njr 3.0

Apple's article on JavaScript in Mac Browsers, like the rest in their Internet Developer series, is comprehensive and well-written. (If only the technical notes and Q&As were anywhere near as good…) The most startling observations for me were that iCab does a better job of JavaScript than OmniWeb (despite having far less development effort behind it), and that Opera 6 and earlier do not support page reflow: Opera 7 does, but is not available on the Macintosh. For a browser which claimed to be as standards-compliant as Opera, this seems a very significant omission. The last version of Opera that I used much was version 3, since it was the only full-featured browser that worked at any reasonable speed on the Pentium 100 with Windows 95 I used at a previous job.

11:48 AM | Radio
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Some readers of this weblog may not be aware that I use Radio to read my RSS feeds. All the RSS machinery in Radio is available to be modified; without it you wouldn't have extensions like outlining and categorization, as provided by myRadio and soon activeRenderer.

As the number of RSS feeds I subscribe to doesn't seem to be decreasing, hierarchical and categorized views can help. I find a browser- and weblog-integrated aggregator much more useful than a desktop one such as NetNewsWire. Typically I read through a page of stories in Radio's aggregator under Chimera, Command-clicking on each link that looks interesting to open it in a background tab. Then I read through the open tabs, click “Delete” to get the next page of stories in the aggregator, and repeat. With NetNewsWire currently, I could open the links in the background, but when (unfortunately, not “if”) Chimera crashed I'd have to figure out which articles I had read and opened links from. Radio's batch-deletion approach handily sidesteps the issue. Finally, I like the mostly passive experience of reading through the news in a single Web page, rather than the active approach of having to press the space bar repeatedly to browse.

However, the integration advantages of a Web-based aggregator on the Mac can and should disappear when the Safari SDK is made available. Windows users have had similar opportunities for years through the embeddable IE control.

11:32 AM | Radio
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appswitch 1.0 released, with new features including the ability to quit an application normally, kill an application 'hard' (send a SIGKILL), and various tweaks to the ps-like application list.

7:16 PM | Radio
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The hiptop SDK is coming, the hiptop SDK is coming. Can't wait to port Pester!

6:35 PM | Radio
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Joe Zobkiw has another book coming out, this one on OS X plugins: services, status items, color pickers, screen savers and more. If it's anwhere near as good as his previous book, it will be one to buy.

I had a productive weekend: made more progress on a proposal for combining the last two stages of my thesis work, spent some time working on adapting Omni's OACalendarView for Pester 1.1, and went to a party last night. This morning I woke up feeling terrible, disoriented and feverish. I've spent most of the day lying in bed shivering, trying to read papers since my mind wasn't good for much else, and unfortunately missed a special meeting with my advisor. Just got dragged out to dinner, and I'm feeling a bit better now, hopefully well enough to go to Kuk Sool tonight.

6:33 PM | Radio
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