SafariĀ 4

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Safari 4 was released today at WWDC and I’m pretty happy with it. There were more user interface changes than I thought I’d see between the beta and the final product. Not that they changed a ton of stuff, but I expected them to stick with the UI that they had in Safari 4 beta and just fix the bugs.

There were only a couple of things that I noticed that were different.

  1. The tabs are back to where they should be.
    While I liked the way the tabs functioned at the top of the browser (and the way they looked), it’s just more practical to have them as close to the content as possible. Putting the tabs on top of the bookmarks bar and address bar just means that you have to move your mouse that much farther, and that can be a problem, especially if your pushing the cursor around with a trackpad.
  2. There’s a “new tab” button for the toolbar.
    This may have been included in the beta, I can’t remember if I looked for it or not, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Sometimes you just don’t want to press Command+T.
  3. The “loading bar”.
    Smaller changes – the right side of the address bar now shows a “loading” icon when a page is loading and fades to white if the URL extends longer than the address bar.

They did take out one small thing, probably unintentionally, that I really liked. When you have multiple tabs open you can grab one of the tabs and drag it out of the current window to create a new window. You can also grab one of the tabs and drag it to another window, if you have one open, and move that tab to the new window. In the beta, since the title bar was the tab, you could grab the title bar, without extra tabs open, to another window and it would add that window to the other window as a tab. You can’t do that anymore, since the title bar is no longer a tab and it only shows the tabs when there are more than one of them.

It would be really nice if you could drag the title bar of a window with just one tab open to another window and have that get added as a tab to the new window. Maybe even let you drag the title bar from a window with more than one tab and have all the tabs in that window get added to the new window?

Update: I’m pretty sure the new tab button wasn’t included in the beta, as the [+] button was always at the end of the title bar.

Charles Barkley onĀ Twitter

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It looks like Charles Barkley isn’t a fan of Twitter. He obviously doesn’t understand how it works yet and still thinks of it as the “I’m eating a ham sandwich” service. Here are his thoughts:

“I think if you Tweet you’re a [d***] idiot,” Barkley said. “Anyone who’s worried about what Shaquille O’Neal is doing all day is an idiot.”

via Dan Patrick.com.

DvorakĀ Theme

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For awhile now I’ve been wanting to redesign the “Dvorak Uncensored” blog. It’s not the bets looking website that I’ve seen and thought it could use a cleaner, simpler layout.

Back when Mr. Dvorak had the competition for a redesign of http://dvorak.org/home.html, there were some great designs submitted. I really like the winning layout and thought It would be great as a blog template, so I went ahead and created one.

This new theme would go right along with the hompage that was redesigned last year on dvorak.org

I will offer this template exclusively to Mr. Dvorak first, as most people want a unique looking website. If he declines my offer for the new theme, I will make it available for public download.

Blog Upgrades for May 17th,Ā 2009

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I made some changes to the website today and I thought I’d go through an overview.

The first thing you will probably notice when coming to the website is the TweetMeme badges that I’ve put in. I’m not exactly sure how much I like them yet. They don’t look bad or anything, and they’re nice to have on the site, but they seem to slow down the page loads waiting for javascript to load the content from tweetmeme. If you don’t know what TweetMeme is, they’re just a site that keeps track of hot stories on twitter, much like how digg tracks stories, but TweetMeme does it automattically by watching retweets.

I also added a short URL to single posts. It’s alot like using tinyurl, except that you’re not relying on another site’s database to serve the links. It’s quite simple and much safer than using tinyurl or the digg bar. The default permalink style on WordPress blogs is “http://domain.tld/p=?<post-number>”. This is much shorter than the permalink styles that most of us use. It turns out that these links still work and actually redirect to the permalink structure that is setup.

The last thing I did today was change the way the date archive links are displayed on the archives page. I liked how Matt Mullenweg was displaying his links, so i copied him a little bit. This one was a little bit harder to setup, but with some searching through the WordPress documentation, I found some functions that helped me out. Now the links are displayed as “Year: January / February / March / etc…”. I put options in the function to optionally make the years links, choose the seperator, and a class name for the years. Each year is a list-item, so I have the function call enclosed by an unordered-list.
As I was making these new changes, I realized that I have good plugins in my functions.php file right now that I should probably publish as plugins. The first one is a change that I made last week that counts the number of images in a gallery. The second one returns a gallery thumbnail even if the first image in the gallery was removed, which i was having a hard time accomplishing with my last theme. And then that one for my archives.