This was included in WebKit builds beginning several years ago, apparently, but is something I recently stumbled upon. Historically, Safari has been pretty insistent on making sure web page form fields (like drop-down menus and buttons) retain the Aqua look-and-feel. Web designers, on the other hand, have gotten used to choosing colors and font sizes for those controls, so they fit in with their site's design.
Hopefully everyone can now be happy: Safari 3 allows web designers to style form controls with CSS. The results are pictured: instead of a glossy, Aqua-like control, Safari displays a matte-finish control in the color and size of your choosing. You can even apply background images to form controls. If you don't apply styles to your controls, then Safari retains the Aqua look.
This shouldn't require any changes to code that's already written for other browsers: Safari 3 should pick right up on the formatting, and display it as the designer intended. It does, however, open up WebKit-specificCSS to your form controls.
Here's a great how-to that I've been meaning to post for a while. Blogger David F. Bills posted a tutorial for adding custom CSS signatures to your iPhone email defaults. The process involves copying over your preferences file and adding the CSS code to the SignatureKey preference.
This gets very interesting when Bills shows you how to add a custom image to your signature. You actually have to encode the image directly so it arrives with your message. Otherwise, spam blockers may block the image download if you just use an HTML link.
It's a really easy to follow method and I had very little trouble getting it set up to include the signature shown here. My biggest obstacle came from my tendency to paste everything in TextEdit. For this project, PropertyListEditor works better and more reliably due to the length of the pasted key.
August Trometer's new PDF book, Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Safari" just debuted. I am not much of a web designer myself but I may cough up the ten bucks to pick up a copy of this ebook. Topics according to the web page include Mobile Safari detection, Webkit-specific CSS attributes, and how to use iPhone-specific features via web tweaks. iUI, Joe Hewitt's iPhone-specific webpage design kit, doesn't appear in the write-up, and I'm not sure if Trometer covers using it or not.
Full disclosure, I have worked with AW/Pearson and will be doing so again.
As many, many readers noted, a new iPod touch ad appeared on TV over the weekend, and Apple has now posted it on their site. There's a long story behind this one that I hadn't heard yet, it would seem that the ad is a product of TBWA/Chiat/Day, just like most of Apple's ads, but the idea actually came from an 18-year-old English guy named Nick Haley. Nick created the ad (his original cut is above) back in September as a homage to Apple's new iPod, and it looks like someone in Cupertino noticed (or at least someone on Madison Avenue).
This might be old news to most of you, but I hadn't heard it and it's a good story. Apple has a reputation for getting their advertising from other sources, and it's nice to see them acknowledge an ad that came from someone who really loves their products.
Special thanks to reader running for figuring this one out for us: the song used in the ad is actually the same one used in this super weird Zune ad from last year. Even when Apple is completely upfront about the origin of their ad, they can't seem to keep from colliding with competitors in the same space.
Update: Calling it the iTouch was completely accidental, and I apologize. You guys are right-- it's the iPod touch, and I'm sorry for mistaking it. I guess the word was sitting in my brain and just wanted to come out.
SiliconUser takes a short look at ye olde Hypercard technology, Apple's precursor to the concepts that eventually became HTML and the World Wide Web. The project was originally created in 1985 as an easier way to create programs on the Macintosh-- it consisted of a "cards and stacks" metaphor, as in you created one card that linked to another card in the stack, and so on. Early Hypercard stacks just worked as organized information databases, but eventually Hypercard ended up doing more and more-- cards could work as applications in themselves, and the links between them served as a precursor to hyperlinks and what we know as the Internet today. Personally, I only used Hypercard very minimally, and it's hard for me to imagine as much functionality coming out of Hypercard as we've got with CSS, HTML, and PHP today. But Hypercard faithful (of which the numbers seem to be not quite known), held onto the application for a long time.
Hypercard's downfall came arguably not because it failed to stand up to new concepts, but because Apple, in a blunder, passed the program away to Claris, who tried to sell it rather than include it free in Macs. By the time Apple took it back, in 1993, the momentum was lost, and after a short period with Apple's Quicktime division, Hypercard was discontinued in 2004. Previous to that, Hypercard 3.0 was shown at WWDC 1996 (including the ability to display Hypercard stacks in a web browser, which might have been the key to keeping Hypercard alive), but that release never came. There are a few traces of Hypercard left on Apple's site, but as a technology, it's as dead as dead gets. Thanks, Thomas!
Realmac Software today has released the much-anticipated new version of RapidWeaver, their powerful WYSIWYG software that does a great job of filling the gap between iWeb and Dreamweaver. This new v3.6 ushers in a significant list of new features, such as:
Themes Styles - no more digging in HTML and CSS to customize your theme (unless you really want to)
6 completely new themes
Snippets - manage chunks of frequently used code instead of copy/pasting or constantly re-typing
New Flash Slideshow - completely rewritten and can now pull images from a Flickr feed
Improved blog, including tags and inline comment support
Easy creation of Lists
Detailed Publishing
And much, much more
Also, due to RapidWeaver's "skyrocketing" popularity, RealMac Software introduced a redesigned website today that includes a full-featured add-ons section where users can browse themes, plug-ins and code snippets, which of course also means 3rd parties nowhave one central RapidWeaver community where the can highlight their products.
With everything involved, I can completely understand Realmac Software's decision to make v3.6 a paid upgrade - current users (including MacHeist owners) can purchase a v3.6 license for $25, while a full license costs $49. A demo is of course available, so head over to the shiny new Realmac Software site to see everything RapidWeaver has to offer.
MacRabbit has releasedCSSEdit 2.5, a significant update to their fantastic CSS editing and manipulating application. As if CSSEdit 2.0 didn't bring enough cool features, v2.5 is almost like sneaking a peek at your v3.0 birthday presents that are stashed away in your parent's closet the day before your party. There is a list of what's new on the MacRabbit's blog.
Quite the update, but a free one for registered owners of v2.x. Users of 1.x can upgrade for $14.95 instead of CSSEdit's regular price of $29.95, and of course a demo is available from MacRabbit.
I'm not a designer, heck I'm hardly a writer, but I do know good software when I see it (and a cute company logo). CSSEdit is a good piece of software, and it has only gotten better with version 2, released today. But what is it, you ask? CSSEdit is the premier CSS editor (that's Cascading Style Sheets to you) for OS X. Version 2 is faster, can save CSS from a remote website better, and auto saves your work. The big ticket feature is previewing CSS for dynamic applications (think blogs).
A demo is available while a full license will cost $29.95.
I used the question mark because nothing is set in stone here, but TUAW reader Ann-CA tipped us off to a report at the DVD Newsroom that Hollywood might actually be close to lifting some of their over-the-top restrictions on DVD burning. This slightly loosened grip on their content could allow for things like DVD burning kiosks (it better be a darn fast burner), and it could also give the green light to vendors like the iTunes Music Store to allow burning of purchased videos.
The panel in charge of making and (finally) rewriting these rules is called the DVD Copy Control Association, according to DVD Newsroom. This DVDCCA is currently working on licensing the encryption technology (Content Scrambling System, or: CSS - nothing to do with web design) to digital distribution services, which is the key to allowing video burning.
No ETA is offered on when these rewritten rules could see the light of day, or when video burning could arrive in the iTMS. If Hollywood's reaction times of the past are any indication (and I genuinely hope they aren't), however, we might all be using 7th or 8th gen iPods before we can watch iTMS video on something besides Apple-branded devices.
CSS Tweak!, as you might imagine, can optimize and clean up your CSS code with the drag and drop of a file. The widget will report how much smaller your file is going to get, and its description states that your new file is "saved in the same location as the original", so I'm pretty sure this means it doesn't overwrite the original, but proceed (and backup!) with caution.
CSS Tweak! appears to be free and is available from Andy Peatling at his site, CssDev.
Earlier this month, the Omni Group offered a sneak peek of their upcoming 5.5 release of OmniWeb, their
feature-rich web browser that pre-dated Netscape by a year. If the preview piqued your interest, you might be
interested in their public beta. While this new release doesn't pack in a boatload of up-front whiz-bang features, they
have implemented some great back-end stuff like using a more recent version of WebKit than Safari, a Site Inspector
(also known as a DOM Inspector) and allowing site-specific CSS rules that update in real time.
John Hicks of hickdesign has a few more
details of what's new and upcoming in the final 5.5 release, and if you want to get in on the public beta, you'll have
to register in the Omni Group's forums in order to see the forum
thread with details on how to download your own copy.
I'll have to agree with Dvorak that mail apps that don't
allow HTML are lame lame lame. Apple's Mail will allow you to see HTML emails, but not compose them.
I guess that's supposed to be a security/annoyance feature, but sometimes I would really like to make an HTML email...
But at least we can have CSS for our signatures.
CSS, for those who don't know, is a way of styling web
pages. It's more precise than plain ol' HTML, and quite frankly, more powerful and better looking. My personal site
uses CSS exclusively (much to the chagrin of Netscape Navigator 4.7). Anyway, Melvin Rivera has a step-by-step tutorial on using CSS in your Mail.app
signatures. You may want to learn a little CSS first, if you've never tried it before. Just like using a Mac, you
may never go back.
Adding to the
small pile of gripes with the new technology Apple is using with iLife 06, such as complaints about iWeb's bloated CSS or RSS standards and photocasting, I just developed a
beef that I haven't really seen mentioned yet: the crummy new URL scheme for iWeb sites, both on and offline.
First of all, in the olden day the .Mac "homepage" did't seem to be case sensitive, as in:
homepage.mac.com/user will get you to the same place as /User. iWeb is a bit pickier, as a wedding site I'm working on
lives at web.mac.com/myuser/iWeb/Wedding/, but /wedding/ will result in a 404 error. Yes, a friend already reminded me
that "Unix = case sensitive," but I don't care. While this could be labeled a minor complaint, my fiance and
I have plenty of family members who aren't too hip on these computer thingies. They're going to get confused by
something silly and minor like this, and I'm sure our relatives aren't the only ones.
Next on my list is the
URL scheme itself. web.mac.com/user/iWeb/sitename? Could that get any less friendly? Granted
"homepage.mac.com" might seems a little unprofessional to some, but this new scheme feels pretty cumbersome
and just plain ugly. Why couldn't we simply have web.mac.com/user and web.mac.com/user/othersites, Apple?
Last but not least is how the new sites are organized in a user's iDisk. Old homepage sites still live in
iDisk/Sites/, while shiny new iWeb sites live in iDisk/Web/Sites/iWeb/sitename. Nevermind a discussion about how
needlessly buried that file structure is - I'm sure this dichotomy of old/new sites and content is going to confuse
plenty of .Mac customers if they ever want to get at any of those files, or make a backup of their sites or entire
iDisk.
But enough about my gripes, what do you guys think: do iWeb and its underpinning .Mac support have
more issues besides CSS and standards? Let's hear your thoughts.
Not long ago we posted a list of the best Dashboard widgets for web developers, as compiled by designer Lisa McMillan. Today's widget could easily join that list. It's called SeeSS, and it serves as a complete CSS reference. There are 140 CSS properties represented, and each includes inheritance, CSS compliancy, Safari support and more. It also does some cool resizing tricks to keep it from hogging too much space on your Dashboard. Check it out.
This was included in WebKit builds beginning several years ago, apparently, but is something I recently stumbled upon. Historically, Safari has been pretty insistent on making sure web page form fields (like drop-down menus and buttons) retain the Aqua look-and-feel. Web designers, on the other hand, have gotten used to choosing colors and font sizes for those controls, so they fit in with their site's design.
Here's a great how-to that I've been meaning to post for a while. Blogger David F. Bills posted a tutorial for adding 
August Trometer's new PDF book, Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Safari" 
SiliconUser takes a short look at 
CSS Tweak!, as you might imagine, can optimize and clean up your CSS code with the drag and drop of a file. The widget will report how much smaller your file is going to get, and its description states that your new file is "saved in the same location as the original", so I'm pretty sure this means it doesn't overwrite the original, but proceed (and backup!) with caution.
I'll have to agree with Dvorak that mail apps that don't
allow HTML are lame lame lame. Apple's Mail will allow you to see HTML emails, but not compose them.
I guess that's supposed to be a security/annoyance feature, but sometimes I would really like to make an HTML email...
But at least we can have CSS for our signatures. 
Adding to the
small pile of gripes with the new technology Apple is using with iLife 06, such as complaints about 
Not long ago we 
