Apple's latest version of Safari is out (in beta), with some evolutionary interface changes, and a dramatically faster javascript processing engine. The release of Safari 4 was not anticipated by any of the typical rumour sites, so it came as a surprise to just about everyone. As always, though, it was no surprise to see Apple's bright and simple marketing pages selling the browser as the best thing since sliced bread.

The Mac maker's marketing team appear to have had a field day promoting all 150 of the fantastic new features of their latest browser. But is everything they say completely true? Have they pushed the boundaries of honesty with their sensationalist slogans? Taking a look at the list of new features, I started to get a little suspicious. Just about none of the new features listed on Apple's website are original - most are already out there in other browsers, having already been invented by the likes of Google, Mozilla, and the open source community. Or they've actually been features in Safari already, but Apple are drawing more attention to them in this release.

The main new features list promoted by Apple:

• Top sites: suspiciously like Chrome's "most visited" section on opening a new tab. But of course it's all shiny and in 3D, which makes meel feel like I'm in the Matrix - so I like that bit.
• CoverFlow: OK, this isn't currently in any browser, but we got there first!
• Full History Search: this has been around in Opera for a rather long time (since the betas of version 9.5 back in September 2007), and was actually available to some extent in the previous version of Safari - they promoted it as a "new" feature back then.
• Tabs on top: Chrome - did we even need to say? But that said, Opera again had the idea of putting the tabs above the addressbar waaay back in the day. They could at least put the little favicons in the top corner to help easily identify different sites on different tabs - isn't that the point of a favicon?
• Nitro Engine (Squirrel Fish wasn't up to scratch for Apple's Marketing Department): notice how in the performance graphs they've subtlely left off Firefox 3.2 and Chrome 2.0 betas, both of which have amazingly fast javascript engines.
• Windows native look and feel: I could go on and on about this for ages, but I won't. The transparent tabs are really quite ugly (Chrome definitely had the better idea there) and the whole thing with darkening the inactive areas of the title bar really doesn't do it for me. Plus it's all misaligned in the Windows 7 beta. But all the same, even in vista, where it does work - I still much prefer chrome for simple native interface feel.


Good one Apple. However, both Safari 4 and Windows 7 are still in beta, so I'll let Apple off for this one.



Seriously, what's going on there? Which would you choose?

• Developer Tools: Is it just me, or hasn't this been in Safari for a while now? I use the developer tools in Safari 3 all the time (all the time I actually even use Safari that is - Firefox FTW!) I can see they've changed the icons from Safari 3 in the web inspector, but other than that can anyone point out to me what they've added?

Ok, I won't go into a huge wealth of detail about all the other features, but here's a couple more from the 150 features page that were tagged as new which really caught my attention:

• Full page zoom: Unbelievably, the first time I came across this was in IE. I don't know if it was around before then though.
• Phishing and malware protection: IE again unbelievably.
• Smart address field: Firefox Awesome Bar, and then the Chrome Omnibox.
• Inline Progress Indicator: Firstly, this isn't new, even for Safari, and more importantly, it looks to me suspiciously like this has been taken out rather than introduced.

Acid 3

And then there's Acid3. I don't like being too pedantic about this matter, but the Acid3 test isn't just about getting a pixel-perfect rendering. To pass the test, the animation has to be smooth as well. I've tested the beta on a couple of different platforms and while it produces an absolutely infallable rendering, the animation is by no means smooth. Test 69 continually takes more than 50 attempts to succeed. So when Apple are professing to be the "first browser to pass Acid3", they are actually wrong in that they're not the first (Opera betas have passed before this one), and they don't actually pass the test! What really puzzles me about this matter is that all the WebKit nightly builds for quite a long time now have passed perfectly with a perfectly smooth animation. So have Apple put a 6 month old version of WebKit into "the World's most innovative browser"? It would appear so.

Toolbar Troubles

The toolbar is only a gripe for the Windows version - it's slightly different in OS X because the menu bar is separated so a few buttons are differently arranged, but the issue can be summed up very well with a simple screenshot:

Spot the difference anyone?

See what I mean? Just for those of you who don't recognise it, the top one's the toolbar from Google Chrome, and the bottom one's the latest Safari. There's just the tiniest bit of a similarity there methinks.

The idea of compressing the main menu bar into a couple of dropdown buttons is quite established (first seen in IE7 I believe), but the simple fact that the two toolbars are so alike is what bothers me. Back and forward buttons at the beginning: a standard UI convention that makes perfect sense. Add bookmark button attached to the left side of the address bar: getting a little bit suspicious. Then the address bar is a bit different (as an aside, I think the refresh button is in the wrong place, but maybe that's aimed at users who have only just got used to the fact that IE decided to put it there too for no reason). The refresh button's new location is also a result of its placement within Mobile Safari on iPhone. But then there are the two dropdown buttons. Now I know these aren't there on the mac, but that's because the menu bar's already at the top of the screen so there's no need for them. Still - they're EXACTLY the same buttons effectively. Come on - they've even nicked one of the icons! OK so the actual content of the two dropdowns is slightly different, but the sheer fact that they are both essentially for the same purpose in both browsers shows unquestionable similarity to Chrome.

On the plus side, the installer for the latest beta FINALLY no longer insists on adding an icon to my quick launch, as per the latest Windows 7 guidelines. Many's the time I've got inordinately annoyed by icons appearing after every time I run an Apple Software Update. I appreciate that one Apple.

And of course I love the fact that the wording of their info pages implies that Safari has only 150 features. That's all. No more. Wouldn't be much of a browser if that were true.

I think that's just about enough ranting for now. The point is, these features may not all be entirely original, but I'll admit bringing them together in one browser makes a pretty good package overall (apart from the Windows interface I don't really like). Let us know what you think on the matter, especially those of you who, like me, aren't complete Macheads (like James.)

Update: June 9th 2009
Following yesterday's launch of the final version of Safari 4, some of my gripes have been fixed.

• Apple have obviously seen the light and put tabs back where they belong. Which is good, because I personally couldn't see the visual appeal of having them at the top. They basically just looked awful on both the mac and windows versions.
• Along with that, the Windows Native Look and Feel, as they call it, is therefore greatly improved. No more of those silly shadow effects along the title bar.
• The refresh button has now taken on its own special little "Loading" message in a blue box while the page is loading, much better than the pathetic little spinner they had in the beta.
• And a few other things that I can't quite put my finger on, but which do make the general experience better than it was in beta

However (and sorry for this), there are still a few things that really get up my nose...

• The toolbar's still the same, a Chrome ripoff. OK, I wasn't expecting Apple to go and drastically change it from the beta, so I won't go on. I did enough ranting about that earlier.
• Acid3. Aaahh, good old Acid3. Come on Apple, you've been going on about 100% compliance for a while now and you're just about getting there. But still, although the rendering's great, the speed still falls down in test 69. Now I know the speed is somewhat hardware-dependent, but I've run it on a couple of machines with pretty decent specs, and it still isn't up to scratch. I'll just take this opportunity to reiterate that old WebKit nightly builds were coping fine, ages ago. But there you go...
• And maybe I spoke too soon about the installer not putting icons everywhere. Apple Software Update still insists on shoving shortcuts in my desktop and quick launch. I don't need them! They just clutter everything up! If I wanted shortcuts there, I'd have put them there in the first place on the original install!

And I know this is advertised as a bit of a rant, and well I suppose it is. But in all honesty it is a bit harsh. Safari's a pretty damn decent browser, truth be told. But I'll stick with Firefox for now - FireBug just has the edge over Safari's developer tools for me, at the moment anyway.

280 North, the guys that brought you 280 Slides (the slickest web app yet for building Keynote style presentations) and the next generation web app development framework Cappuccino, have just announced their latest creation - 280 Atlas.

280 Atlas is a web app, built with Cappuccino, designed to make it easy for others to build advanced, beautiful web apps with unrivalled ease. Check out the video to get an idea of just how simple they have made the UI design process. It in some ways makes me think of Interface Builder in the development tools that come with OS X, but I have to remind myself that these are online. It's not this easy to build web app interfaces in any desktop apps I can think of.

When you think of what Adobe is doing, attempting to make it easier for design professionals to get building applications on the web and the desktop (via AIR), this puts them to shame. The web will be a better place with more web apps built on open source technologies like Cappuccino. If the next round of web apps are anything like 280 Slides, then things are going to get very exciting around here.

Keep your eyes on 280 Atlas, and the 280 North team. They are moving the industry forward at a staggering pace, and it's up to us, the developers and designers, to start building web apps that not only compete, but outperform what's on the desktop.

Continuing from yesterday's post on Managing multiple photos on the iPhone, here's a suggestion of how much better app sorting and selection could be via iTunes.

We didn't come up with this concept, but it's impressive to see what could be done. Recent findings (after asking around on Twitter) showed the majority of people seem to download their apps directly to their iPhone (rather than download to iTunes and then sync) but this way of sorting could encourage people to plug in their iPhones a little more often.

The current method of organising and syncing apps with your iPhone in iTunes is not good enough right now. Apple, in a way, had to guess the way millions of people would download, organise, use, and delete apps on their iPhones an iPod Touches, and they did a pretty good job given how well things work right now. However, organising apps in iTunes has always been one of those areas that has seemed like an after thought.

Perhaps Apple have more in store? I have a feeling the Home Screen might change more than we expect in OS 3.0. Will we see a more effective way of organising our growing numbers of applications? It's been a long time since a major iPhone OS update, and you can bet your bottom dollar that Apple haven't been sitting around waiting for the competition to catch up.

If we can select multiple emails in Mail, and delete or move them to another folder in one go, then why can't we do the same with our photos on the iPhone?

Deleting Multiple Photos

This puzzled me the other day when I had been on a little photo taking spree. I ended up with a load of shots that were great. But an even greater load of shots that were dreadful. Deleting the multitude of dreadful photos was a real pain - the only way to do it at the moment is to touch each thumbnail, hit the trash icon, and then "Delete Photo" on the slide up "are you sure?" pane.

So, for me to delete 10 photos, it takes 3 touches (or taps?) each. That, for those without a calculator to hand is a whole THIRTY touches. And that's assuming all of the photos you wish to delete are next to one another. If they're not then you might have to touch the "back to camera roll" button at the top and then scroll to find another dreadful photo, then touch that. A real pain.

If we could delete photos in my proposed way, then we would reduce it down to 3 clicks plus one click for each photo you wish to delete. Touch the "Edit" button at the top > Touch the thumbnail image of each photo you wish to delete > Touch "Delete (#) > Then confirm with "Delete Photos".

Sending Multiple Photos

Similarly, it's pretty annoying if you ever need to email more than one photo to someone. There is at least one app currently available that is solving this problem, aptly named "Multi-Photo Email". That app is pretty much as good as it's going to get from 3rd party offerings, but it's not what I would call a complete solution to an integral missing feature. To send multiple photos with my proposed solution, you would do the same as for multiple delete, but hit "Send" rather than "Delete" (pretty obvious that one).

Rearranging Photos

A third useful, but not essential feature would be the ability to rearrange photos. Currently, photos are arranged in chronological order which makes perfect sense. Since the ability to take screen shots on the iPhone though, I have often found that I would prefer to be able to rearrange my Camera Roll to group screen shots separately from actual photos. Maybe that's just me, but it wouldn't be too much of a crazy idea seeing as you can rearrange Apps on the Home Screen, re-order towns in Weather, ticker symbols in Stocks, time zones in Clock, etc. etc.

All in all, it would make me that tiny bit happier to have the functionality to manage multiple photos easily in such a regularly used application.

Just a last minute idea, but being able to share photos via Flickr and Facebook (as you can with MobileMe) would be nice too. iPhoto 09 is ahead of the iPhone in that respect. Perhaps we'll have to wait for iPhone OS 3.0 before we start cluttering that slide-up menu too much eh?

Update

Hey, it looks like Apple are on the same wavelength as us (again!) as the new iPhone 3.0 firmware allows you to send multiple photos via email with a method almost identical to the one we've suggested here. They've even gone for the same red "tick" icons. I'm not sure if there's a way to rearrange photos yet, but this is definitely a very welcome feature addition to see.

We post a lot of links to some really useful, surprising, and sometimes just plain funny sites on Twitter. Until now, we haven't shared much of our Twitter chatter on Liquidicity, but we know you'll find (at least some of) what we share useful, so now you can pick up the best bits from the same place.

• We've been working on our Legal pages a bit. Homepage isn't quite there yet, but tell us what you think so far: http://is.gd/kbub
• YouTube-to-iTunes in 1 click: http://is.gd/BAi (via @chrisodonnell)
• Some awesome typographic tees: http://bit.ly/a9tUP
• Very interesting and smart piece about why the iPhone will continue to have the upper hand: http://is.gd/k7W8
• Blogosfear - the adverture game (an idea by Ironic Sans): http://is.gd/k7FW
• Really nice screencast - makes me want to sign up instantly to Krop: http://is.gd/jlcE
• 9 Common Usability Mistakes - from Smashing Mag: http://is.gd/k2wt
• Oh sweet the new Virb is looking insanely good - I want to eat it. Check it out: http://virb.com/

If you found any of this vaguely useful, you may want to follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/gosquared

Stay up to date with the team:

James - twitter.com/gosquared
Geoff - twitter.com/TheDeveloper
Caspar - twitter.com/MediaD00d
And JT needs to get Twitter!

P.S. We're trying these brief "link roundup" posts out. If you want us to follow you on Twitter, wanna share your Twitter finds, or have any suggestions on ways we can improve these posts, shout out in the comments!

There's a site I've been following for a while that has been a great inspiration for some of the changes we've been making to GoSquared. Over the last few months we've paid a lot more attention to the design of Liquidicity (this blog), and more specifically, we've been looking into how to improve typography around the site.

I Love Typography is a really useful, inspiring site run by a guy named Johno all about typography. Covering the latest free fonts, type news, tuition on typographic terms, and a bit of humour to lighten things up, I Love Typography is a useful resource for anyone with an interest in making letters and words look as awesome as they can.

I've decided to write a little about the site because a) it's been a great source of inspiration to me, and b) it recently had a redesign that some of you may not have seen. The old site used to look great, but the improved design is much cleaner and easier to navigate - usability is paramount.

Just a few examples of the kind of stuff that gets featured on I Love Typography include a limited edition Helvetica Moleskine (up for grabs!), tuition on vertical metrics, and a lovely leather 'type bag' for the other half.

Of note, every week you can be sure to be updated on the latest, best, and weirdest examples of type in the world in Johno's "The week in Type" set of posts. A huge amount of work goes into these hugely informative, inspiring posts that can only be produced by a true type fanatic. What would we do without him?

All in all, if you're ever stuck for typographic inspiration, you know where to look!

Today we're introducing GoSquared Services, a sparkling new area of the site to market our design services.

Since we started GoSquared, we have always been taking on design work for various companies - we have designed logos, websites, and icon sets for some great, fun people. Before, the only way people knew about us was through word of mouth, and the only way people could see our previous work was to email us and ask us about it.

These past few months, though, we've seen an exciting increase in the number of people interested in our design services. This is fantastic, but it started to become tedious and time consuming to send every potential client an email with a sufficient selection of work attached. Especially when you find they only had $15 to spend.

With the new GoSquared Services, we can show prospective clients a selection of work that demonstrates our skills, and provide information about the disciplines we have to offer. We are also very open about the rates that we charge, so people can see from the start exactly what to budget for. Our rates are negotiable, so email us if you have any questions.

Our portfolio of work will expand over the next few months as a few of our current projects reach completion. Many of our clients like to keep work confidential until they have launched their project, so we are more than happy to work to their rules when it comes to secrecy.

Overall, we are pleased to finally bring you an area of the GoSquared site that will inform you of a service we have actually (secretly!) offered for a while.

We hope you enjoy Services, even if you don't want to get anything designed just yet. Have a look around and tell us what you think.

GoSquared is 3 years old today. Wow time flies.

Usually, people take the opportunity to talk about their past when they are asked to speak on their birthday, without spending too much time dwelling on last year, I would like to spend a post on telling you about what we are doing right now, and will be carrying through over the next few months at GoSquared.

As you know, GoSquared owns and runs Liquidicity - this blog. We post as frequently as we can to feature design and technology news, and, when we have too much time, icons and other free resources for your enjoyment. We are very pleased with the growth of Liquidicity - it is our biggest source of traffic and has helped open many doors for us in the design world.

However, we started GoSquared on this day in 2006 to build a site where advertising could be as easy and as attractive as possible. We set out to build a simple way of enabling anyone to get seen online. 3 years on, 3 major updated versions overhauled, we still have the same aim.

In the first half of 2008 we introduced the most intelligent system we had ever built. Crucially, we introduced the ability for other websites to sell Squares via the GoSquared Network. People could suddenly purchase ads on other Sites with the same ease as before - uploading a 140x140 pixel image and assigning a title etc. then submitting. This is the system that is currently running for all members of GoSquared. We're proud of what we've achieved so far, but we owe it to our constantly growing network of Sites to deliver more. We owe them more traffic, we owe them more advertising revenue. At the moment, the combination of Squares and the GoSquared Network is not good enough.

Since the first half of 2008, we've been working to improve on what we built. We've changed a lot, and there's a lot still to do, but you can already see what has been keeping us so occupied by applying to the Private Beta now.

Changing the way we Price Advertising

Today, we will be introducing a major change to one of the most important factors for selling ads online - Pricing. Available tonight, we will be giving Private Beta testers the ability to choose between the current method of pricing (based on GoSquared Reputation) or to manually input prices that they believe their Site's advertising space is worth to advertisers.

One of the problems with the way we currently charge for advertising is that we often don't charge enough for some of our higher traffic Sites. By allowing Private Beta testers to manually input pricing figures, we will be able to utilise this information to improve the way we automatically price other Sites. In a way, we're crowd sourcing ad prices - but it's up to you whether you take the automatically calculated price or set your own values.

We have a couple of other things to show you today, but that's just a small update on what's going on with our core business - selling advertising.