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Not a Safari convert

Tuesday, 12 June 2007 in Computing by Enoch Lau | 4 comments

OK. So Apple’s released a Windows version of Safari (and I tried blogging from Safari, but it submitted a blank page, and copy and paste from Safari back to Firefox was rather buggy *not happy*), and I don’t quite like what I see. This is why I’m sticking to Firefox for at least the time being:

  • Yet another look: It looks like a Mac application, feels like a Mac application and behaves like a Mac application. If I wanted to use a Mac, I’d use a Mac. (I know it’s similar to the deal with iTunes and QuickTime, but I hate both as well.)
  • Font rendering is weird: It looks like they’ve copied over the font rendering from the Mac as well; compared with the Windows font rendering, the font smoothing looks uncomfortable and I’m not sure I like the character spacing. If this is what it’s like to use a Mac, this is even less reason for me to switch.
  • Another new set of keyboard shortcuts: Firefox and IE keep their keyboard shortcuts relatively similar so it’s not much of a pain to switch between the two, but Safari… just realised that Ctrl+Backspace doesn’t work, and it doesn’t minimise when you go Winkey+M.
  • Downloads: It downloads straight to the Desktop, or to another folder. I want to be prompted for each location.
  • Plugins: It’s new so there are hardly any plugins yet.

Enough rambling for the time being, but no I’m not going to be using Safari as my everyday browser any time soon. I must agree it’s faster, but its memory footprint is far worse than Firefox (150MB in ten minutes?). I’ll keep it around, however, to test my website.

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Site migration complete… but still much to do

Monday, 9 April 2007 in Meta by Enoch Lau | No comments

Just last week I slapped on the “moved house” tags on my old site at intrepix.tripod.com - yes, well over three months after I got this domain. Call it laziness. But what actually took me so long is that I wasn’t quite happy about how this site had turned out, so I wasn’t prepared to call this “home” just yet. What wasn’t I happy about? Well for one, I missed the design of the old site - the colours and the gradient fills had been tweaked until I could call it perfect. The new “environmentalist” look on this site was designed with minimalism in mind, but I don’t think that suits me well. The new jazzed up home page sports some fancy transparency and css effects, but my wiki still looks rather utilitarian I must say.

So why don’t I simply do something about it? Suppose we have a utility function U that factors in P, the pleasure I get from viewing a beautiful design, and E, the effort that it takes to create said beautiful design. :-P I’d say we’re stuck at the first hump, a local maximum.

function.png

What’s left to do: create pages on the wiki for past and present projects, prettify the wiki, add more intersection links

(Just a thought: I’m beginning to think my writing style is too stiff and rigid and verbose. Perhaps it’s just that nothing I write can compare with some of the stuff I regularly read.)

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