Just because I thought it deserved its own post, here’s wishing all my readers a very Merry Christmas if I don’t speak to you individually otherwise.

Have a good one!

Firefox on the Mac is, well, it doesn’t always fit in quite as well with the Mac as it could – and it feels like that’s always been the case.

Firefox 3 is meant to start changing that, and making Firefox feel like a first class citizen on OS X. Having heard Jacob’s singing praise for the beta’s integration with GTK on Linux, I thought I’d download the Mac build and give it a try.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is real native buttons. Instead of Windows 95-style boxy buttons, native Mac buttons are now used, unless the website specifies specific button colours, in which case those colours and styles are used on the standard boxy buttons (exactly the same as Safari 3 now does).

There’s also a new theme available, called Proto. It doesn’t ship with the beta, but is linked to from the welcome page you get. And this is what it looks like:

» Read the rest of this post…

So I’m downloading the WebKit source code which I need for an upcoming FOSSwire tutorial. Downloading it from SVN is painfully slow, but then I can’t remember SVN checkouts ever having been that fast.

There’s another option to download – grabbing a .tar.bz2 of the latest nightly. Downloading that over HTTP is, guess what, also painfully slow.

The top speed this connection can do on download is around 250 Kbytes per second. It’s downloading at less than 10% of that capacity, with no other activity on the connection. Downloads from other sites run much faster. Now it might just be me, but I can’t help thinking Apple are either not putting enough resources into WebKit.org, or they’re deliberately degrading the download experience.

I hope for their sake it’s the former, and if so, come on Apple, put some resources into it! You wouldn’t have a base for Safari if it wasn’t for the open source community, so let’s be nice back shall we?

I finally had time to walk into an O2 store today and have a brief play with the iPhone.

And I’m pretty impressed. On a sidenote – I’ve decided to go for an iPod Touch, which is actually scheduled to arrive tomorrow, but since it’s a part Christmas present, it won’t be getting any usage for 42 days from today.

I was a little concerned about the iPhone keyboard, but even in about 10 minutes, I picked up how to use it and became pretty good and considerably quick for a small keyboard. Which is a good sign, as I’ll be getting used to it more on the Touch.

The applications all worked really well – the multi-touch interface is very well done and it feels very intuitive to just pick up and use. I mean, I would say that, as I tend to pick things up quickly anyway, but it did seem genuinely intuitive.

My only complaints from what I’ve seen about the device itself are the fingermarks on the screen (the demo iPhones there had seen a lot of fingers) and Safari occasionally rendering a little slowly on some pages. I can confirm, however, that my site looks just as it does in Safari on OS X on the iPhone. 🙂

Of course, my major complaint is the contract lock-in, which is why I’m getting the Touch and not the iPhone itself. It’s a shame, as Mail, SMS, Google Maps and the Phone functionality on the iPhone do look very nice.

Quick tip if you do walk into O2 or the Apple Store and play around – if you do log in to anything in Safari. and then just idly tap the Home button thinking you quit Safari, beware. Anyone who goes back on Safari will arrive at the page you were last – logged in and all. I’d recommend you log out explicitly from whatever sites you visit, close all pages with the bottom right icon in Safari and then clear History, Cache and Cookies in Settings from the home screen. Or, don’t log in to anything. 😛

I’m now going to have to resist the temptation to walk back into O2 during lunch breaks just to have another play! 😉

Out of curiosity, I wanted to know exactly how hot the Geforce 6600 GT in my desktop PC here was. Turns out, it idles about 52 Celsius (125 F).

Then, again, out of curiosity, I put it under some load, by running glxgears at full screen – 1600×1200. Turns out the GPU positively roasts at such a temperature.

83 C ~= 181 F.

Pretty hot.

I’m thinking. And thinking hard. I’m enticed by both the iPod Nano and the iPod Touch. I’m going to almost definitely buy one of them soon, but I’m not sure which one.

Yet.

So here’s an über brief list of advantages for both.

Nano:

• £70 cheaper for 8 GB.
• Smaller (good, but also easier to lose).
• Choice of colours.
• Still does video, Cover Flow (albeit not quite as well).
• More space because less complex OS, so more space for media.

Touch:

• Bigger – bigger screen.
• Awesome operating system, platform and interface.
• Wifi – Safari, YouTube; the real web wherever you can scrounge a connection. In your pocket.
• Cover Flow much smoother – interface much better than Nano.
• SDK coming soon means a platform for building apps on later?
• Boast factor – make everyone think you have an iPhone 😉

Of all of the new features in Leopard, Time Machine definitely looks one of the most significant and as a concept it looks pretty neat.

Over the last few days, I’ve put Time Machine into practice and I’d like to share my thoughts.

• The initial backup after you set it up is a pain. The entire system gets backed up (40 GB in my case, when I’d set it up) and you get an annoying progress window. It doesn’t quite happen in the same ‘in the background’ way it’s promised initially. The initial backup can’t be interrupted either – it’s a good thing it only has to be done once.
• Subsequent backups are completely automated, in the background and incremental. Provided you don’t shift around tons of data in the space of an hour while your drive is connected, there’s very little to back up each hour so it happens virtually instantaneously and you don’t notice it.
• The interface is very eye-candy-y and I think some of the effects can get in the way a little bit when you’re just trying to restore something. However, being able to use the full power of the Spotlight architecture inside your backups is pretty cool and is a real boon when trying to find a specific file from a specific backup.
• A little more configurability with regards to how much disk space Time Machine uses and retention policies would be nice. How it’s done right now does keep it simple, but how hard would it be to implement a slider as to how much of the drive to use. Right now, it means you have to re-partition the drive with a data partition too if you want to do so, as the backup partition is completely monopolised by Time Machine.
• The backups aren’t in some crazy proprietary format – they’re just the files copied to directories on the disk. It’s simple to restore files even without using the Time Machine interface and all your data is nice and accessible. That means if I have a major MacBook catastrophe, I can plug the backup drive into my Linux box, mount the HFS+ partition and copy my files. Interoperability for the win.
• Having backups completely automated is going to save me so much time and effort – and my backups wll be more up-to-date, should I ever have to use them (I haven’t yet on the MacBook).

So, overall – Time Machine is a really cool feature. If they add some more options to configure it just how I like it and maybe offer a toned down interface as well, it will be the most awesome desktop backup solution ever.

Thanks to the extremely hard work of Jacob (coding and architecture) and Chris (design), and not really me (I did keep posting though), FOSSwire has just relaunched!

Well, FOSSwire, we’ve had some ups and downs, but overall it’s been a good year. We now have quite a reader base compared to when we started.

But now isn’t the time for reminiscing. (really, never is the time.)

You may have noticed some changes around here. Did FOSSwire get a haircut? You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. But we did add several new features:

• Tabs: Now, instead of a bajillion categories, we now only have five, and they are shown as tabs at the top of the page. Who doesn’t like tabs?
• Tags: This is where the mass amounts of categories were thrown. We didn’t really know what to do with this new feature in WordPress 2.3, so we’re just using it as our new category home.
• The Metabar: Chris calls this the Ãœberbar. To each their own. The important thing is this is home to many more features, including:
  • GNOME vs KDE vs XFCE wars
  • FOSSwire Video: Yep, we finally support video. Expect many more posts to have this feature.
  • PkgBase Automatic Installers: This is what we were suggesting with this post. You can now enjoy a one-click style install feature for systems that support it. And for those that don’t, instructions are given.
  • Expertise Level: Know before you read a post how difficult it will be to do. Most commonly used in the Tips & Tutorials section.
• Post Ratings: For anything that can be reviewed, such as a software or game release, we can now assign a rating out of 10 to it.
• Caching: You won’t notice anything (other than comments being delayed) except for the site running a lot faster. We’re using a custom-built caching system that is by far faster than WP-Cache.

Those are most of the features, but we’ve made some cosmetic changes here and there. We think you’ll like it.

This relaunch marks one year of FOSSwire, and I’ve been extremely happy to be a founding contributor and hope we continue to enjoy as much success as we’ve had (and hopefully more)!

One year.

Wow.

It’s gone pretty quickly, and in the past year I’ve managed to push out 210 posts. It isn’t quite one a day, sadly, but still, I’m pretty happy with how much I’ve put into FOSSwire personally.

Of course, I must again point out that the overwhelming majority of the work for this new release was not done by me! I’m not taking credit at all – not until content I’ve produced arrives 😉 .

So, here’s to the next year!

So Leopard is here and it is very very nice. I haven’t had an awful lot of time to actually sit down and just play – it’s mostly copying stuff from my backup over, getting things running smoothly again. I will report back with thoughts later!

As you can see, Spotlight is furiously re-indexing all the stuff I just copied, so it is pegging my CPU (usually just one of the cores though, so it’s still snappy and responsive) and making it very very hot (see the menubar for the CPU core temperature)!

More Leopard stuff soon.

It’s taken me a little while to do some testing and making sure everything is all good – but my personal blog is now upgraded to WordPress 2.3.

WPGet is also upgraded to 0.7 as well – so I’m now actually using the latest version of my own software too!