Sarah Ward’s Blog

Apple have just announced the Safari 3 Public Beta at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Now I love my Apple products. I still love my old G4 even though it is now on it’s second power supply, and am I currently sat here typing away on my 6+ year old PowerBook even though the DVD drive is starting to really struggle. (I actually want to get a new Mac, but I keep changing my mind about which one but that’s another story…) And I think my Apple Video was one of the best products I’ve ever been given for a Birthday present. I use it all the time at home connected direct to the TV to watch video podcasts PixelPerfect and Diggnation (both Revision3 productions). Oh hang on I am digressing here a bit… but basically I am a fan of the Mac.

So I guess it was expected, with the move over to Intel, and iTunes successfully moving over to the PC (and well Windows media player sucks so why wouldn’t it). But I’m a bit worried that it may not be that successful or at least not gain the market share they hope. Firstly, it is known amongst some developers that the fastest browser on the Mac at the moment is Camino. Safari and Firefox just doesn’t seem to be as fast. Yes, standards compliance is important, but if something takes for ever for some JavaScript to run, you ain’t going to hang around. However notice that they don’t even list that it the comparison charts. You can’t even download this Beta unless you have upgraded to the latest OSX either which also sucks. (A problem we have in the office at the moment as we are still stuck on OSX 10.2.)

But I think what is really ironic is that the screenshots of Safari they have on the Apple.com website is displaying Yahoo. Now as a Mac user I know I can’t view Yahoo Mail Beta in any other Browser but Firefox (and some other weird one I’ve never heard of). Hoping this might have changed I have downloaded the Beta and tried again, but no we are still not allowed in. I will assume this will be the case for those on PC too. So why would anyone change from a great browser that is Firefox, and well if you’re using Internet Explorer, do the right thing you know you want to, and switch over to Firefox, if you can’t even check your Yahoo email. Come on Apple and Yahoo, I think it’s time you resolved this issue.

I just looked at the contact page. It was looking a bit more of a mess than it was before, so let’s go back to the default look until I think of something better! Yes, I know. I am fickle.

Well that was relatively painless, apart from trying to find one I really, really liked. I have managed to settle with this one I found on the WordPress Themes website. I have a green box on the right there with nothing in it. Not sure what that’s for yet. And the heading is a bit hidden by the background, but it’s close to the kind of thing I like. I will probably get around to fixing those small things myself in time, or maybe it will encourage me to actually get on with my own design.

Ok its not pretty yet, but I have added a contact form, so that in the unlikely event you want to contact me you can send me a message. It’s all working right now, just needs a little tidy up that I will l do at some point later.

Just thought that if anyone is interested in how this is implemented it uses the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0WP for WordPress plugin.

Ah ha world. I have finally installed WordPress after removing my old installation. Obviously it took me a couple of attempts to get it working, and don’t do what I did and forget to rename the sample config file. It’s not clever and it’s not funny.

Anyway, here it is my latest attempt to write and hopefully update my own blog. I have lots of things I’d like to write about but never seem to have the time to type it all up, so we will see what happens. Sorry for the unexciting look to the pages. I did a design last year but never followed it up. Who knows we might see it again at some point. In the mean time I may find a WordPress theme to go with.

Well, must get on… This being my first post, I have a lot more I still need to do.

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