| Tuesday, June 8, 2010 |
05:40 - Oh hells yeah
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Of yesterday's Apple announcements, none is more welcome to me than Safari 5. If for no other reason than this:
They've gone back to the old progress bar! Wooooo!
Now it matches the behavior they've stubbornly—and rightly—stuck to for the iPhone and iPad, and gives you visual feedback of the amount of loading progress, unlike the strange and crippled slate-gray button-spinner thing of Safari 4:
But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that the blue progress bar that fills up the address field from left to right—as we've been accustomed for so long—is still, and seemingly forever, gone. Apple doesn't seem to want us seeing an activity indicator that shows actual progress anymore; they'll give us a little spinner, sure, but no more progress bar. And never mind that Safari on the iPhone still has the blue progress bar; now it's just there to mock us on the desktop, who now have to pretend it's 1995 again with the functional equivalent of the Pulsing Breathing Blue N in the upper right corner of our Netscape window.
But that's okay; they'll probably helpfully get rid of the progress bar in Safari for iPhone OS 3.0.
It's nice to be wrong sometimes.
Of the other features that are new, the Reader mode looks quite pretty—it's like a little piece of iBooks in a desktop browser. I may find myself using it from time to time, just because the affordance of switching from full-page mode to reader mode and back is so lightweight and unobtrusive and pleasant.
I'll be looking forward to trying out the new HTML5 hotnesses. The new Firefox-esque location bar is rich and meaty and feels far faster and more graceful than Firefox's. Bing is now officially invited to the party, signalling that Apple views Google as a bigger threat than Microsoft these days. And geolocation should be fun.
And oh yeah, the new iPhone looks pretty cool too. Hey, gyroscope! And a high-res screen with pixel doubling. Woo again!
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Brian Tiemann
