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! 😉

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.

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.

So I’m officially ready for Leopard.

The entire Macintosh HD volume has been backed up (60 GB of sparseimage!) and frozen (I’m not touching it in terms of saving anything important) and I’m ready for my shiny Leopard disc to arrive to do an erase & install and then copy selectively the good stuff back.

Now we just hope UPS decide to deliver it tomorrow morning not evening (or worse, later than tomorrow!). Go on UPS, make me happy.

The question is – do I venture to Southampton to buy it from the Apple Store proper, or do I buy it online and get it shipped to my door?

Considering I’ve never bought anything in a real physical Apple retail store yet, I’m tempted to head down there if I can and go pick up a copy in person. Either way, Leopard looks pretty cool and I’m definitely interested in grabbing a copy for my over-6-month-old MacBook. :O

UPDATE: I pre-ordered it yesterday. Should be here on release day apparently.

Unfortunately… there’s no way I’m getting one.

It’s an awesome device with some amazing features and some really really nice applications, but I’m not going to get one. Primarily my reason is I don’t spend anywhere near £35 a month on my phone (and I couldn’t afford to right now anyway). The minimum O2 contract length is 18 months at a minimum of £35 a month.

Let’s do a little maths – £35 * 18 is £630. Plus £269 for the device itself. That’s a grand total of £899. Minimum spend.

Sorry, no iPhone unboxing photos from me, I’m afraid.

If you’re like me and open Terminal.app quickly under Mac OS X to do something, but then want to open your working directory in the Finder (perhaps to drag something to another location or just see the current directory graphically), I found a really neat trick.

The simple command:

open .

Will open the current directory in the Finder. Very useful for me anyway.

With Apple just having released Safari for Windows and people wondering exactly why, I wanted to put out my thoughts on Gecko versus WebKit. I may well be wrong on some of the technical and historical points here, I’m just going on what my understanding is and my opinion on the two engines. Please do correct me in the comments, I’m sure I’ve made some mistake somewhere. I just want to put out my opinion on this.

At the moment, Gecko has the edge in terms of compatibility. There are only few sites that do not render properly in it, and it does very well as a rendering engine.

The problem is – Gecko was designed for Netscape 6 for Windows. Netscape 6 was a complete disaster, but the Gecko rendering engine survived and made it to where it is today.

Unfortunately, it still carries around baggage from those NS6 days. Gecko wasn’t really built for what it is doing today (although it is doing a pretty damn good job at it). Add to that the complexity of some of the architecture like XPCOM and XUL, Gecko starts to look quite heavyweight.

XPCOM adds a lot of code for marshalling objects between different usage contexts (eg. different languages). This leads to code bloat in XPCOM based systems. This was one of the reasons why Apple chose KHTML over the XPCOM-based Gecko rendering engine for their Web Browser[3]. Source

Apple chose to fork KHTML and built WebKit over implementing Gecko because they saw the value of KHTML being light, speedy, developed from the ground up for these things. In the long term, WebKit’s architecture is probably a better choice for Apple.

Do you really want to carry around Netscape 6 on your iPhone?

As far as compatibility goes, I think things will only get better now that Safari runs on Windows.

As much as I love Gecko, use Firefox, advocate Firefox and will continue to use it in the future, I think Apple made and are making the right decisions with WebKit and the Safari platform.

Just my £0.02.