Baltimore Squirrels

I’ve been playing with the new Safari 4 beta for the past hour and there are some pretty notable changes. All in all I think it’s a pretty great update, I might finally be able to ditch that sluggish behemoth known as “Firefox” once and for all.

I’ll leave a real breakdown of the features to someone who is good at writing those things, but the short list is:

• The Windows version is now sporting a native Windows UI. The Apple UI has never looked quite right in Windows, I think this is a great change and a big step towards getting people to actually use Safari in Windows.
• Tabs in the title bar, similar to Google Chrome and Stainless. I’m not 100% sure why, but I expect it was well researched given the technical hassle it must have presented.
• Speaking of tabs, in old Safari once you started dragging a tab left or right you could no longer drag it out of the window, this is fixed in the beta. Kind of a nitpick but it’s been bugging me for a while.
• Bookmarks and History views now use coverflow. I think this is a hugely useful addition, I’ve been using SafariStand largely because of the coverflow history view it offers and I’ve found it very helpful.
• A “top sites” start page similar to what Google Chrome and Opera offer.
• Everything from Webkit. This primarily (to me) means the new, speedy javascript engine and a much improved web inspector.

For kicks I applied some jQuery and CSS to Apache’s directory listings.

Before:

After:

You can see it in action and download it. Some assembly required.

I sort of want a job making simple tasks look overwhelmingly complex in infomercials. How fun would it be to come up with a way to make washing your hands seem daunting, or opening a door, or petting your cat? Maybe I can moonlight as an Obfuscator of the Obvious.

With regards to productivity and time management, the use of the term “multitasking” is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

Multitasking is a trap, a siren song to the overworked. You can’t write multiple proposals at once, you can’t work on multiple webapps at once and you can’t give your attention to multiple clients at once. Chances are if you think you’re multitasking you’re either breaking up and prioritizing your tasks well (which is good, but not “multitasking”) or you aren’t giving any task your full attention.

Multitasking is a misleading term that has turned into a professional talking point and – in my opinion – it needs to be purged from our productivity vocabularies.

Clearly I need to raise my rates.

Dan Cody – My Open Records Request Reveals a Shocking $2 Million Price Tag for State of Wisconsin Web Site.

via

The display of an ad on Hulu can be broken down to three features:

1. Video – the presentation of a “sponsored by” clip at the beginning of the video, and perhaps a few commercials.
2. Banner – the presentation of a matching banner on the video page.
3. Interactive – the ability to click-through the ads to a link provided by the advertiser.

When watching Hulu videos with Boxee, #1 remains intact but #2 and #3 are thrown out the window. You can argue the importance of these items if you want but the fact is the advertisers are paying for these features and when you watch a video with Boxee the advertisers aren’t getting what they paid for. That’s all it takes for them to make a call to legal to have the plug pulled.

I popped open my 1TB Fantom GreenDrive the other day and I was surprised to find a WD Caviar Green. Not bad, the WD Caviar Green is easily $100-110 anywhere online, and the Fantom GreenDrive can be found for $120-130. In short, you’re paying $20 for a very sturdy, USB/eSATA enclosure.

The GreenDrive is a little slow for a primary disk though (it’s “green” because the speed varies from 5400 to 7200 RPM, thus using less energy than an always-7200 RPM drive), but the Fantom G-Force runs at 7200 and is apparently also a sweet candy shell around some quality WD chocolate (okay, I’m going a little far there). I think I know where my storage money is going for the foreseeable future.