Why Safari 3 on PC? For the iPhone!
June 12, 2007 | 2 Comments
I love Safari on my Mac. It outperforms Firefox for me, the built in RSS support is wonderful, the tabs work better than any of the other browsers, and private browsing (better known as porn mode) can’t be beat. However… it’s really no competition for Firefox or Internet Explorer on the PC platform as an overall browser.
So.. why Safari on the PC? Does Apple truly believe they can compete with Mozilla and Microsoft? I’d say they are not that misguided…
Safari is now available on PC purely to test iPhone applications.
There are a lot of web developers who will be able to develop small applications to deliver through Safari on the iPhone starting on June 29th. Yet, a large majority of the developers will not have iPhones and don’t have Macs. This means Safari needs to be made available for testing on PC for those developers to add value to the iPhone. Although this would be made better if Apple cloned Firebug and rolled that in out of the box…
As far as actual browser usage, I would be shocked to see the web adoption pass 6% for Safari (Apple claims they currently get 4.9%). This may sell a couple more people on Macs, but Safari is not iTunes. It does not stand head and shoulders above competitor software. If they do expand market share in Safari and get a few more people onto a Mac, this is a bonus.
In conclusion… I’m glad to see Safari on PC. Hopefully more web applications will get tested with it… but don’t be fooled this is a move to bolster the iPhone, nothing more.
Tags: apple, browser, explorer, firebug, firefox, internet explorer, iphone, mac, macs, mozilla, osx, pc, safari, web, web application
Great Color Picker
June 6, 2006 | 33 Comments
When doing web development it is often helpful to use a color wheel or some sort of color picker when coming up with color schemes. In general I’m satisfied with the desktop application Pixie in my normal web development toolkit. However, that tool does not present a color wheel or allow you to pick multiple colors from out of nowhere.
Enter 4096 Color Wheel. As far as I can tell, this is the ultimate web based application for playing with colors. It gives you colors in hex, like you’d want, but also presents “web safe” and “web smart” alternatives for any color you may pick.
Tags: 4096 color wheel, color, color picker, color wheel, pixie, web, web application, web development, web safe, web smart
Scriptaculous
January 6, 2006 | 1 Comment
Matt recently came across and got very excited about Script.aculo.us for doing DHTML effects and AJAX.
From Matt’s post: Script.aculo.us Is My New Best Friend:
Script.aculo.us is a Javascript Effects and Control framework developed by Thomas Fuchs, a software architect living in Vienna, Austria who, like me, was disappointed by current web application frameworks that made no sense to him. His framework is 3 things: Easy to Use, Simple, and Easy to Use. His libraries - built off of the AJAX framework, Prototype - blow SAJAX out of the water!
One of the things that makes script.aculo.us especially great is the detailed and well written documentation/apis. Arguably, this is why I first loved Java and eventually became addicted to PHP. The Java API was great, but PHP.net is unmatched. Like PHP.net, the script.aculo.us wiki allows users to contribute back knowledge easily.
Tags: AJAX, api, apis, dhtml, java, php, programming, prototype, SAJAX, scriptaculous, web, web application, web development, wiki