

I still need IE6, no way was I going to let that happen.

The Journey Begins

There is a way to install IE7 without removing IE6 — this workaround — but it only works with beta versions of IE7. I don’t want to track down and install a beta of IE7. More Googling turned up a solution fulfilled by installing Virtual PC 2004, but running a PC inside a PC on my Mac? That’s getting a little complex for my taste. I haven’t had any LSD flashbacks in months, and I don’t want to start triggering them again now. I do want to note that VPC is free, to Microsoft’s credit.

Then, after a massive bong hit, I remembered I can install more than one OS on Parallels. Voila. Better than that, Parallels allows you to clone a virtual machine. PERFECT.

Continue reading »

Is Apple hiding or disabling features in the latest OS X 10.5 “Leopard” developer builds?

This interesting Digg story commentary by user panique not only answers “Yes,” to that, but explains why.

If you actually viewed the MWSF Keynote, you saw Steve Jobs tell us there were some other amazing features in Leopard that they are playing very close to the vest. He said he didn’t want to “give anyone a head start on copying them”. Of course this is an implied reference that Microsoft wishes to copy these features.

All it takes to get a copy of the Leopard Developer release is $500 and a mailing address. Not to mention that we already know that Microsoft is an Apple Authorized Apple developer (Office Mac, etc.). Given that Apple has already stated that it does not want to give any advance opportunity for Microsoft to preview any “top secret” features, the idea that they have a secret internal-only build clearly is not a theory, it is an operational imperative. And I’d hazard a guess that a healthy portion of the bugs present in the latest preview have to do with the “top secret” features being ripped out of the build.

Nicely done, panique.

Easy and fun: Download Telegraphics’ small, efficient favicon Photoshop plugin. (Direct Mac CS3 download.) A $5 donation is suggested.

Then unpack it and drop it in Applications -> Adobe Photoshop CS3 -> Plug-Ins -> File Formats.

To use, create any square image, then Save or Save As… ICO (Windows Icon) format as favicon.ico. Place that at your site’s root.

The plugin does everything for you: colors, resizing etc. But your results will vary on how good your source image scales down to 16px by 16px. I recommend starting with a 64px or 128px sqare image.

 From our friends at Creative Techs comes a snappy way to straighten images in Photoshop that’s been around since version 5.5 (!). Enjoy!

Open .docx Files

Because Macs won’t get the next Microsoft Office application (Office 2008) for almost a year, there’s probably a few of you that want to open PC Word 2007 documents — .docx extension — and can’t.

Here’s how, thanks to our friends (and fellow Seattle residents) at CreativeTechs:

• Free Mac converter coming soon
• $20 converter available today
• Free web service
• Free converter Widget

Read more.

Now About Those OS’es You Don’t Have…

Developers, need to check your Web pages on a Windows or Linux OS, but don’t have them? These three services will make screenshots of your pages taken in various OS’es! What a great idea. File this under Why Didn’t I Think of That? then read more.

After a four-year hiatus, Mac users (whose Macs have Intel chips) will sometime in 2007 be able to buy Adobe’s video editing application Premiere.

Adobe will announce on Thursday that it will revive a Mac version of Premiere, the software maker’s video program aimed at professional editors. The new Mac version will only run on Intel-based Macs and will be part of a larger Adobe Production Studio suite that will include Adobe Encore DVD and Adobe Soundbooth.

The move may have been sparked by the Mac’s increasing market share, but was almost certainly a cause of Apple’s use of Intel chips, which makes porting applications from Windows to Mac easier for developers.

Don’t expect to find many similarities with the old Mac version of Premiere. “They both have wheels and body frame, but that as far as the similarities go. This is a completely different animal, except for the name,” Hayhurst said. “The team has done an outstanding job.”

Thank goodness for that. Premiere was a tough nut to crack back in its late-1990s verions, with somewhat non-intuitive controls, and it took Apple to show the way to simple moviemaking with iMovie.