Software and Technology Ramblings

Just a quick note on a surprising feature of Apple Mail and iCal. After I upgraded to Leopard, I noted that some items in my email (addresses, dates, times, etc) had contextual menus appear when you rolled over them. The menus let you create a contact or an iCal event from the data in the email. But, again, Apple surprises with attention to the smallest details. For example, I was emailed this simple confirmation for an upcoming meeting:







When I rolled over the 6:00, the menu appeared and selected Create New iCal Event…. A little pop-up appeared and I began filling it out. When I went to choose the date, to my surprise, it was already selected:







It scoped out the rest of the message to find the mention of Thursday to select the 20th.

The ability to add an iCal event from an email message isn’t what makes a Mac fantastic. It’s the fact that the functionality does not get in your way and when you choose to use the feature, it works as you’d expect… and better.

It’s amazing what losing an entire blog posting will do for brevity of your next (replacement) post.

 I had several thoughts on Windows for Safari before IE helped me get rid of them.  So, instead of well-formed thoughts, I’m bringing out the bullets:

• I get it.  I understand why Apple decided to do this
• It has to with the user experience for Safari users.  The more people (like QA people and web developers) that can get their hands on Safari the fewer incompatibilities that will exist.
• Apple is about to add 4 million Safari users (who knows how long this will take, but that’s how many iPhones are being made in the first push).
• Safari is the iPhone’s gateway to the world.  The better a website works in Safari, the more pleasant the iPhone experience
• Safari is the iPhones software platform for 3rd parties.  This isn’t as important to me (as it relates to releasing Windows Safari).  3rd Party iPhone developers would have found a way to develop for Safari.  There will be far fewer 3rd Party apps that are as important to iPhone users as there are websites that are important to iPhone users.  These are websites that these (lucky) people use every day and will expect to run well on their iPhone

So, that’s nice and all, but how well does it work?

 Really, very, super fast.  I didn’t try many sites, in fact, I only tried PositiveWare.  But there is a lot of AJAX going on in PositiveWare and there are cases where I’m waiting for IE to run the JavaScript.

 In browsing to the Project Manager for one of PositiveWare’s best clients, here are my click-to-load times (using an iPod):

• Windows Safari: 3.48s, 3.47s
• Windows IE: 21.1s, 20.8s

In the Project Manager still, clicking Contract All and then Expand All on the same Project Tree used in the previous test

• Windows Safari: 3.6s, 3.34s
• Windows IE: 14.7s, 14.32s

Tests were run on a Mac Mini, running XP via Boot Camp. 

Can’t wait to try Safari 3 in Mac OS X!