Update Fever Week – Like Shark Week only Better

Safari.jpg

Yesterday Apple updated Safari to 3.1.1 fixing two bugs but not putting in the new WebKit that's passing the Acid3 test 100/100. Too bad. I was looking forward to that, but they may have a lot more work to do on that guy before it's ready for release. Still, it's nice that they keep on top of the problems folks have found and release updates as often as they do. Sometimes it's still amazing how big a memory footprint Safari can get to be on my laptop - easily passing the 200MB size with only two tabs open. The cache and 'history' of the working browser has got to be enormous. Anyway, it's great to have that updated.

Transmit.jpg

The next update I got this morning was Transmit 3.6.5, and while I really like the work the Panic guys do, I'm still a little surprised that they don't have a more 'minimal' interface to Transmit. What they have is fine, if you're using an FTP client like a file browser, but most of the time for me it's more like a small extension to the system. Make it as seamless as possible - no need for big borders - more like Cyberduck. That's a minimalistic interface that I like for file transfer. Nothing that gets in the way or takes up pixels that it doesn't need. I like all the features, and I appreciate what they are doing, but I think it'd just be nice to be able to have an alternate GUI that was less into borders fluff, and more into "just the goods".

Camino.jpg

The last update this morning was Camino 1.6. While I'm not a big user of Camino, I can appreciate what they are doing, and at times it's nice to be able to fire up another browser and see if the web site I'm having problems with works any better with Camino than Safari. It's fast, clean, and a nice Mac app, so you gotta keep up to date and make sure they didn't throw in something really cool that could make it the best browser on the platform. This release is supposed to have a few nice GUI improvements and I'm sure they're nice. I just haven't had a lot of time to play with it. Maybe this weekend.

Like any self-respecting computer goober, I love getting the updates and seeing what others have done with their code. In each of these cases, it's more than just an app - these are things that the developers are seriously proud of, and they should be. This is some of the best software out there, written by passionate, dedicated folks. And it shows. Gotta love that.