I'm now working for Kineticode and one of the perks of working here is a company iBook. This is my first real exposure to a Mac and I must say that I am pleased at how easy it is to use and how sensible so many features are. That being said, how the hell did Apple create Safari? I can't upload hidden files (such as a .htaccess file), tabbing to the next field in a form seems to be horribly broken and I've had images render wider than the browser with a horizontal scroll bar appearing. Oh, and the "remember password" checkbox is a joke. Sometimes it remembers. Sometimes it doesn't. Time to go back to Firefox.
Re:Wouldn't bother with firefox...
Ovid on 2004-12-03T16:36:15
I was noticing that Theory was using Camino and I must admit it looked sharp. Those widgets are part of what they call Cocoa, right?
Are there any problems with Firefox or is Camino just prettier?
Re:Wouldn't bother with firefox...
Elian on 2004-12-03T17:06:02
The widgets are just part of the OS X widget set. You can get to them with Cocoa apps (in, say, perl, if you've got CamelBones installed) but you can with Carbon apps as well. They're all there for any GUI app on the system.
Firefox itself works fine, but it's more obviously not an OS X native application, and using it gets really jarring switching between it and other applications. You can get used to it, but I've never really seen the point.:) Re:Wouldn't bother with firefox...
apotheon on 2004-12-04T08:55:18
I'm getting the impression your a Mac user first. I've become a *nix user first, and find some of the idiosyncrasies of Macs to be somewhat aggravating, not to mention how closed off the system is in comparison to fully open source OSes like Linux. These days (since the advent of MacOS X) I'd prefer a Mac over a Windows machine, of course, and would even like to have one to play around with entirely on its own merits, but the Mac GUI isn't my favorite thing in the world by any stretch.
In any case, I tend to not care one whit if an application's GUI doesn't perfectly match the standard GUI of the system I'm using, so long as A) the application is satisfactorily functional and B) the behavior of the thing is sufficiently intuitive. For my purposes, Firefox very impressively satisfies both requirements.
I've used Safari, and it drives me batty. I also don't like the relative lack of pure-hotkey goodies in other browsers than Firefox, including similar Mozilla knockoffs, though I've not tried Camino in particular. If Camino acts like Firefox, I'm sure I'd love it. If it acts like a Safari that just works better, or like the Mozilla suite's browser component, or like Galeon, I'd probably loathe it.
Widgets mean next to nothing to me. If widget themes and the like have any notable effect on me, it's typically only in the form of aggravation, like the Windows XP "Fisher Price" widget set. I tend to feel that the interface should not ever be something you think about. When you have to think about the interface, it has failed. That includes an interface being thoroughly cute with lots of fancy colors.
