d00dism

I’m indecisive about my browser on my Macs (the choice is easy for PCs, Firefox all the way). Pre Safari and Firefox, the choice was easy. Camino (formerly Chimera) was the end all for Mac browsers. Now my choice switches between Firefox and Safari. Firefox is fast most of the time, but after some use seems to slow down. Safari is fairly fast, but tends to have pregnant pauses when connecting to servers (or at least this is what the status bar tells me).

Making Firefox More like Safari

After fighting it for a long time, I went to Firefox. There were several things that bugged the crap out of me that I made acceptable with the help of some other pieces of software. The first is the lack of bookmark syncing. Safari’s implementation is simply so beautiful and transparent that it makes it hard to go back. The other problem was the default widgets that Firefox draws. It doesn’t even try to use native buttons, and as such, very boring, ugly, utilitarian buttons are drawn that simply do not fit. Two products mostly solved this for me.

• Bookmarks Synchronizer lets you sync your bookmarks via FTP.
• Kevin Gerich’s Pretty Widgets lets you have widgets that look pretty good. This is most easily applied with Firefoxy.

However, the bookmarks synchonizer doesn’t allow for syncing based on intervals of time (instead relying on manual sync and program start and termination). It’s possible to loose bookmarks as it doesn’t handle changes from multiple locations at relatively similar times gracefully. It’s still mostly a kludge solution. As for the Pretty Widgets, they tend to mess up in some situations, making the buttons disappear all together. This happens on my WordPress blog’s configuration screen. You can still click the buttons, but you have to know they are there to begin with.

Making Safari More like Firefox

Part of my problem with Safari (beyond the fact that it refuses to respect stylized elements) was that things seemed to load slowly. I traced some of this back to Mike Solomon’s PithHelmet, which is just about as good as Firefox’s AdBlock. It’s better in some respects, worse in others. Mike started working on performance, forcing me to reevaluate Safari again. Its bookmark syncing is compelling, as is just how damn pretty it makes all pages look. After some time, I’ve found the three pieces of software that makes Safari good enough for now.

• The new 2.2 beta of PithHelmet has made incredible strides in improving load times and gives me my beloved Machete back.
• acidsearch gives you multiple search channels (a la Firefox) and Find As You Type (AKA Type Ahead Find). It’s free too.
• CocoaGestures gives me back my gestures, which improve web surfing ease ten fold once you start to learn it. Hold down a mouse button, move the mouse in a specified way and you invoke a command. It’s best experienced. They also have a new (for pay) product that looks compelling, but offers more than I’m looking for.

These three products get Safari pretty damn close to what I like. However, Safari still has some very annoying rendering bugs (such as drawing stuff all over the screen in Gmail), but I can live with those until either Safari 1.3 is released (please?) or Tiger and Safari 2.0 grace my Macs.

To follow up on my old post, Brad Oliver has posted a new beta build of the Knights of the Old Republic game. Of particular note is that even in its current rough form, users with Radeon 8500, 9000 or 9200 cards will see double framerates. However, in some cases, this is doubling 2-3 frames per second to 6-7 FPS. I’ll probably just keep playing with my Powerbook, although the initial problems have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I haven’t returned to the game since discovering that fact.

Two Saturday games. Yay!

• Pittsburgh vs. N.Y. Giants
• Washington vs. San Fransisco
• Carolina vs. Atlanta
• Buffalo vs. Cincinnati
• Dallas vs. Philadelphia
• Denver vs. Kansas City
• Houston vs. Chicago
• Minnesota vs. Detroit
• San Diego vs. Cleveland
• Seattle vs. N.Y. Jets
• New Orleans vs. Tampa Bay
• St. Louis vs. Arizona
• Jacksonville vs. Green Bay
• Tennessee vs. Oakland
• Baltimore vs. Indianapolis
• New England vs. Miami

Fire up software update or download the delta or combo installers. The enhancements, straight from Apple are:

Applications

• Allows TextEdit to open certain RTF documents that previously wouldn’t open, resulting in a “TextEdit Open Failed. Couldn’t open file” alert.
• Resolves an issue in which Safari, Mail, and other networking applications that use DNS lookups could experience intermittent connectivity issues with Security Update 2004-09-30 and Mac OS X 10.3.5 or later installed.
• Addresses an issue with Blizzard World of Warcraft in which the game’s frame rate could drop considerably when in “Ghost mode,” if the computer uses an nVidia graphics card.
• Resolves an issue in which enabling Vertex Shaders in World of Warcraft could lead to unexpected graphics issues when using an nVidia graphics card.
• Addresses an issue with World of Warcraft in which incorrect colors or unexpectedly flashing objects could appear when using an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card, making gameplay difficult.
• Improves compatibility for Pacific Tech’s Graphing Calculator 3.5—some 3D surfaces might not render in Mac OS X 10.3.6.

Other

• Addresses an issue in which a brief “flash of lines” may appear on the screen when waking the computer from sleep after the “Flurry” Screen Saver has run, if the computer uses an ATI Radeon 8500, 9000, 9200, 9600, or M9 graphics chip.
• Improves compatibility for FireWire-based audio interfaces, including the Edirol FA-101 FireWire audio interface.
• Enables E*TRADE PDF account statements to be viewed in Preview.
• An Apple Cinema 22″ ADC display, when connected to certain PowerBook computers, no longer shows random “stuttering” or other graphics anomalies in the Finder and DVD Player.
• Addresses an issue in which shadowed text in a PDF file may print differently than it appears on the screen when printing to a raster printer.
• Filenames longer than 31 characters are no longer shortened when the file is saved on a server via Apple File Sharing.
• Resolves an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.6 in which some FireWire hard drives would not appear (”mount”) on the desktop.
• Addresses an issue with Mac OS X 10.3.6 in which DVD Player might not open on some Power Mac G4 computers that use an ATI Radeon 9800 AGP video card.
• Resolves an issue that prevented printing to some Windows-based print servers.

Following my post about Netflix, a new story about Blockbuster came to my attention. Blockbuster has announced that it will no longer charge late fees, or at least that’s how everyone is reporting the policy change. Putting it this way is a little misleading.

They are using this necessary change to their business model as a way to promote their own business. The growing popularity of Netflix (and even their own similar service) has demonstrated a strong consumer interest in being able to retain videos for an extended amount of time. Getting burnt by late fees once or twice is enough to drive any consumer to another system. Additionally, the way in which late fees were assessed made little sense. My roommate in college rented a movie and didn’t return it for three weeks. When he finally went to return it, they charged him in excess of $20. This is obviously more than the video cost to begin with and he didn’t even get to keep it. The fees weren’t based upon what it would cost to replace the copy of that movie, but instead based upon the amount of profit lost due to being unable to rent it to another member. Obviously, this was a broken system.

In order to add their own spin, Blockbuster supplied revenue numbers for their late fees. Late fees earned them appoximately $300 million. What is missing about this information is its relevance to the situation. That money shouldn’t be counted separately from its rental fee income as it is meant as compensation for that to begin with.

The new policy doesn’t change “due dates” for movies, but instead institutes a week long “grace period”. Let’s examine that a little further. You are entitled to keep that movie until the due date by virtue of paying your rental fee. If you can not return that video by the proposed date, you are allowed to keep it up to a week longer at no penalty. Because there is no penalty, the “due date” loses all significance. It is nothing more than a suggested return date. The real due date becomes the end of the grace period. It’s not going to take more than a month for consumers to figure that out.

The second part of their new policy is that following that week long grace period, you are not charged a “late fee” but you are charged that remaining cost of the video and it becomes yours. At least they recognized the problem with the old system. However, that charge is a fee and it’s assessed if you keep the video later than the grace period allows. How is this not a late fee? Well, the only functional difference is that you get to keep the movie. It is still a late fee. A change of nomenclature doesn’t mean that you’ve actually elimintated late fees. They’re just collecting them in a different way.

The next question is what if the renter doesn’t want to pay the (probably inflated) price for the movie. Blockbuster has you covered there too. Customers whom keep movies beyond the grace period may recoup that money by returning it within 30 days. The catch here is that you will be charged “restocking fees”. There is no functional difference between late fees and restocking fees. In both cases, you are paying money for keeping the movie too long and you don’t get to keep it afterward.

Is Blockbuster eliminating late fees? Not really. They’re eliminating it by changing the nomenclature. They can now advertise “No Late Fees” both in stores and on television. The sad thing is some people will be taken in by this and buy it hook, line, and sinker.