the New York Times is piloting their paywall system in Canada. I thought I’d click around the website until it got triggered. Eventually, I got a warning pop-in, saying I had only one article left. Click. You must subscribe to see more.
I don’t actually have a problem with their paywall model. It’s their newspaper. It’s their content. It’s their website. They can do what they want. But, it was a ridiculously trivial process to thwart the paywall and regain full access to the NYTimes without subscribing. A couple of CSS overrides, and a javascript toggle.
I have no intention of leaving my blockerblocker in place. It works fine, but I don’t really have much use for full access to the NYTimes website. As others pointed out, it’s also trivially possible to bypass the paywall by enabling “private browsing” mode in a browser. Not an impressive way to design the “drm” to base the fortunes of a multimillion dollar news enterprise on.
I’ve been waffling back and forth between Safari and Firefox over the last few months. The flexibility of Firefox keeps drawing me close, like a moth to a flame, only to be burned because it doesn’t “feel” right. Safari does. I’ve been slowly adding Themes and Extensions to make Firefox start to look/behave better, and it’s close. Darned close.
The thing that might push it over the threshold for me was the addition of the All-in-One Mouse Gestures extension, which combines a bunch of stuff (including Mouse Gestures) into one nice package. In Safari (and every other Cocoa app on my system) I’ve been using CocoaGestures to add powerful mouse gestures to tasks like tab switching, closing tabs, etc… But on Firefox, I had to keep reverting to the keyboard (or moving the mouse to select a tab – much more efficient to just flick the mouse and have that motion translated…) Heck, I haven’t even found a keyboard combo to switch tabs in Firefox yet…
The last two things that Safari rocks at are the integrated spel cheker, a handy key combo to put the text focus in the Google search field in the toolbar. I’ve tried the Firefox spell checker extension, with no luk.
I’ve been waffling back and forth between Safari and Firefox over the last few months. The flexibility of Firefox keeps drawing me close, like a moth to a flame, only to be burned because it doesn’t “feel” right. Safari does. I’ve been slowly adding Themes and Extensions to make Firefox start to look/behave better, and it’s close. Darned close.
The thing that might push it over the threshold for me was the addition of the All-in-One Mouse Gestures extension, which combines a bunch of stuff (including Mouse Gestures) into one nice package. In Safari (and every other Cocoa app on my system) I’ve been using CocoaGestures to add powerful mouse gestures to tasks like tab switching, closing tabs, etc… But on Firefox, I had to keep reverting to the keyboard (or moving the mouse to select a tab – much more efficient to just flick the mouse and have that motion translated…) Heck, I haven’t even found a keyboard combo to switch tabs in Firefox yet…
The last two things that Safari rocks at are the integrated spel cheker, a handy key combo to put the text focus in the Google search field in the toolbar. I’ve tried the Firefox spell checker extension, with no luk.
Dave Hyatt Tim Hatcher announced last night that the latest nightly builds of Safari now include a new tool for web developers to view DOM and CSS elements/attributes on a web page. I tried it last night, and it’s excellent – even better than the one built into Firefox. You just right-click anywhere on a page, and a contextual menu item will let you “Inspect Element”. This is perhaps more intuitive than Firefox’s “enter a new mode, then click somewhere on the inspected page” method of visually selecting an element to inspect.
Here’s a screenshot of the fancy new inspector, being used to debug a CSS problem I was having with the text in the header of my blog:
Update: I spaced on the author of the post. I guess I still think of the WebKit blog as Dave’s old Surfin’ Safari blog. It ain’t, and there are multiple authors on the new WebKit blog. Oops.
Dave Hyatt Tim Hatcher announced last night that the latest nightly builds of Safari now include a new tool for web developers to view DOM and CSS elements/attributes on a web page. I tried it last night, and it’s excellent – even better than the one built into Firefox. You just right-click anywhere on a page, and a contextual menu item will let you “Inspect Element”. This is perhaps more intuitive than Firefox’s “enter a new mode, then click somewhere on the inspected page” method of visually selecting an element to inspect.
Here’s a screenshot of the fancy new inspector, being used to debug a CSS problem I was having with the text in the header of my blog:
Update: I spaced on the author of the post. I guess I still think of the WebKit blog as Dave’s old Surfin’ Safari blog. It ain’t, and there are multiple authors on the new WebKit blog. Oops.
When I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.0 RC3 last week, there was a bug or issue that corrupted a cookie used by the fancy schmancy new authoring screens. Safari barfed all over that corrupt cookie, meaning I couldn’t use it to manage my blog. Firefox just ignored it (and the functionality that required that cookie apparently degraded transparently – the widgets were no longer collapsable or movable).
So, I thought it would be a good chance to switch to Firefox 1.5 for a while and kick the tires a bit as my primary (only) browser.
Things I like about Firefox:
- Fancy schmancy wysiwyg and “ajax” crap all just works.
- Websites don’t try to protect me from myself by warning me that I’m using Safari
- The del.icio.us extension makes creating bookmarks better (but not hugely better than the bookmarklet)
- The great “Web Developer” sidebar, with the cool stuff like cookie inspectors. Many of these tools are reproducable via bookmarklets, but it’s nice to have a unified place to get them all.
Things I don’t like so much:
- NO. SPEL. CHEKER. I tried installing the recommended extension, but it never worked. And wouldn’t have been integrated with the OS-level dictionary I use in every other app on my Powerbook. It’s really uncomfortable typing away, and not being able to know at a glance, or via peripheral vision, if I’d made a typo or a stupid spelling attempt (I rarely get words with more than 3 letters right on the first shot…)
- No Cocoa UI widgets – they’re available in Camino, and are apparently planned for Firefox 3.0 (official plan), but the XUL widgets suck badly, compared to the great ones that are provided by Cocoa. Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way.
- Feels like it is quite a bit slower than Safari. Speed is good.
- Text rendering sucks badly as well. Compare pages to what they look like in Safari. Just simply not as good. And Firefox doesn’t support the CSS dropshadow – meaning my blog’s banner text looks worse in Firefox 😉
- Page load progress indicator – the simple spinning “working…” indicator just ain’t enough. There’s an extension to get more info, including a progress thermometer, but nothing comes close to Safari’s elegant thermometer-beneath-the-location-field implementation.
When I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.0 RC3 last week, there was a bug or issue that corrupted a cookie used by the fancy schmancy new authoring screens. Safari barfed all over that corrupt cookie, meaning I couldn’t use it to manage my blog. Firefox just ignored it (and the functionality that required that cookie apparently degraded transparently – the widgets were no longer collapsable or movable).
So, I thought it would be a good chance to switch to Firefox 1.5 for a while and kick the tires a bit as my primary (only) browser.
Things I like about Firefox:
- Fancy schmancy wysiwyg and “ajax” crap all just works.
- Websites don’t try to protect me from myself by warning me that I’m using Safari
- The del.icio.us extension makes creating bookmarks better (but not hugely better than the bookmarklet)
- The great “Web Developer” sidebar, with the cool stuff like cookie inspectors. Many of these tools are reproducable via bookmarklets, but it’s nice to have a unified place to get them all.
Things I don’t like so much:
- NO. SPEL. CHEKER. I tried installing the recommended extension, but it never worked. And wouldn’t have been integrated with the OS-level dictionary I use in every other app on my Powerbook. It’s really uncomfortable typing away, and not being able to know at a glance, or via peripheral vision, if I’d made a typo or a stupid spelling attempt (I rarely get words with more than 3 letters right on the first shot…)
- No Cocoa UI widgets – they’re available in Camino, and are apparently planned for Firefox 3.0 (official plan), but the XUL widgets suck badly, compared to the great ones that are provided by Cocoa. Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way.
- Feels like it is quite a bit slower than Safari. Speed is good.
- Text rendering sucks badly as well. Compare pages to what they look like in Safari. Just simply not as good. And Firefox doesn’t support the CSS dropshadow – meaning my blog’s banner text looks worse in Firefox 😉
- Page load progress indicator – the simple spinning “working…” indicator just ain’t enough. There’s an extension to get more info, including a progress thermometer, but nothing comes close to Safari’s elegant thermometer-beneath-the-location-field implementation.
I tried. I really tried to use Firefox as my default browser. I was kind of enjoying it, but kept finding myself tripping over stuff like a UI that doesn’t respond the way a native MacOSX app should, and a browser that was rather prone to locking up (although pages rendered quickly). Key commands that were quirky and decidedly non-Macish. Mouse buttons didn’t respond as expected (even my multibutton mouse with scrollwheel behaved more reliably under Safari than Firefox).
It felt like Firefox would be just as comfortable running on an X11 server as on my Mac – but that glosses over the nicenesses of the Mac UI. It just got to be too much. I think the only thing I’ll really miss (although that might be stretching it a little) is the WYSIWYG editor support. If I ever really need that, then Firefox is a short command+space Firefox away…
Also, I realized that Safari (with Stand and a few bookmarklets installed) offers about the same functionality in a nice, fast, clean app. I’ll keep Firefox around for testing and debugging stuff, but will be using Safari as my default browser. Or, perhaps, a recent beta of OmniWeb… Damned novelty addiction!
I tried. I really tried to use Firefox as my default browser. I was kind of enjoying it, but kept finding myself tripping over stuff like a UI that doesn’t respond the way a native MacOSX app should, and a browser that was rather prone to locking up (although pages rendered quickly). Key commands that were quirky and decidedly non-Macish. Mouse buttons didn’t respond as expected (even my multibutton mouse with scrollwheel behaved more reliably under Safari than Firefox).
It felt like Firefox would be just as comfortable running on an X11 server as on my Mac – but that glosses over the nicenesses of the Mac UI. It just got to be too much. I think the only thing I’ll really miss (although that might be stretching it a little) is the WYSIWYG editor support. If I ever really need that, then Firefox is a short command+space Firefox away…
Also, I realized that Safari (with Stand and a few bookmarklets installed) offers about the same functionality in a nice, fast, clean app. I’ll keep Firefox around for testing and debugging stuff, but will be using Safari as my default browser. Or, perhaps, a recent beta of OmniWeb… Damned novelty addiction!
Holy CRAP that’s annoying. I have Safari running on both computers pretty much 100% of the time. My Powerbook’s copy is set to use RSS, and to update feeds automatically. I’d noticed earlier this morning that my subscriptions were holding almost 30,000 items. I thought to myself “Hey, that’s cool! Usually, it corrupts and resets itself to a fresh database at around 20,000 items. I guess that problem’s been fixed somehow.”
Nope. Safari just decided to nuke my items database and start from scratch. All of my subscriptions are safely in my bookmarks file, but the items (and read state) were nuked for all of them. Now, Safari is re-downloading every one of my nearly 500 feeds, and dutifully marking each item as “unread”. What a waste of time THAT is. I might be switching back to NNW yet again. Perhaps I’ll try Vienna or Shrook for a while…
Holy CRAP that’s annoying. I have Safari running on both computers pretty much 100% of the time. My Powerbook’s copy is set to use RSS, and to update feeds automatically. I’d noticed earlier this morning that my subscriptions were holding almost 30,000 items. I thought to myself “Hey, that’s cool! Usually, it corrupts and resets itself to a fresh database at around 20,000 items. I guess that problem’s been fixed somehow.”
Nope. Safari just decided to nuke my items database and start from scratch. All of my subscriptions are safely in my bookmarks file, but the items (and read state) were nuked for all of them. Now, Safari is re-downloading every one of my nearly 500 feeds, and dutifully marking each item as “unread”. What a waste of time THAT is. I might be switching back to NNW yet again. Perhaps I’ll try Vienna or Shrook for a while…
So, after switching to Safari RSS for a couple of months, and really liking the simple (i.e., nonexistent) interface and unified display, I finally got fed up with the quirks in the Safari implementation. Sometimes it would take 15 minutes for a large feed set to display, pegging the CPU at 100% for the whole time (this was most obvious when viewing my Flickr feeds, which could have 500 images, each of which are downloaded apparently simultaneously).
Also, the filter/sorting options are just plain incomplete. Without a “show only new items” option, it’s a real pain in the ass to view new items. Either you have to set it to show a whole bunch of items, and sort the newest items to the top, to ensure viewing all new items, or you narrow the display and have to iterate over various subgroupings or filterings with the “New” sort option selected. Please, fix this… Add a “New items only” option, that would do what it said (and, items wouldn’t disappear from the display as they are “read” – they would simply be marked as read, and disappear the next time the display is refreshed).
So, after running the handy dandy Safari feeds to OPML export script, I’m back in NetNewsWire. It’s a really great app, but I already miss the Safari unified display (warts and all) – the “Combined View” layout in NNW just isn’t the same. I’ll give it a week or two to see if I can get my head back into NNW-think.
Meanwhile, this is what greeted me in NNW after running the import-from-OPML process, and updating all feeds:
Update: I went screaming back to Safari RSS less than 24 hours after trying to switch to NNW. Performance wasn’t any better when using the Combined view in NNW – it may have actually been worse. I’m back to Safari RSS now, and am just learning to be more patient as things load 🙂
So, after switching to Safari RSS for a couple of months, and really liking the simple (i.e., nonexistent) interface and unified display, I finally got fed up with the quirks in the Safari implementation. Sometimes it would take 15 minutes for a large feed set to display, pegging the CPU at 100% for the whole time (this was most obvious when viewing my Flickr feeds, which could have 500 images, each of which are downloaded apparently simultaneously).
Also, the filter/sorting options are just plain incomplete. Without a “show only new items” option, it’s a real pain in the ass to view new items. Either you have to set it to show a whole bunch of items, and sort the newest items to the top, to ensure viewing all new items, or you narrow the display and have to iterate over various subgroupings or filterings with the “New” sort option selected. Please, fix this… Add a “New items only” option, that would do what it said (and, items wouldn’t disappear from the display as they are “read” – they would simply be marked as read, and disappear the next time the display is refreshed).
So, after running the handy dandy Safari feeds to OPML export script, I’m back in NetNewsWire. It’s a really great app, but I already miss the Safari unified display (warts and all) – the “Combined View” layout in NNW just isn’t the same. I’ll give it a week or two to see if I can get my head back into NNW-think.
Meanwhile, this is what greeted me in NNW after running the import-from-OPML process, and updating all feeds:
Update: I went screaming back to Safari RSS less than 24 hours after trying to switch to NNW. Performance wasn’t any better when using the Combined view in NNW – it may have actually been worse. I’m back to Safari RSS now, and am just learning to be more patient as things load 🙂
Dear Safari RSS team,
Updated 2005/08/01 with thoughts on Flagged vs. Star Ratings
I’ve been using your cool RSS aggregator for a while now, and while it’s really quite good, there are a couple of things you could do to make it really kick ass.
- Have a “new items only” view – rather than just sorting by New, or sorting by Date, or filtering by “last 7 days” – just show me the new stuff. I’ve got like 15,000 items that appear to get loaded every time I check my feeds. That would drop down to just a hundred or two if I could limit to “New only”. The “Today” filter doesn’t cut it – what if I miss a day? What about Monday mornings? Vacation days? “Last 7 Days” isn’t granular enough. A “New Items” filter should be possible, with the SQL Lite engine storing the feeds and items…
- Let me collapse/expand entries – sure, the slider dealie to set displayed article length is nice, but what if I could set items to show title only by default, and just twiddle a little knob on the items that I want to read more about to view the full content – without having to affect the displayed article length of every other item on the page
- Make Safari’s scheduled RSS updates actually, you know, run on a schedule. Often I find that Safari’s forgotten to update for a couple of hours (or it refuses to update after launching, even if it’s the first run of the day). Seems like clicking on my “feeds” folder in the Bookmarks Bar and causing it to start loading the feeds seems to trigger an update. It’d be nice if I didn’t have to babysit an automated update though.
- It’d be really nice if I could override the default “Remove Articles” setting – so I could set it to automagically purge items after a couple of months, but I could set a feed (or folder of feeds, or whatever) to keep items for a different period (shorter, longer, infinite, whatever). I know it’d be a bit more confusing for the UI, but if I could “Get Info” on a feed, and have access to the settings there, it wouldn’t be in any newbies’ faces…
- While I’m at it, why can’t I “Get Info” on any bookmark and add additional information? Have it capture the text of the page for searching by Spotlight? Add additional keywords/tags to a bookmark (you know, like the Finder’s “Spotlight Keywords” field) – personal folksonomies in my Bookmarks…
- How about a “Flagged” bit on a blog entry? With a corresponding “Flagged Items” filter view? Makes it much easier to find stuff that I’ve found interesting before, and kinda makes the persistent store of feeds and items, you know, useful…
OK. That’s it for now. Keep up the great work. If there’s anything I can do to help out, just give me a shout.
Update: Just had a “duh” moment – instead of just having a “flagged” bit (which is by definition a binary toggle), what about following iTunes and iPhoto by having star ratings for feeds and items? Then I could filter on previous items that were ranked 3 stars or higher… Actually, following the iTunes/iPhoto model for “get info” would work as well – being able to set multiple DublinCore-ish fields to help find stuff later…
Dear Safari RSS team,
Updated 2005/08/01 with thoughts on Flagged vs. Star Ratings
I’ve been using your cool RSS aggregator for a while now, and while it’s really quite good, there are a couple of things you could do to make it really kick ass.
- Have a “new items only” view – rather than just sorting by New, or sorting by Date, or filtering by “last 7 days” – just show me the new stuff. I’ve got like 15,000 items that appear to get loaded every time I check my feeds. That would drop down to just a hundred or two if I could limit to “New only”. The “Today” filter doesn’t cut it – what if I miss a day? What about Monday mornings? Vacation days? “Last 7 Days” isn’t granular enough. A “New Items” filter should be possible, with the SQL Lite engine storing the feeds and items…
- Let me collapse/expand entries – sure, the slider dealie to set displayed article length is nice, but what if I could set items to show title only by default, and just twiddle a little knob on the items that I want to read more about to view the full content – without having to affect the displayed article length of every other item on the page
- Make Safari’s scheduled RSS updates actually, you know, run on a schedule. Often I find that Safari’s forgotten to update for a couple of hours (or it refuses to update after launching, even if it’s the first run of the day). Seems like clicking on my “feeds” folder in the Bookmarks Bar and causing it to start loading the feeds seems to trigger an update. It’d be nice if I didn’t have to babysit an automated update though.
- It’d be really nice if I could override the default “Remove Articles” setting – so I could set it to automagically purge items after a couple of months, but I could set a feed (or folder of feeds, or whatever) to keep items for a different period (shorter, longer, infinite, whatever). I know it’d be a bit more confusing for the UI, but if I could “Get Info” on a feed, and have access to the settings there, it wouldn’t be in any newbies’ faces…
- While I’m at it, why can’t I “Get Info” on any bookmark and add additional information? Have it capture the text of the page for searching by Spotlight? Add additional keywords/tags to a bookmark (you know, like the Finder’s “Spotlight Keywords” field) – personal folksonomies in my Bookmarks…
- How about a “Flagged” bit on a blog entry? With a corresponding “Flagged Items” filter view? Makes it much easier to find stuff that I’ve found interesting before, and kinda makes the persistent store of feeds and items, you know, useful…
OK. That’s it for now. Keep up the great work. If there’s anything I can do to help out, just give me a shout.
Update: Just had a “duh” moment – instead of just having a “flagged” bit (which is by definition a binary toggle), what about following iTunes and iPhoto by having star ratings for feeds and items? Then I could filter on previous items that were ranked 3 stars or higher… Actually, following the iTunes/iPhoto model for “get info” would work as well – being able to set multiple DublinCore-ish fields to help find stuff later…
Thanks to a pointer from Sameer D’Costa, I just used a handy shell script to export all of my Safari RSS subscriptions to an OPML file that can be imported into Wordpress to update my links/blogroll. Easy peasy.
I hadn’t realized how much my subscription list had grown… It’s now up to 469 feeds, and I didn’t even realize it – that’s 100 new feeds since switching to Safari RSS.
Update: Almost forgot – had to modify the .opml export slightly. Out of the box, the script exports urls as “xmlUrl”, but Wordpress expects “htmlUrl” – easy to change using a batch find/replace, and easy to fix the script, too.
Thanks to a pointer from Sameer D’Costa, I just used a handy shell script to export all of my Safari RSS subscriptions to an OPML file that can be imported into WordPress to update my links/blogroll. Easy peasy.
I hadn’t realized how much my subscription list had grown… It’s now up to 469 feeds, and I didn’t even realize it – that’s 100 new feeds since switching to Safari RSS.
Update: Almost forgot – had to modify the .opml export slightly. Out of the box, the script exports urls as “xmlUrl”, but WordPress expects “htmlUrl” – easy to change using a batch find/replace, and easy to fix the script, too.
Since I’ve moved to Safari as my RSS reader, I’ve lost the easy way of updating the blogroll/links section of my blog. I used to just export my subscriptions from NetNewsWire as OPML, which was then easily ingested by WordPress.
I’m realizing that my blogroll/links are now woefully out of date, and would like to bring them into sync with my current subscriptions – but am not about to start manually syncing them.
Is there any way to readily export OPML of bookmarks (ideally, of a selected bookmark folder, or just “All RSS Feeds”) from Safari? This feels like a good candidate for Automator, but it looks like the Automator action vocabulary for Safari is missing the needed bits.
Since I’ve moved to Safari as my RSS reader, I’ve lost the easy way of updating the blogroll/links section of my blog. I used to just export my subscriptions from NetNewsWire as OPML, which was then easily ingested by WordPress.
I’m realizing that my blogroll/links are now woefully out of date, and would like to bring them into sync with my current subscriptions – but am not about to start manually syncing them.
Is there any way to readily export OPML of bookmarks (ideally, of a selected bookmark folder, or just “All RSS Feeds”) from Safari? This feels like a good candidate for Automator, but it looks like the Automator action vocabulary for Safari is missing the needed bits.
