In all of the hullabaloo surrounding Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4, it was easy to miss the announcement of Safari 5, the latest version of Apple’s web browser. And it was even easier to overlook the announcement of one of Safari 5’s features. But now that Safari 5 has been in the wild for a bit, this particular feature has been getting more and more attention, and I think there’s more to come as people work through its potential ramifications.

The feature in question is “Safari Reader”, which allows you to view a streamlined version of a website’s news articles and blog entries. Or, as Apple puts it:

Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story. It works like this: As you browse the web, Safari detects if you’re on a web page with an article. Click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article appears instantly in one continuous, clutter-free view. You see every page of the article—whether two or twenty. Onscreen controls let you email, print, and zoom. Change the size of the text, and Safari remembers it the next time you view an article in Safari Reader.

Most users will probably consider this a very welcome feature, especially in light of the fact that web advertising has consistently grown more obnoxious over time, thanks to obtrusive techniques and gimmicks such as fly-out ads (which lurk in a webpage’s corner and “fly out” when you mouse over them), “in-text” advertising (which highlights certain words on a webpage and displays a popup with ads when you mouse over those words), and splitting articles across multiple pages (which increases the number of ad impressions for the entire article). Safari Reader provides a nice escape from these things and gives you quick and easy access to nothing but the content that you came to the website for in the first place.

(Admittedly, this isn’t anything new. Readability is an add-on for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari that does much the same thing. Ad blocking software has been around for a long time. And many sites offer their content ad-free, or relatively ad-free, in their RSS feeds. But as far as I know, this is the first time it’s been a browser-level feature.)

Continue reading…

Apple has launched a nice little gallery that showcases some of the cool things that can be done with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. No Flash required, though you do need to be using a modern browser (e.g., the latest version of Safari). The demos are pretty cool—I’m especially fond of the “Transitions” gallery—and it just proves that Flash is becoming increasingly unnecessary to create rich, interactive web experiences.

We all know that the iPhone is already the pinnacle of geek lust, but now it has a nice, healthy dollop of retro geek lust as well.

And just for the record, this is way cooler than the recent announcement of an actual Commodore 64 incarnation that’s coming this June.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame offers up some intriguing and thoughtful punditry on Apple’s much-rumored Tablet device.

I have a thousand questions about The Tablet’s design. What size is it? There’s a big difference between, say, 7- and 10-inch displays. How do you type on it? With all your fingers, like a laptop keyboard? Or like an iPhone, with only your thumbs? If you’re supposed to watch video on it, how do you prop it up? Holding it in your hands? Flat on a table seems like the wrong angle entirely; but a fold-out “arm” to prop it up, à la a picture frame, seems clumsy and inelegant. If it’s just a touchscreen tablet, how do you protect the screen while carrying it around? If it folds up somehow, how is it not just a laptop - why not put a hardware keyboard on the part that folds up to cover the display? (Everyone I know at Apple refers to it as “The Tablet”, but so far as I can tell, that’s because that’s what everyone calls it, not because anyone knows that it actually even is, physically, a tablet. And “The Tablet” most certainly is not the product name.) If it’s too big to fit in a pants pocket, how are you supposed to carry it around? And but if it does fit in a pants pocket, how is it bigger enough than an iPod Touch to justify existing? And so on.

But there’s one question at the top of the list, the answer to which is the key to answering every other question. That question is this: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

This article is a good example of why I like Gruber’s writing so much.

Shortly after upgrading to Safari 4, the latest version of Apple’s web browser, I took a look at a site that I’ve been working on and noticed that the layout was off. The site looked fine for the most part, but some elements—specifically some navigational links—had been left unstyled by the site’s style sheet.

Normally, style sheet info is an “all or nothing” deal. Either your style sheet works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, it’s usually because of something simple, like the style sheet’s URL being incorrectly specified. But that obviously wasn’t the case here, because part of the style sheet was working.

Furthermore, the site looked perfectly fine in Firefox, and I couldn’t remember the site ever having this issue in Safari 3. So obviously, my thoughts turned to Safari 4 as the culprit. I immediately began dreading the hours spent trawling through discussion forums and mailing lists to try and learn if style sheets were being handled differently in Safari 4. All manner of worst case scenarios were tumbling around in my imagination when, in a moment of clarity, I decided to validate my style sheet.

Sure enough, the style sheet had a few errors. Most of them were fairly straightforward, like improper values being specified for an attribute. But one error stood out to me: one of the hex color values was invalid because it contained hidden characters.

That’s when it dawned on me. When making my (X)HTML/CSS mockups, I often use of DigitalColor Meter, an OS X utility that shows you the color value of any pixel on the screen. It’s a very handy utility for web developers because it lets you get a color from your layout without having to load a mockup in Photoshop just so you can use Photoshop’s Eyedropper tool. Instead, you fire up DigitalColor Meter, hover over the area containing the color you need, press Command-Shift-C, go to your HTML editor, press Command-V, and presto—you’ve got your hex value.

It’s a pretty slick shortcut, but I’d forgotten that—for whatever reason—hidden characters are inserted into the hex value when you paste it into your HTML editor. Take a look at this screenshot taken of a recently pasted hex value in BBEdit with the “Show Invisibles” option turned on.

As you can see, there are additional characters after the “96”, “C2”, and “51”. I usually remember to remove such characters, but in this instance, I had missed one. Other browsers ignored the hidden character when they loaded the style sheet but Safari 4 choked on it; when it loaded the style sheet, any info after the hidden character was simply ignored. (I’ll let the reader decide if this is a good thing or not. But personally, I tend to think that it is a good thing when a web browser forces me to make sure that my code is neat and tidy.)

So for today’s lesson, repeat after me: Always validate your style sheet(s) and if you’re using DigitalColor Meter, make sure you clean out any hidden characters if/when you paste hex values from it into your HTML editor.

Panic—one of the coolest Mac developers out there, and the creators of Transmit (my favorite Mac FTP client) and Coda—is selling their biggest apps for half-price until May 29th. Click here for details.

Earlier this month, my external hard drive—which contained, among other things, my entire iTunes library—died. I tried rescuing what I could when it became obvious that the drive was on its last legs, but I was unable to rescue everything, including my iTunes library.

Fortunately, a lot of the songs in my library also existed on my iPod. By default, however, you can’t copy music files from an iPod to your computer. A quick Google search turned up plenty of methods for getting around this limitation, and I finally chose to go with Senuti.

Senuti says that it’s a simple application that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod to your computer. And to put it simply, it worked like a charm. There were some features, such as transferring playlists over, that I didn’t use. However, the core functionality worked just fine, and was quite easy to do, to boot.

I still have some work to do with rebuilding my iTunes library, but I’m much better off than before, thanks to Senuti. (You can find a more thorough review over on AppScount.)

Yeah, the new MacBook and MacBook Pro are pretty cool, what with the souped up graphics, solid aluminum construction, and other nifty features.

But what really got me drooling is the new 24” LED Cinema Display. My immediate thoughts were somewhere along the lines of “I wonder how this would look sitting next to my iMac?” But apparently, it’s only for MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro systems with Mini DisplayPort, according to the specs page.

It’s not enough to make me want to get rid of my desktop, but it’s still awfully purty.