This means I might actually post more often, now that MarsEdit can talk to WordPress again.

This also means I’ll probably be sending Daniel Jalkut some more coin on the latest version of MarsEdit. Supporting your favorite indie software developers is a good thing!

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.

PHP Notice:  Undefined index:  399768cac5c44d61 in /.../wp-admin/admin.php on line 1, referer: http://method.unnerving.org/wp-admin/post-new.php

Every single error message has the same hex number.

The database looks okay, but I did have to delete a number of comments from the wp_comments table by hand… Could that have screwed it up?

What would be a good “getting started programming Mac OS X” book for a 15-year sysadmin proficient in perl and formal CS schooling?

I have itches I need to scratch.

Google was kind enough to alert me to the fact that this site had fallen victim to comment spam. I’ve cleaned all these comments out of the system, and updated the entire site to ensure that comments could no longer be left on any post.

So, that means no more comments, people. The, like, three of you who commented so far.

Does anyone know what Sun is doing? Does Sun know what Sun is doing?

• See the Microsoft press release.
• See the Sun press release.

Is Sun even relevant anymore?

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!

I’ve been thinking about just what it is I want to do, and I’m thinking that Method isn’t really working. Well, that, and I never actually write anything for it. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to be doing, but expect a new domain name in the next couple of months, along with possibly a more focussed effort towards actually keeping this blog updates a little more frequently.

No promises, though.

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.