Good, Beta, Best
The Age
Thursday March 20, 2003
The Safari browser, up to version 64 and still in beta, continues to improve.
AS THE autumn leaves begin falling, spring is flushing away the winter gloom of North America and rejuvenating the juices of Silicon Valley. That is not to say that Silicon Valley's climate ever gets very wintry, but it is a way of recognising that new stuff is imminent, not only from Apple but also from the citadel to the north, Fortress Microsoft.
For Macintosh users probably the best news is that further improvements have been made to Safari and, according to those who ought to be in the know, v64 of the browser you should by now have on your Mac is close to release.
Up at the House that Bill Built, news from the Macintosh Business Unit is that MSN for OS X (ain't the world getting just too alphabetical?) is on the way. The service will include internet software and specialised content. There is a website, but so far all it has are some pretty pictures. However, it is clear that Microsoft takes Macintosh internet users seriously.
Back at Apple, iMovie has been updated, providing what Apple says is improved performance and stability. Some criticisms were heard about iMovie 3's stability, and this 1.9MB download, available through Software Update or directly from www.apple.com.au, is said to fix it. You may also see an update of Airport's firmware (v4.0.8), but Australians need not worry about it. It is mainly to help users of American DSL services.
As usual, Apple is not flagging any details about forthcoming developments in Safari, but informed rumourmongers say the latest, still beta, version will include tabbed browsing, a feature that has been demanded in feedback messages to Cupertino. In fact, it was about the only complaint about Safari's first beta release. The other innovation coming in the next Safari beta release will be the addition of Auto-Complete, saving you the hassle of filling in online forms.
Nick dePlume, editor of the United States Mac rumour site ThinkSecret, says two Safari updates are in the works at Apple. Beta version 62 included tabbed browsing for the first time; version 64 carries a number of enhancements to those, although neither update has yet been made public. One would guess that the next public release will be of version 64, but you never know. It could be version 65. OS X allows rapid development and, with Safari now in the hands of more than two million Mac users, they are not about to let too much grass grow between their toes.
Tabbed browsing is regarded by many experienced web surfers as one of the most useful tools a browser can offer. It lets you wander around in a number of websites, all in a single browser window, rather than having to stack windows up like magazines in a newsagent. Each page is separated by a clickable tab. It is wonderfully valuable, particularly for students looking for project information, because you can keep track of pages more easily and move to them more quickly.
Tabbed browsing was introduced in the Chimera project - a Mac browser based on the Gecko engine and recently renamed Camino. Chimera maintains tabs even into its bookmark library, an even more useful feature that many believe is likely to flow through to the next release of Safari.
In Safari, the tabs will sit under the main toolbar and, when activated, will be highlighted and drop down. Each will have a closure icon so it can be shut down without having to be brought to the front. Chimera could cope with a dozen or more websites on a single tab, and Safari should be at least as generous.
Read my Palm
Rumours of an Apple personal digital assistant (US computerspeak for hand-held computer) have been around for ages and gained strength with the inclusion of Inkwell, Apple's handwriting recognition software in OS X 10.2.
You can use Inkwell in any application that involves text by hooking a Wacom tablet to your Mac and challenging the set-up to recognise your scrawl. But with the recent appointment of Steve Sakoman, formerly with Palm and before that with Be, as an Apple vice-president working with software chief Avie Tevanian, the rumours have again been revived.
Apple will not talk about anything it does not have on the shelves or ready to roll, but with seven computer manufacturers now producing tablet PCs and Dell recently introducing a hand-held to compete with the likes of Palm and iPaq, Apple must be tempted.
The core of the issue is the well-established, continuing convergence of personal computers and consumer appliances, a trend so far seen more in product lines from makers such as Sony than, for example, Hewlett-Packard or Dell, with Apple very much in contention because of its digital lifestyle software products - iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes and iDVD - as well as the wildly successful iPod MP3 player. Among the trendy of the world, you are not in the swim if you do not have an iPod somewhere around your Armani clothing.
So, does Sakoman's arrival foreshadow the oft-expected Apple hand-held revival of Newton in a 21st-century form? Your guess is probably better than mine.
Mac to war
Being a child of the flower power generation, Steve Jobs may not be entirely enthusiastic about the prospect of war with Iraq, although his view is his own private business.
However, it is worth recording that among the tonnes of hardware, 300,000 troops, sophisticated communications guidance and surveillance equipment, weapons, aircraft, bombs bugles and ice-cream the US Defense Department has shipped to the Middle East is at least one Macintosh.
It is a Titanium G4 in the hands of a Major Shawn Weed, an intelligence officer (of course he's intelligent - he's a Mac user) with the 3rd US Infantry Division now in Kuwait.
According to an item in Wired magazine, Major Weed took his TiBook along because "the problem with computers in the army is that they are bought by the gross and not necessarily purchased to accomplish certain functions. The army doles out laptops the way we dole out boots, tents and other supplies." But not TiBooks.
Weed said he was given a Panasonic Toughbook but found it was not fast enough. Weed declined to say what he does out there in the desert but did concede he works with massive satellite images. These are of such size and detail that the Toughbook crossed its eyes and slowed to a crawl. Weed decided this was not good enough; a battle might be over before he could see where the enemy was, so he requisitioned a 1GHz 15-inch TiBook running Jaguar-plus.
"Lives are in the balance here," Weed told Wired. "Other laptops either can't open the files or they freeze halfway through, so I lose my work and have to reboot. The TiBook is not 'ruggedised' like the ToughBooks but has stood up to the conditions without trouble.
"Solid as a rock".
Not that Weed's TiBook is lonely. It might be the only one in the 3rd Division, but many of the reporters and TV crews use PowerBooks and even iBooks. The TV teams use TiBooks to edit their digital video footage.
The eyes have it
Anyone who has been around the Macintosh for any length of time knows about The Eyeballs. They are those slightly creepy and somewhat distracting "eyes" that sit in the toolbar of your computer screen and follow the movements of your cursor. If you go to www.sticksoftware.com you will find the latest version, completely rewritten for Mac OS X with improved graphics. The site has a heap of other shareware and freeware, including Measles, which is a bunch of coloured balls that bounce around the desktop; Fracture, which makes fractal images for screensavers; and Constrictor, a screen snapshot utility for Mac OS X. This is among the more practical offerings on the site. It lets you position a frame over exactly the area you want to snap and lets you customise the snap image with effects such as framing and feathering.
Vote 1 for Jobs
Forbes, the magazine for business tycoons, recently updated its 400-richest-Americans list. It is what has been described as a "horribly unscientific" reader poll for the most popular US CEO.
Given the record of such people as the bosses of Enron and WorldCom, it is remarkable that anyone voted at all, but they did. And Steve Jobs topped the IT industry magnates list with a slightly amazing 84 per cent of the vote.
It is only a month or so since some keen person ran a website proposing Jobs for President of the US, a job he said was beyond his idea of sensible ambition. Given the Apple CEO's charisma, amply demonstrated every year in Macworld keynotes, the result is not a great surprise.
However, comparative statistics are intriguing. Larry Ellison, ebullient America's Cup competitor and head of Oracle Software, scored 53 per cent. Carly Fiorina, often rated the most powerful businesswoman in the US, came in with 41 per cent popularity rating, and bouncy old Steve Ballmer, president of Microsoft, won only a 31 per cent score. We don't know whether Saddam Hussein was in the running.
Another way to bake
Stephen Withers, a stalwart of iMug, the Victorian Macintosh Users Group, stumbled on a cute little "feature" in OS X. He says he is not sure if it has any practical use but what the heck, it's fun. Several other Macophiles have also judged it cool.
Withers says he "accidentally dragged an application from a disk image volume into the Dock. A few days later I clicked on the Dock icon and the disk image automatically mounted and the program ran".
There is a rumour around that Steve is descended from that ancient Chinese genius credited with inventing roast pork when he accidentally burnt his house down, but I am sure that is an exaggeration.
Yet another rumour
At this year's technology showcase, CeBIT, held in Hannover last week, IBM showed off its new PowerPC 970 microchip, which Apple is expected to build into its next generation of Power Macs. The 970 will go on to the market about July, running at 2.5 GHz or so. Apple is making no comment about when, or if, it will use the chip, and although the Mac remains the computer of choice for heavy graphics use, higher clock speeds would be handy.
US reports say the PowerPC 970 is targeted at the low-end server and desktop markets but is derived from IBM's Power4 chip, used in higher-end servers. A blade server developed by IBM in its German research centre will show off the new chip at CeBIT. Blade servers put an entire server on to a single card, which is handy for system administrators, but they require chips that draw little power and thus generate less heat.
At its launch last year the 970 was shown running at 1.8 GHz, well below the 2.5 GHz IBM's engineers are now talking about but nearly twice as fast as the current PowerPC chips offered in the top-end Power Macs and PowerBooks.
gbarker@theage.com.au
© 2003 The Age