So, last night I mentioned I chose Subtext over dasBlog due to some rendering issues in Safari.  Ok, I didn't mention it quite like that but you get the idea.  Since my main machine at home is an iMac, Safari support wasn't crucial but it was the equivalent of a coin toss for me.    

Scott Hanselman pointed out in his comment, rightly so, that it looked fine to him.  I know what I saw, so I quickly downloaded Safari beta 3 on my windows dev machine at work to get a screen shot of what I was talking about.  Unfortunately, he's right.  It looks exactly the same as it does in IE 7, and as it is intended I presume.

This can't be right.  I know what I saw.

At that point I was convinced that it must be an issue exclusive to OS X.  I rushed home this evening and started opening browsers. 

Here's what I found:

IE 7 on Win XP	Safari 3 Beta WinXP	Safari 2 OS X

          
So I'm not crazy, nor is Scott Hanselman.  We're both right. 

On that note, I decided to get the Safari 3 beta for OS X and see if it's Safari 2 or just Safari on OS X that's the issue.

Here's Safari 3 Beta on OS X Tiger:


  Safari 3 Beta OS X


So, it's obviously Safari 2 that has rendering issues.  I guess the question remains how important is it to support Safari 2 on OS X?  Probably not very, but it did swing my vote.

(As a side note, all this screen grabbing must have tore my monitor - I just found a dead pixel.  Not happy about that.)

Cheers.

A couple of years ago, not too long after building my last computer, I purchased a very nice, very large LCD monitor. It's a Samsung SyncMaster 213T 21 inch, 1600x1200 resolution, pretty much the cat's whiskers at the time. Several years ago when I bought it, it was pretty much the best thing available in the retail space without jumping up to the $2000 pro range.

I bought the Apple mini-dvi to dvi adapter and set my 21" Samsung as my secondary monitor. I was chuffed, thoroughly satisfied with myself, and absolutely pumped about the amount of screen real estate I was going to have.

I turned it on. Man, do I have a ton of real estate - the 24" iMac is running 1920x1200 beside the Samsung running 1600x1200. Boo-yah!

One thing though...

This Mac screen makes the Samsung look *terrible*. Apple does mention on their site that the 24" iMac is, purportedly, 40% brighter than the 20" iMac. I can tell you that it's most definitely brighter than the 21" Samsung. Let's look at the stats:

Samsung: 250 nits 500:1 contrast
24" iMac: 400 cd/m 700:1 contrast

Stunning. I had no idea what I'd been missing all this time! The iMac is so much more vivid and gorgeous, and all the while I was looking at my Samsung thinking how wonderful it was. The difference, especially side-by-side, is truly remarkable.

While everyone is ranting about simplicity and common sense with design, how about we discuss the missing option on my iMac?

Let's be clear, the 24 inch iMac is a giant monitor with a computer built-in.

Last night, I started downloading XCode, which is a svelt 932 MB.  I wanted to turn the monitor off and leave the computer on to download while I become a Viking. 

Can't.

What?

For the love of all things good, who designed this thing? 

Touch the power button.... it goes to sleep.

Restart?  No.

Sleep?  No.

Shutdown?  No.

Where's the 'turn off monitor' feature for crying out loud?

Wait, I can go to system preferences, power settings and adjust the computer to never sleep and the monitor to blank out after 1 minute of idle time!

Ridiculous.

Steve, I want a monitor off option on the apple menu.  How hard can this be?  You shut it off if my computer is idle, how about giving me the option to do it manually?

Oy.

It just works.

I'm at a complete loss for words.

disclaimer: I'm still in my honeymoon phase with my new iMac, so anything I say forthwith should be considered suspect. The only things I can come up with to describe it are that it makes KDE look like a wannabe little brother, and Windows * look plain ridiculous.

I've been having hardware trouble with my main machine for a couple of months.  It's a dual Athlon-MP with 1.5GB Ram that I built in 2003.  I realize computers don't last forever but I was expecting to get more life out of it than this.  Finally, last week it started flaking out and became totally unreliable.  I opened the case and swapped parts for a while but nothing helped.  Time to buy a new computer.  I labored over whether to build a new one or buy a manufactured PC like a Dell.  I haven't actually bought an off-the-shelf computer for over 10 years but I'm a little tired of building them.  I'm no fan of most manufactured computers like HP for a number of reasons including the whole concept of a "restore" disk.  So, I spec'd out dozens of different computers, parts, etc.

After much deliberation, I bought a 24" iMac.

I confess, I fell for the marketing.  I'm hoping it lives up to the hype.  It's supposed to be delivered tomorrow.

The allure of OS X was too much to resist.  Bootcamp/Parallels pretty much made the deal.  I have grown, right or wrong, utterly dependent on Quicken.  However, Quicken Mac is less than stellar, nay less than acceptable, if one can believe the reviews all over the internet.  Besides, I still have my laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu.  If all else fails, I switch it back to WinXp.

Hopefully tomorrow evening I'll be making my first post from aqua.

Cheers.