happy, healthy, effective online living
There’s more talk about the different browsers available for Mac over on theappleblog. Tanner Morrison gives an overview and his criteria to explain why he uses both Camino and Opera. More good stuff - check it out.
One of the first things you will need to decide as a new Mac Switcher (which I am, BTW, have I mentioned that?) is what browser you are going to use. If you have just come from PC Land, then you have probably been using Firefox, or possibly IE 7, and hopefully not IE 6. When you fire up your new Mac, you’ll find the Mac-specific
Safari, but you’ll also notice that you can download a universal binary of Firefox.
On top of that, you may have had a smart friend tell you about Camino, a Mac-specific implementation of Firefox which seems to be significantly faster than it’s ground-breaking cross-platform brother.
If you’re still trying to figure out the differences between all these browsers and have yet to understand what “webkit” and “cocoa” mean (that was me a short while ago), then how will you know which browser is the best?
I personally started out using Camino, on the notion that it is faster and leaner than Firefox alone. For those who have spent any time in PC Land, Firefox is pretty much ingrained in our minds as the best browser to use. So, seeing that Camino is built just for OSX and is faster than Firefox, it sounded like the obvious choice.
Now, I am not interested in putting all manner of extensions and plugins into my browser. Basically, I just want a lean, mean browser with tabs, easy keyboard navigation, and fast browsing. I also want to save sessions, as I open a lot of tabs and keep them open as I jump around between ideas and projects throughout the day. So, both Safari and Camino offer the minimalist and apparently solid performance that I’m after, though Camino requires a bit of tweaking to get session-saving functionality, and I haven’t figured out how to do this in Safari just yet.
Now, this review at Macintalk not only gives some objective evidence of browser features and performance, but clearly explains the differences between the four main Mac browsers. As you can see from one of their performance evaluations below, Safari clearly beats out Camino for speed.
Since I’m not ready to pay for a web browser (OmniWeb), I’m now a Safari user. I’ll think about using WebKit over the next few weeks.
Thanks to Dan for highlighting this review at TUAW.com.
Technorati Tags: safari, mac, mac+switcher, camino, browser, firefox
The latest Inside the Net podcast features an interview with Mena Trott, co-founder of SixApart. SixApart is the company that brings us Moveable Type, LiveJournal, Typepad and now a brand new service called Vox.
As I mentioned, I am a big fan of Typepad, despite just moving this blog off of Typepad and over to Wordpress. Typepad is a fantastic way to get started in blogging and to write without having to spend much time working on technical details of your blog.
In this interview, however, Mena talks about Vox, a new service which is currently in beta that aims to make it even easier to write, publish, share photos and experiences - but with a specifically-designated community. Vox allows you to define a specific friends and family community and then to grant permissions around the publicity of each bit of the information you publish.
Vox is a great way to setup a blog oriented around keeping your family up to date about some of your specific experiences, when you don’t necessarily want to share this with just anyone who may read your blog. The theme Mena keeps coming back to is “getting your mom to blog” - the idea is that Vox makes it not only easy but personal and personable to share your content with just the people you choose.
Vox is currently in beta and is invitation-only, and they are targeting a fall public release. However, you can sign up for a possible early invitation on the SixApart Vox page. Vox will be ad-supported and free for users, and the ads currently on the site appear to be well-integrated and minimally intrusive.
Vox seems like just another example of how Mena and the team at SixApart are always looking for ways to make their product better and serve their user base. This attitude is one reason why I loved Typepad and can still so highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get started blogging.
I’ve been busy redesigning and migrating this blog from it’s initial home at Typepad to a new host and different blog software. I’m now running Wordpress and am using Dreamhost to host this site. I’ve also updated the look and feel and have further refined the purpose of this blog.
Why did I switch from Typepad? First of all, I am extremely happy and impressed with the Typepad service. They have really worked hard over the past couple of months to add new features and make it easy to add content and “bling” to their blogs. I started my blog experience with Typepad over a year ago and it gave me the perfect opportunity to figure out what blogging is all about, to learn some of the mechanics and technical details and to find my voice.
Being the technical tinkerer that I am, however, I found that I wanted to do more than Typepad would let me do. I am a Plus subscriber, which is the middle subscription level, and allows me to do a lot of customization of the blog design and layout. However, only the Pro level provides the ability to actually edit templates and CSS stylesheets. As I had more ideas of what I wanted to do and what I wanted to learn how to do, I realized I wanted more control and wanted to be able to customize and completely design my site myself.
For less than the yearly price of a Typepad Pro account (currently $149.50 / yr) I found that I could use a hosting service and the free open source Wordpress system and completely design and setup what I wanted to do. For hosting, I found that Dreamhost offers an incredible deal on disk space, bandwidth and services - including a one-click install of Wordpress. I have been completely satisfied thus far with Dreamhost and highly recommend it.
Also, Wordpress is a very powerful and highly extensible publishing system that, although may be a bit intimidating for those who haven’t worked with code before, really does make things simple and elegant.
Finally, after writing about several different topics and really exploring a mix of personal, leadership, Tablet PC, business and general Internet gadgetry, I have come to a better understanding of what I really want to write about in this blog. I have re-subtitled it “happy, healthy, effective online living”, and will focus on how I’m learning to best live the online, connected life by mastering technology rather than becoming a slave to it.
So come on in, have a look around, and let me know what you think. Thanks for visiting!
Technorati Tags: blog+platform, dreamhost, design, typepad