mark's blog - becoming the ultimate geek

Safari on Windows

Mark — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 16:58:10 +0000

For those who have been living under a rock, a couple of weeks ago Apple have released their Safari browser for Windows. To satisfy my lust for new toys to try out I have been using Safari constantly for the past week. And here are the thing I like / don’t like about it:

The good:

The UI: Although I must say that it seems a bit surreal to use an OS X application on Windows I do like how dialog boxes transition, the transitions when moving bookmarks around or even moving a link (a preview of the page is shown). Having said that it does still require some work, especially when minimizing / maximizing in which case performance is very lacking.
RSS viewer: I believe the inbuilt RSS viewer is far more superior then that of IE 7. I especially like the ‘Article Length’ slider that allows you to view an ‘excerpt’ of long articles. The only negative comment I have about this feature is that the search is not as instantaneous as one would expect.
Performance: This by far is the greatest feature of Safari and that will be prove to be IE’s / FF’s Achilles heel in the war with Safari. Any web-page that I have loaded in Safari loads much faster then in IE / FF. Have a look at Scott Hanselman’s browser speed shootout video for an indication of the performance.
Bug reporting: Though this feature does not really effect the browsing experience it is very useful especially at the beta stage. What makes this feature worth mentioning is the fact that it allows you submit a screenshot and the source of the current page with a click of a button. I must say that this makes things easier for those who are always reluctant to file bug reports because of the complexity it involves.
Font smoothing: Although many have been complaining about how Safari renders fonts and that they look ghastly - I believe that on my Dell Inspiron 9300 running Vista the reading experience is much better then in IE/FF.

The bad:

Live.com: Safari does not yet support the components required by Live.com - which I use as my default RSS reader.
NTLM support: NTLM is not yet supported in the current beta but it’s supposed to be in the final version.
Tab switching: The tab switching shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+{. That is way too complicated, I definitively prefer the IE/FF CTRL+TAB shortcut. Maybe this is customizable but I have not yet found from were to do this.
Mouse support: As yet Safari has no support for the front/back buttons and wheel on a mouse. But I bet this will fixed at a later stage.
Other issues: Minimizing / maximizing quality is flaky; some web-pages are broken (not really Safari’s fault); occasional crashes when opening dialog boxes.

Well that sums up my thoughts on Safari. Despite the issues I do believe that the Beta 3 is stable enough to use and I will definitely keep using it over the coming weeks - and will be looking forward to what Apple has in store for Safari in the future.

So my suggestion is head over to Apple’s website and give Safari a go.

EntroPay at Silverstone

Mark — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 12:20:11 +0000

As part of Ferrari’s 60th anniversary celebrations, next weekend (Saturday 9th -Sunday 10th) Ferrari GB will be hosting Racing Days at Silverstone. This will be Britain’s largest ever gathering of Ferraris. On the right you can see one of the Pirelli Ferrari formula classic cars that will be taking part and that has been partially sponsored by EntroPay.

My ‘new’ job…

Mark — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 08:34:04 +0000

In my previous post I had mentioned that I started a new job, nearly 2 years ago. Now since I am starting afresh it makes sense that I explain what this job is. Back in 2005 I joined Ixaris Systems, a UK based company that creates electronic payment solutions. Our core product is EntroPay, an online prepaid payment service.

What separates EntroPay from services such as PayPal, is that EntroPay offers consumers a real VISA debit card which can be used anywhere online were the VISA brand is accepted. Since EntroPay is a prepaid service it means that it removed credit risk and can thus be given to anyone. In addition EntroPay provides anonymity - consumers will only see EntroPay UK on their physical credit card statements, and in addition it is not required to provide online merchants with your personal details.

Now about my role… Initially I was mainly involved in maintaining and improving our custom built fraud module system. However over the past months I have gone from developer to tester, and am now in charge of setting up a testing team within R&D and obviously performing the actual testing. This has meant changing my mind-set from that of a developer, and I can say that it has not been an easy task - however I am ready for the challenge.

Well that sums up what my ‘new’ job is all about, I will definitely be writing more about challenges that I meet everyday.

Getting back to blogging

Mark — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 18:43:07 +0000

So it’s been nearly 2 years since I had my last blog, and now I am back to rejoin the revolution. The hiatus was mainly due to the start of a new job (more about that later) and the fact that I was not happy with the blogging engine that I had written.

But since I am always too busy to write a decent engine or setup one of the many engines out there, I decided to just go with WordPress. This seems to have all the features I need and took me a mere 2 hours to get everything up and running. Now it’s a matter of seeing how things unfold.

Well, that’s enough for the ‘opening speech’… Stay tuned for more - this time i promise to keep blogging regularly ;)