BravoBug News

Besides the ability to change the position of the new tabs, there are several other ‘hidden’ settings you can toggle on or off by directly modifying Safari’s defaults (plist/prefs) file. The easiest way to modify these is of course to fire up the terminal and use the handy-dandy defaults tool.

MacOSXHints wrote a cool article listing several of these nifty ‘hidden’ settings and instructions on how to toggle them.

Check out the article here!

After a very fun and very productive sale on Mega BrickBash 3000 and IconBurglar, the prices are now (almost) back to normal. Mega BrickBash 3000 was originally $25, IconBurglar was $15, and although the sale is over I have permanently reduced their prices by $5.

Thanks to all of you who made this a very fun sale by registering your copies and supporting BravoBug’s Mac software development. For those of you who haven’t yet registered, it’s still the perfect time with the newly (and permanently) reduced price tags! Thank you for supporting Shareware!

Thanks to TUAW for featuring this video. From the article: “Zen Bound originally started out as Zen Bondage, a physics game/sandbox where the goal was to wrap a rope around a 3D shape or object. The game has just recently been ported to the iPhone, and in the process has actually been improved — the graphics look sharper and the iPhone’s multitouch controls really add to the tactile experience.”

Slashdot has an interesting article on why the iPhone is “selling so poorly in Japan that it’s being offered for free”.

(Photo: the Panasonic P905i)

From the article:

“With a high level of technical sophistication, critical customers, and high innovation rate, Japan is the toughest cell phone market in the world. So it’s not surprising that although Apple is the third-largest mobile supplier in the world, selling 10 million units in 2008, in Japan the iPhone is selling so poorly it’s being offered for free. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn’t cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera, multimedia text messaging, nor a TV tuner. Pricing plans in Japan are also very competitive, and the iPhone’s $60-and-up monthly plan is too high compared to competitors; a survey lat year showed that among Japanese consumers, 91% didn’t want to buy an iPhone. The cellular weapon of choice in Japan would be the Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a 3-inch TV and features 3-G, GPS, a 5.1-megapixel camera, and motion sensors for Wii-style games. ‘When I show this to visitors from the US, they’re amazed,’ according to journalist Nobi Hayashi, who adds, ‘Carrying around an iPhone in Japan would make you look pretty lame.’”

Anyone have the movie Gattaca? Well… you can move it from your Science Fiction section to Documentaries, now. :O

As posted on Slashdot:

“The Fertility Institutes recently stunned the fertility community by being the first company to boldly offer couples the opportunity to screen their embryos not only for diseases and gender, but also for completely benign characteristics such as eye color, hair color, and complexion. The Fertility Institutes proudly claims this is just the tip of the iceberg, and plans to offer almost any conceivable customization as science makes them available. Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life’s savings for a custom baby, opponents are vilifying the company for shattering moral and ethical boundaries. Like it or not, the era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back.”

As most of you know, Apple recently made available the Safari 4 beta, which aims to improve the speed of the web browser, among a list of 150 other new features. Instead of writing up a big lengthy article about all this, which you can find plenty of in the blogosphere, I thought I would write up some quick comments and thoughts I had. First off…

The new tabs: Most people don’t seem to like them, but they can be reverted to the old style by typing this command into the Mac OS X terminal (as posted on MacWorld):

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

The perfect 100 Acid3 test score: Doesn’t matter, unfortunately. It’s nice to see Apple striving to set an example for standards compliance, but it won’t make any difference until Firefox and IE catch up. They both still make up the vast majority of browsers on the web, and web designers don’t build websites just for Safari users, they design websites with cross-browser compatibility in mind. So the fact that Safari scores perfect on the test is great, but ultimately meaningless and inconsequential since the world of web browsers is only as good as its weakest component (IE). Even Mac-only websites must at least cater to Firefox’s level of rendering/standards compliance.

The speed: Safari boasts some nifty new speed enhancements including a super-fast JavaScript engine. Very cool, although I never thought JavaScript was slow in the first place…

The search field: Now works with Google’s Suggest feature, although Firefox has had this for quite a while.

Stability: I personally haven’t seen any significant differences in this area. Both browsers seem to be quite stable.
Okay now on to what I really wanted to talk about: Why Safari is still not as good as Firefox (in my personal opinion)… Again, to cut down the verbosity of this, I’m just going to lay out the key points here.

First of all, Firefox’s speeds are equal to Safari when it comes to real world browsing. Apple can show bar charts all day long but what really matters is how snappy web pages appear to load when people are just casually surfing the web, and Firefox holds its own in this contest. I can’t notice any significant speed boosts when using Safari over FF for general browsing. And another thing… when I am watching Netflix instant-watch movies in Safari vs Firefox on the same mac, same internet connection, Safari gives me a poor bandwidth rating, Firefox gives me a high-quality one (weird, huh?).

Security: Firefox still reigns supreme here. Its options for controlling how it handles your cookies and how it loads webpages is unsurpassed. Safari simply doesn’t have enough features to keep security-conscious (read: paranoid) web surfers feeling secure. And as far as response times to zero-day threats, it’s been proven time and time again that no monolithic tech company can respond as quickly as the open source community.

Add-ons: The ability to use NoScript has recently become a big reason I don’t think I’ll ever use another browser. This is by far the most awesome security add-on I’ve used while surfing the web, and Safari doesn’t have anything like it (that I’m aware of).

Keyboard shortcuts: Firefox has more, and they’re better.

Customization: Firefox is king in this arena, with a bazillion ways to customize your UI (if you so desire).

Okay that being said, I should acknowledge that Firefox has its own set of quirks and drawbacks. The cocoa-style Mac OS X controls they added in FF3 simply look and feel phony. It gives Safari the edge in terms of genuine Mac OS X aesthetics. And of course there are other small things that us Mac fans love, like Safari’s pretty Find/Search tool, which highlights the actual words on the page in the lovely OS X style. With Safari 4’s new speed enhancements, users requiring things like super-fast JavaScript will, I’m sure, find Safari to be in a league of its own compared to other browsers.

But… all in all, Firefox to me is still king of the web.

Okay, well… it might not be Atlantis. But it sure is interesting…

Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/google/4731313/Google-Ocean-Has-Atlantis-been-found-off-Africa.html

UPDATE: Awww. Well our worst fears have been confirmed. The lines seen in the ocean floor data are in fact not the city of Atlantis, but are apparently just image artifacts which are the result of the data mining process. ‘Tis a shame.

What news anchors do during commercial breaks…