Favorite Files

No favorite files added yet

Recent Posts

1. Comment - Apple appeals $625.5 million patent verdict over use of Cover Flow

   (Oct 4, 2010 - 6:18 PM)

   I'm no particular fan of Apple or its business practices and I think -- to a certain, real extent -- Apple may be, in part, reaping what it has sewn in the past, in terms of dubious intellectual property infringement suits launched against others -- but, nonetheless, I can't help but see this as one more example of a Patent Office that doesn't understand technology and is far too quick to issue patents of questionable merit, and of juries that are ill-equipped to sort out either legal or technical issues and in the grasp of a credulity seemingly as bottomless as the deep pockets they seem to imagine they are about to dip into on behalf of imagined underdogs -- entities, however, that all too often are revealed to be patent-squatting speculators.

2. Comment - Apple introduces Safari 3.1, with some HTML 5 support

   (Mar 18, 2008 - 4:07 PM)

   I vaguely recall some of the speed claims for the initial release of Safari for Windows.
   
   Like the purported speed advantage of Firefox (which is my favored browser), much of that "competitive speed" comes from over-aggressive caching that causes the browser to miss changed content at times.
   
   However, with caching turned off, Safari Win was the slowest of the three browsers on my machine. In fact, with caching turned all the way off, rendering was so slow as to be unusable.
   
   Kudos to Apple for relatively good support for web standards so far -- and I'm definitely glad to be able to test the pages I develop in Safari, since the Mac version seems to amount for around 5% of int'l browser share. But using Safari for Windows even a little helps suggest why the Safari Windows int'l share is a negligible .07%.
   
   (I also believe a big damper on adoption of Safari by Windows users is that Safari 3 for Windows came with a very, heavy, dark, and "smudgy" default font view, more suitable to the gamma level used by the Mac's Aqua graphic interface. But even with the fonts optimized for Window's darker gamma, Apple style fonts simply don't look nearly as clean or sharp to most Windows users.)