Lizenzen bringen Probleme

Allerdings soll es bei diesem Codec in Zukunft einige lizenzrechtliche Probleme geben und die Suche nach Alternativen ist die einzig vernünftige Lösung.

Die Zukunft

Bei modernen Browsern der neuen Generation wie Google Chrome, Firefox 4, IE9, etc. ist ein Audio- und Videoplayer bereits integriert, um das Video-Tag einzubinden. Das Format WebM mit dem VP8 Codec ist bereits gut unterstützt.

Google ist sogar einen Schritt weitergegangen und hat H.264 direkt rausgeworfen und setzt nur noch auf VP8. Bei Youtube wird ebenfalls alles dahin codiert und abgelegt. Somit ist der Trend scheinbar festgelegt.

Press play on tape

Das Abspielen innerhalb der oben genannten Browser funktioniert bereits. Einfach die Videodatei mit dem Browser entweder über das Menu öffnen oder per Drag und Drop reinwerfen. Auch andere Wiedergabeprogramme wie VLC zeigen die Inhalte einwandfrei.

Encodieren

Leider gibt es auf dem Mac mit OS X 10.6.6 noch keine native Unterstützung, doch es gibt eine sehr bequeme Methode für Quicktime 7 Pro. Einfach das Paket WebM Component Installer.pkg installieren und schon kann man im WebM-Format exportieren.

Ein kurzer Test mit dem VP8 Codec hat sogar noch kleinere Dateien als mit H.264 Codec erzeugt – allerdings muss ich das erst noch genauer unter die Lupe nehmen.

As a Webkit lover, of course I love the Safari browser. It is fast, reliable, powerful and easy to use. I wish Firefox would use its engine, but there are lot of discussions in the Mozilla forums, that it will remain using the Gecko engine.

From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit.

Arstechnica

Alternatives

The only alternative I know what uses Webkit is the Google’s Chrome. Unfortunately, they say, a Mac version is not available, yet. But there is! You can download the developer edition, which is a completely compiled and ready-to-use application. Install it by just dragging the icon to the Application folder like any other program.

After the first start it asks for importing bookmarks. So I did, and it works very well. The passwords are taken from OS X‘s Keychain Access and you do not need to enter all your identifications, again.

At the first look, compared to Safari

• it looks a bit more stylish,
• the preferences are easier to use,
• performance feels better on loading pages, working on sites containing Flash objects,
• the developer menu can be found at View, instead of a own menu column,
• no need for an extra search bar, just type into the address field.

Unfortunately I am missing two features, but I can shortly live without:

• Syncing the bookmarks with MobileMe or back to Safari,
• the option to merge all windows together

What Safari does not have is

• the function “New incognito window”.

Pages you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.

• opening every tab or window as a own thread
  • if one crashes, not all of the browser activity is lost,
  • if one gets unresponsive, you can work with all the others.
• jumping through search results initiated with CMD+F.

Conclusion

I am using it now for a several time. It works very stable and fast. The workflow is great, everything works fine so far. This my new default browser!

A browser is one of the most important tools nowadays and so it is important that it behaves fast, easy to use and recource saving.

On Youtube they introduced “Google Chrome Frame” which is a plugin for the Internet Explorer. This makes it possible to render websites with the Chrome engine with all its advantages on speed and quality inside Internet Explorer.

I am not sure, if that is good, because I absolutely dislike the Internet Explorer because of all those uncomfortable differences compared to the other browsers. Any further existing options on testing websites makes it harder for a web developer to test it out. My web dream is without beeing Internet Explorer.

Credits: Logo was re-created by myself from their respective owners Google and Microsoft.

But it is not that free I have expected to get it. You need to enter your Live ID to receive the serial keys and to get the end link for the leech.

Begginning to write this article I put my Live ID userdata in and I am still watching the green spin wheel letting me authenticate. I am afraid, this could take another while.

But after all let’s see if Microsoft has learned something and what got else copied by Apple.

Update:

Taking the Firefox browser instead of Safari took me to the download almost immediately. I tested it out several times, it looks like deceitful blocking.

Merge windows

To feel as fit as a fiddle on my Mac’s screen I need to have it clean with only that windows in front I am currently working in.

For how to hide unwanted applications without termination I blogged the article The secrets of hide and seek.

The Eventbox is my best friend when getting updated on RSS feeds, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. When clicking the arrow to see the original or full details it opens the source in Safari as a new window.

If you click many details, you will get many Safari windows open. You can configure Safari to put them in tabs. I have not enabled this, because I prefer that when applications open a browser it should be a fresh window.

When having lots of Safari windows, but you want to have them just in only one and seperated by tabs, you can go to the menu Window and select merge all windows.

The greatest feature I like is to make screenshots of Safari. You can specify a screen resolution and it is rendered with the Safari engine and stored as an image.

This is nice to have all your links pictures or thumbnails. Unfortunately you can only either add a URL or take the active one from Safari.

LittleSnapperBatch

But I want to have all open tabs as websnapshots. And to solve that I wrote my first Mac Application called LittleSnapperBatch.zip using the powerful AppleScript. I hope you find it useful, too.

Step 1: Open your favourite flashvideo – let’s say on Youtube. Then open the Activity Window using the menubar.

Activity Window

Step 2: Now you see the activity window which shows every data file transfer from the current open tab. When the video is playing, then you will notice that the download is still in progress and the transfered size is increasing. But, if the video is already stopped, then it will be line with the largest file size. Just do a doubleclick and watch the flashvideo downloading.

File List

Step 3: That’s it! Once downloaded you can play the flv-file with Quicktime.

Downloading flv

Hint:

When you are not able to watch and listen to flv files, then you need the codecs! You may download Perian to have your Mac enabled playing those and AVI videos.

Safari 4

The new Safari browser is my favourite browser since the the release 3. It is so fast, that no other browser can beat it and the display is really great.

Due to I am developing websites I love Safari, because it supports DOM, CSS and XML so well like really no other does. Safari and Firefox, are cool, but anyhow I am more familar with Safari.

Now, Apple just has released the Safari 4 with innovative features that are really cool. You may have seen some of them as plugins for Firefox, but now it is built in natively and it works so damn fast and reliable. I am absolutely juiced up.

The interesting part is, what’s new? You can read the details on Apple’s website, but let me tell you with my own words.

The tabs and its plus sign are now embedded into the title. That looks weird, but I needed some time to get used to it. In the end, it saves some space on the screen and that is absolutely what I do prefer.

A new overview is embedded as a grid icon into the bookmark bar and clicking on it shows a 3D thumbnail page of the most visited ones. Clicking on a icon zooms into the page with a really nice and fluently transition. It can be customized by nailing favourites or the amount of thumbs to be displayed.

The history search went much faster and you can browse through it using the great cover flow previewing the visited sites. So you fill find back much more easier where you have been before.

Apple did not forget the developers and the tools gained some features and display options like Javascript error detection and more.

If you need to find something, the search eventually inherited a live find feature during typing.

The zoom function is now completely different. Before it just scaled the font, but not the images. Now everything is zoomed in or out. This gives also a nice option to make screenshots of large websites.

It is still beta, but I love it! By the way, there is a version for the PC users available, too.

CSS frames

I am a big fan of creating websites with CSS. You may know, that is possible to have a frame like behaviour without having real frames using the iframe tags.

The secret is to put some divisions at the right place and to give the right properties. It results with only having one section scrollable and the rest of the site will remain and keep a great design. A good inspirating example is given by Stuart A Nicholls.

I have made a design using that technique and was testing it on the iPhone. But anyhow I did not know how to scroll the scrollable content. By accident I took two fingers, and that’s it. You can scroll those areas by using two fingers!

ClickToFlash

Flash embedded into websites normally slows down surfing a lot. All the power of your DSL or cable connection is lost, because it takes a lot time to initiate that flash objects.

Nowadays, Adbobe Flash can bring a big advantage like an audio or video player. But I think, it makes only sense to start them when clicking on that. I am sure, you agree, that it is mostly misused for unwanted and animated adverts.

For heavens sake I am not alone with that opinion and Rentzsch made a Webkit extension which will work on Apple’s Safari.

It is called ClickToFlash and it shows you, that there is a embedded Flash object, but it is not loaded until you click on it’s placeholder. Having that tiny extension activated, surfing brought me much more fun and speed.

Thank you so much, Rentzsch.

Internet Explorer Tester

If you are programming or designing online content, then you always have the same problem as me:

Does the site look good and work on any browser?

The best way to find out, is of course to install all those browsers. In my opinion it is important to check at least the damn Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera. On the Mozilla engines almost everything works fine, because the interpret the W3C standards much better.

But the big difference is the damn Internet Explorer. You have to check for the versions, because 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 (beta) do all react different. Unfortunately, most people having a damn PC are using the damn Internet Explorer, because they are to noob or to lazy to install something better.

The next problem is, that you can not have multiple versions of the damn Internet Explorer installed on one Windows operating system.

For that instance I found a very nice free Windows tool called IE Tester. You can open a tab for the specified browser version and compare to others.

Resize text areas

Safari is my favourite Browser, because it is really quick and intuitive for me. It has tons of features and uses a way for working with tabs which I do prefer against any other browser.

A cool feature which should be available and I have seen in Safari only, so far is the ability to resize text area fields in forms.

If the space is too small or even too large, you just can pick the resize panel on the bottom right corner handle and drag it to the required size.

Especially when writing longer comments or blog articles like this, it is absolutely great to see more information on a big screen.

Malware

I am really very confused about some comments on my Blog.

This happened since I wrote an article about Apache2 and Perl. The comments are containing a part copied from the original content and the senders homepage URL is somewhat like http://sun.mygamesok.com/200811/server-error-29.html (do better not click).

Safari 3.2.1 has now a new option in the preferences at the security icon. It is called “Fraudulent sites” and can be checked with the option “Warn when visiting a fraudulent website”.

When getting the details provided by Google, than it looks really horror what virus and trojan trash is on that site. But of course, I could not leave to click.

Then came a well designed site containing senseless summaries of server containing subject matter.

I received many comments and all lead to different URLs but having the same text on it. To protect you (espacially windows guys) I removed them, of course!

Domain Typing extended

Safari on the iPhone is really the best browser I have ever seen on a mobile device.

I had a lot of good mobiles in use before. Among them were MDA Pro or Blackberry 8110.

There is really no comparision in conform, speed and intuitive usability.

Typing of domains is just a snag and of course Apple integreated a well hidden feature giving you much more afford.

By default you see “.com“ in your keyboard.

Hold your finger on it and expands to the most other common domain endings like “.de”, “.net”, “.org”.