Josh Babetski : Quixotic Bravado

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• html5doctor, helping you implement html5 today
• Visual git tutorial I
• syntaxhighlighter - Google Code SyntaxHighlighter is here to help a developer/coder to post code snippets online with ease and have it look pretty. It's 100% Java Script based and it doesn't care what you have on your server.
• 16 great .htaccess Tricks and Hacks « PHP Twitter
• JSONView :: Add-ons for Firefox

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• Check My Colours - Analyse the color contrast of web pages
• jQuery Image Effects - Hover Effect w/ jQuery & CSS - jQuery Tutorial
• Using jQuery for Background Image Animations
• 960 Grid System
• Page Speed Home Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Recent links posted to Delicious:

• Font Squirrel | Handpicked free fonts for graphic designers with commercial-use licenses.
• IE6 Update IE6 Update looks like IE’s Information Bar, but instead of offering your visitors an ActiveX plugin, it offers a browser update.
• Mini Display Port to HDMI Adapter | Mini Display Port to DVI / VGA Adapter Mini Display Port to HDMI Adapter
• Firediff - In Case of Stairs Firediff implements a change monitor that records all of the changes made by firebug and the application itself to CSS and the DOM. This
  provides insight into the functionality of the application as well as provide a record of the changes that were required to debug and tweak the page’s display.
• Plex Media Center for OS X Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins.

For a long time I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the performance of Firefox 2 on my Mac. The Mozilla folk will blame it on plug-ins and such, but I’ve done a lot of tweaking, hacking, and research and it’s just got issues.

The main issue is the memory bleeding. Every other day requires I shut down Firefox and restart it. The second is occasional responsiveness even before the memory leakage fires up. On the Safari side, the new Webkit builds keep getting faster, and being an iPhone user, the consolidation and ease of syncing bookmarks is not without its appeal. This doesn’t mean Firefox is out, the wide selection of plug-ins/add-ons still makes it my go to browser for development and debugging; I’m just trying it in the second string position.

Speaking of plug-ins, this may be the biggest flaw in using Safari: Not a lot of development for plug-ins and not easily extensible. The biggest resource I’ve found so far is a site called Pimp My Safari, which has been helpful, but doesn’t seem to be updated frequently. So I’ve been compiling a list of the features I want/need ported from Firefox to make this browser switch stick:

• Click RSS icon and add to Google Reader or other online reader. Since I access feeds from both my Mac and my iPhone, I use an online reader. I want to easily click that “RSS” icon in the address bar and assign that feed where I want.
• Multiple session session-saver. You can load your last session, but I want the option to save multiple sessions and jump back to a specific ones.
• Some refinement to the very impressive Safari Web Inspector. Namely the ability to click “Inspect” and select a section of the page like Firebug.
• I like to search right from the location bar. My biggest frustration right now is that muscle memory has my typing search terms in and getting a Safari error page.
• A plugin to post directly to Delicious. Bookmarklets are fine, but I want tighter integration, once again like the delicious plugin for Firefox.

I’m sure I’ll find some others and will update this post; I’m only in day two of the test. If you have solutions or know of good plug-ins for Safari, please let me know.