Ken Bereskin's Radio Weblog

Sun, 26 Oct 2003 03:05:34 GMT

Panther weblog I know that no posts since April is a little sad (ok - a lot sad). May 2003 was the time that I started to focus most of my attention on Panther and it was hard to talk about Jaguar. Given that I couldn't talk about the new cat, silence prevailed. I'm definitely going to talk about Panther and share some insights and tour throught the cool and subtle features in this release. I've recently started using the TypePad service and will do all of my postings from there. The new blog can be found here. Thanks for all the emails encouraging me to keep up the blog.

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 18:22:41 GMT

Safari Beta 2 is now available and looks like the new features have been really well received. If you haven't tried it out yet, be sure to check out the new tabbed browsing and autofill forms features. These were without question, the top two requests that we heard from the very enthusiastic Safari community.

To get Safari Beta 2, either check your Software Update preference panel, it will upgrade your existing copy. If you want to download it again, no problem, just head to the Safari website here.

I'll talk about some of the new features later, but first and I want to highlight that both the Wells Fargo Online site and the new Macromedia.com site now welcome Safari users.

Sat, 12 Apr 2003 06:20:41 GMT

Be sure to check your Software Update. Mac OS X v10.2.5 is now available and there are a lot of improvements in this update. Here are some of the highlights from my perspective (in addition to the normal fixes for application reliability and addressing key issues reported by customers). Digital Hub peripherals. More Bluetooth devices, disc burners and digital cameras are now supported. Networking. A host of improvements for dialup, DSL/cable modem, LDAP and .Mac users. Security updates. As always, the latest security improvements are rolled in to system updates

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:46:29 GMT

Safari certainly has been a huge hit with Mac users around the world and we are very appreciative about the support, enthusiasm and feedback from everyone. While most of the great features are pretty obvious - performance, Goggle search, SnapBack and bookmark collection to name a few, there's one subtle but extremely important feature that is worth describing further.

Simplifying the download experience was a top goal of Safari. Downloading should be as simple as clicking a link and in most cases, there should be no need to launch helper applications or answer bizarre questions on where and how to download, etc. People shouldn't need to know about different encoding, archiving and compression formats.

To accomplish this, Safari works in concert with "Internet-Enabled Disk Image" technology introduced in Mac OS X v10.2.3. An internet-enabled disk image is one that can clean up after it is downloaded. For example, if you have a Mac OS X application packaged as a single icon, stored in one of these disk images, all you need to do is download it in Safari and the image will be downloaded, decompressed, and the application package will be copied out of the disk image and placed in your default download folder (usually your desktop). The disk image is automatically mounted, unmounted and put in the trash.

If the disk image includes an installer package, you will be prompted that the download requires installation at which point you can continue and the Apple Installer will be invoked (we don't run downloaded apps directly ever).

The net result is very simple. Click a download link and if the download image is Internet-enabled, you'll be left with the very thing you wanted to download exactly where you expect without having to answer a bunch of questions or crumbs of temporary files left all over the place.

Creating an Internet-Enabled Disk Image is very simple. A detailed technote can be found here. There's a command line utility called hdiutil that has options to set the flags to make one of these images and we hope and expect that all Mac downloads will embrace this new format, simplifying downloads for everyone on the Mac.

Wed, 09 Apr 2003 06:52:45 GMT

DiskCopy has a number of great features, some of them I've talked about in this weblog. One feature that is very handy is that you can create an optimally sized image simply by dragging a folder to the Disk Copy application icon. You don't have to guess at the size of the image as Disk Copy will work that out for you, even for compressed images. If you have Disk Copy in your dock for example, just drag a folder to the icon and you'll be presented with the Disk Copy dialog allowing you to name the image and specify if it should be compressed and / or encrytped.

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 14:54:13 GMT

As you know, Safari includes integrated Google search right in the toolbar. Just type in your search, press return and you are taken directly to the Google results. Coupled with SnapBack (that orange icon that appears after clicking a search result page), this is a very convenient way to browse and search the web.

On the Google front, Safari supports a contextual menu with "Google Search" to search based on text that you find on a page itself. Just select the text you want to search on and ctrl-click (or press the right mouse button on multi-button mice) the selection. Choose "Google Search" and you you are taken directly to the results page.

Thu, 03 Apr 2003 14:35:19 GMT

A simple tip to jump start things. Many people have asked recently if there's a convienient way to hide all application windows and get to the desktop. One simple way to do that is to hold down the Option and Command (Apple) keys and click the desktop. This is a short cut to activate the Finder and hide all windows of running applications.