Dear Apple, or more specifically, the Safari developers at Apple,

I would really, really, really love for one feature to be added to Safari. Just one more feature, and I think I’ll be in web browser nirvana. Seriously.

I want Safari, just like FireFox, to be able to save my session and offer to restore it the next time Safari starts up. Now, not just a “save session at quit” kind of thing, either, because that doesn’t help when Safari crashes. I mean a “save as you go” kind of thing, like Saft adds to Safari, and like Firefox has, so that if Safari does crash, I get that wonderful little “Would you like to restore your previous session?” dialog.

Now, Firefox’s dialog is a little sparse, but effective. It lets you restore your previous session, or start a new one. Starting a new session presumably blows out whatever might have been saved, which is fine. If one of the pages in your previous session caused the browser to quit, though, simply restoring that session whole-hog might not be a good idea.

Saft, I think, takes the other extreme, and allows you to pick every single URL (from all the tabs and windows) to choose whether they are part of the restored session or not.

So, here’s my idea. Save the session as you go. When you quit cleanly, log that in the session save data. When you start up, if there’s a saved session present, pop up the “start a new session or restore your previous session” dialog. If the user chooses to restore, check to see if the session exited cleanly, or crashed last time. If it crashed, pop up a new dialog, saying that it crashed last time, and one or more of the pages from the session should be disabled. Then let me select what gets restored and what doesn’t.

Of course, make the whole session saving feature optional, by putting a single checkbox on the Advanced panel of Safari’s Preferences.

I’m sure there’s a cleaner way to design the session restore choices (one dialog instead of two, with some intelligent hiding based on what the user clicks on?) I’m not a UI designer, so someone else will have to work that magic.

In summary, Safari developers, I want to have session saving and restoration built into Safari with the same fit and finish that the rest of the browser has, and that includes restoring sessions after Safari crashes and providing the ability to pick and choose what gets restored.

Thank you,

Gregory

P.S.: Yes, I could just use Saft, which I’ve paid for and used for a couple years now. However, with Safari updates becoming more common, I’m getting tired of waiting for two weeks for Saft to catch up. Besides that, I’m becoming more and more uncomfortable with the idea of any InputManager hacks running on my system at all.

For the longest time I’ve been pining for a way to have a keyboard shortcut “maximize”, or, in Mac parlance, “Zoom” the current window. Ideally, it would be a toggle.

Well, I found a way to do it today.

First, you’ll need either FastScripts or FastScripts Lite (available at the same link). Install it, and set it up to run at login.

Next, if you don’t already have it, create a new folder at ~/Library/Scripts. Open Script Editor (/Applications/Applescript/Script Editor), and type in this script:

tell application "System Events"
	set currentapp to item 1 of (get name of processes whose frontmost is true)
end tell

tell application currentapp
	tell front window
		if zoomable then
			if zoomed then
				set zoomed to false
			else
				set zoomed to true
			end if
		end if
	end tell
end tell

It’s also here at pastebin.com.

Save it as something like “Zoom Front Window”, as a script, in ~/Library/Scripts. Then, you can open your FastScript preferences, and assign the keyboard shortcut you like to it. I currently use Option-Shift-=, because it’s the same physical keys as what I used on my Linux boxes for the maximize window shortcut.

Have fun!

A patent filing by Apple, noted by StorageMojo, seems to give credence to the possibility that Apple really will be using ZFS extensively, either in the initial release of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), or in a subsequent release.

Personally, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple holds off on using ZFS as the system default filesystem, especially as the boot volume file system, until a 10.5.x release, but still allows it to be used on non-system-volume drives from day one. I am perfectly willing to be happily surprised to learn that I am wrong, however.

This information, however, does make me think that Apple is definitely planning on transitioning away from HFS+, and making that transition apply to upgrade installations as well. This will make many people happy, I think, because nobody likes to do an upgrade via the “re-install everything from scratch and restore my data” way. I was actually wondering if I’d have to do a clean re-install when I finally get my hands on Leopard in order to take advantage of ZFS, but this makes me think I can take the easy way out.

Should be some interesting announcements in the next week.

It occurs to me that I’d love to do a lot of things that I don’t necessarily have time for in the day-to-day grind of work and home life. So, I figured I’d at least start trying to document some of them. Here’s the first one:

Barracuda Spam Firewall Mail Client Plugins

True, Barracuda supplies two plugins for Outlook and a plugin for Lotus Notes, but what about everyone else in the organization? Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Evolution and even Entourage users are left out in the cold. These users can’t take advantage of the nifty “train as spam” or “train as good” buttons which you can invoke on any email in your account. If all the organization’s mail is going through a ‘Cuda anyway, these functions can prove invaluable in increasing the accuracy of the ‘Cuda’s filters.

You don’t even need to be logged in to the Barracuda appliance; it apparently does a simple HTTP request using a base URL the Barracuda tucks into a header of every message it processes. The trick is figuring out what the HTTP request really is. Now, this will really be as easy as forging one of these headers to point to a different URL, and just seeing what the buttons do by watching the server logs (or even just running netcat on the appropriate port). I haven’t gotten around to it yet, because I’ve got lots of “real” work to do, but someday I’ll decode the URL magic.

That’s when the real meat of the project comes in: building plugins/extensions for Thunderbird and Apple Mail. (No, honestly, I don’t really care about Evolution or Entourage.)

That seems to be the scuttlebutt, based on information from various execs at Sun. Apparently Apple’s been so interested in ZFS because they’re planning on making it the default filesystem in OS X Leopard (10.5).

When I first heard that Apple was interested in ZFS, I hoped and prayed that it would come to this. I’m still fervently hoping that Apple really is planning on making ZFS “the” Mac OS X filesystem, because even though HFS+ works, I’ve still never really been entirely comfortable with it. Honestly, ZFS won’t really buy much for the average joe for things like laptops or other single-drive systems, outside of the amazingly better data integrity checking that’s built in, but for multi-drive systems, I think ZFS will really come into its own. A Mac Pro with four 750GB or 1TB hard drives installed is the perfect place for ZFS to be used for both speed and redundancy.

I’m definitely interested to see what will actually come out during the WWDC about Leopard.

I’ve fixed the comments. Basically, it worked out to me not having completely moved enough bits into place for the new theme, so when things were missing, they’d default back to the most basic thing. The most basic thing, unfortunately, was a simple index page that didn’t include anything about comments.

Coda, from Panic, has really been a godsend in terms of allowing me to very easily put this theme together and hack on it. I’ve been especially thankful for the ability, as of 1.0.1, to use a local HTTP server for previewing, as that’s helped with some of the PHP issues. For something as complex as WordPress, though, I find that it’s just better to keep a separate Safari window around, as the preview for individual PHP files that make up the parts of WordPress don’t really lend themselves to being called directly via a URL.

Amusingly, Coda’s ability to use a local HTTP server is what prompted me to get the Apache Web Server included in Mac OS X running, and get it playing with PHP, and install MySQL “Community Server”, and get all those bits playing together. I figured, if I’m going to hack on the face of my blog, I might as well do it offline so that it actually works before I push it online. The result is that I have a fully-functional copy of Method running on my PowerBook which I can hack on to my heart’s content, safe from prying eyes for debugging and testing.

I think that’s pretty cool.

I think in a week or so I’ll put together a nice review of Coda based on what I’ve been able to do with it so far, just to wrap up my experiences and impressions with it. I’m very happy.

Coda 1.0.1 is available.

I’m looking forward to trying out the enhancements.

Also, Cabel from Panic got back to me on my expired demo problem, even though I wasn’t expecting a response. Color me impressed. (What color is "impressed", anyway?)

I was very excited when I downloaded the 15-day preview for Coda. So exited, in fact, that I finally got around to rebuilding Unnerving.org and creating a custom theme for Wordpress for this blog. I did it all in Coda, taking advantage of its handling of PHP syntax, inclusion of reference materials, and mindlessly simple previewing abilities for HTML files.

I’ve noticed a couple things:

• If you use another app to muck with the files while Coda has a Site open (i.e., move, rename, add or delete files or folders within the Site on your local disk, either via Finder or Terminal), Coda will get very upset and crash. I dutifully submitted my crash reports, so hopefully that will be helpful to Panic.
• My 15-day trial ended after only five days of use. This is merely annoying, as I already plan to purchase a full copy for myself, but it means I can’t use it until I make the purchase. I sent Panic an email about this, too, but I honestly don’t expect a response. It qualifies, for me, as a fit-and-finish problem, however, which might be off-putting to potential users.

All that said, I really like Coda. As I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere, you kind of want to slip back into your Editor/Terminal/File Transfer/Web Browser paradigm every so often, but there’s definitely something about Coda that convinces you to just stay inside of it. It’s comfortable.

As a rule, I’m not always happy with apps that force you to work within a single window. I’ve adapted for Mail, simply due to the fact that separate message windows don’t work the way I’d necessarily like, either. Being a visual person, I would definitely like the ability to selectively tear tabs off into their own windows (and, ideally, merge them back as tabs into other windows) so that I could have a couple files in the same Site side-by-side for the times when it’s useful. All in all, though, I found myself working quite comfortably after a while.

Coda is definitely not a PHP IDE, though the only area it falls down in is the ability to preview/debug PHP scripts. This really is not a major problem for the target users (including myself), but some might see it as a negative point. PHP support is good enough for me, with great syntax coloring and the integration of the PHP reference. You can select any PHP builtin or function and hit a hot key to jump to its reference page.

I haven’t explored the Javascript support of Coda, as I don’t do any Javascript coding as of yet. Given that Coda previews, by default, using WebKit, I imagine it’ll be able to preview with full Javascript as well. Again, built-in Javascript reference material and full syntax support is included.

I’m not sure what to say about the CSS editor aside from the fact that man, it’s awesome. I’ve split the CSS for unnerving.org out into a site-wide file, which means Coda can’t include it for previews unless I fetch it from the server, but Coda still makes editing the CSS file stupidly easy. If you have your CSS within the HTML file itself, it’s even better, and Coda can give your previews full justice. Definitely good, either way you look at it.

Overall, I’m really quite satisfied with Coda, and will be eagerly plunking down my cash for a license as soon as my wife lets me.

Take a look; I’m sure you’ll be impressed, too.

Well, I’m not sure what’s been changed on the server yet, but I finally have Gallery2 up and running at gallery.unnerving.org. I suspect that Apache’s mod_security was getting in the way, and it might have been disabled. I’ll be able to confirm this when I hear back from my friend that’s running the hosting.

What’s most wonderful, in my opinion, is that the iPhoto2Gallery plugin works perfectly. This makes it almost painless for us to start uploading photos that we want to share, since all our recent photos (taken with our Canon digital camera) are managed in iPhoto on the iBook.

I love good technology days. Heck, I even solved some problems at work today.

Well, it’s certainly been a while, but I once again can get my Method on. Basically, I finally got off my butt, set up my virtual host (courtesy of Binary Tribe) and re-loaded my blog database from a backup.

In other news…

This was definitely far less effort than trying to get Gallery2 going. I’m not sure if it’s me, or every server I touch, but I cannot, for the life of me, get Gallery2 to work. I’ve tried it on a virtual host here. I’ve tried it on my Ubuntu system at home. I’ve tried it on a RHEL4 system at work. Each time, I end up with bizarre and different brokenness. I seriously don’t understand it. Turning on debugging gives me a steaming pile of useless information, so don’t suggest that unless you’re willing to sit next to me and debug it. Should I not be using the latest Gallery2? Input is welcome.