dfbills.com blog

Adobe released public betas for the next generation of products yesterday.  The most exciting news is that the next version of Dreamweaver will use WebKit as its rendering engine, replacing the long-standing Opera engine.

Mozilla is telling us to go kick the tires on the first Firefox 3 release candidate.  Only a few aesthetic changes that I noticed, but Mozilla says there are major security enhancements under the hood. Javascript performance is ridiculously fast and especially noticeable in the Google Apps.

I’ve definitely seen it before and after seeing it a few times this week, I wanted to comment that I really like the Twitter “server down” page.

The latest AOL Desktop for Mac now includes a Webkit-based browser.  Who woulda thunk?

Over the years, they’ve gone from no web browser to proprietary browser to Tasman (IE 5.0) to Mozilla (Netscape 7.0) and now to Webkit (Safari).

To enable Mac Safari single window mode: (available starting in Safari 3.1)

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

A few months back, I was feeling a bit jealous of all the cool kids in iChat using their music as status messages.  I’ve played with this on and off since I first saw the scripts to make this happen on Doug’s Scripts for iTunes.  When it was officially added to iChat in the Tiger OS release, I toyed with it some more, but never could really use it on a regular basis since I play music at work on my iPod.

Then one day it hit me- with my jailbroken iPod, I could wirelessly scrobble tracks to last.fm and then pull that data back down and use it for a status message.  So, I whipped up a little shell script.

#!/bin/sh
while :
do
osascript -e ‘tell application “iChat” to set status message to (do shell script “curl http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/dfbills/recenttracks.txt | head -n 1 | cut -c12-”)’
sleep 110
done

Download here.

I’m sure this could be cleaner and I’ve been mulling over the idea of setting the data as a variable so that I can display a growl message too, but hey- my contacts in iChat can see my uber-cool status line showing my musical taste and that’s all I set out to do.

Today, Apple unveiled the latest version of Safari web browser.  What’s new?  Not just the speed- Apple says Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2 & JavaScript executes up to six times faster than other browsers.  But more importantly, this is the first browser to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5, first to support CSS Animations, introduces support for CSS Web Fonts and support for integrated client-side database storage via offline SQLite database.

Go HTML 5!

A clever developer has posted instructions on how to create an iPhone WebClip icons for your own website: (via MacRumors)

The lowdown:

- Create a 57x57 PNG
- Name it “apple-touch-icon.png”
- Upload to the root level of your website

You can override Safari’s WebClip search behavior just like with favicons:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="myicon.png"/>

As usual, detailed instructions for iPhone web development are posted in Apple’s iPhone Dev Center.

To flush DNS cache

Tiger:

sudo lookupd -flushcache

Leopard:

dscacheutil -flushcache

AOL has declared Netscape dead.  Has this not happened before?  “AOL Cuts Remaining Mozilla Hackers” (2003)

Most people have considered it dead for quite some time.  How many people have even heard of Netscape 9.0?  Asking around, none of the developers I know have. 

This might be the end of the AOL Netscape era, but certainly not the end of Mozilla.  Anyone ever heard of Firefox?  How about Seamonkey or Camino?