Tag Archives: Remember the Milk

In love with Fluid.app

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fluid-logo.pngHow did I not know how wonderful this was before? It’s not like it just came out yesterday. And it’s free!!

Fluid is an application you can use to create Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) on the Mac based on the Safari rendering engine (WebKit). The author freely admits that the concept was inspired by Mozilla Prism, which does something similar for Firefox and its rendering engine, Gecko. As well as Adobe AIR which brings its own tricks to the party beyond just duplicating a browser.

The beauty of a browser like Google Chrome is that each tab runs in its own space in memory. If a web app misbehaves, you can shut down that tab and free up its resources without bringing down the whole browser. Fluid brings a similar concept to the Mac in an oh-so-elegant way that relieves most of the pain I had in switching from Firefox to Safari.

As a matter of fact, I tried the latest Firefox release candidate the other day and found that I still prefer Safari for day-to-day use. Fluid-created SSBs make the experience near perfect for me.

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Use the Push wisely, my son

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One of the most heralded new features of iPhone 3.0 is Push notifications. That means that even though an application is still not allowed to run in the background, it can periodically call home for information and display a message and/or badge to let you know of changes.

This can be incredibly useful or incredibly annoying. I can’t stand applications that display a badge I already read. When I’ve ready the alert, take the badge away unless you have something new to tell me. And I certainly will never, ever authorize a game to notify me of anything (I’m talking to you, Tap Tap Revenge). Just because a feature is there doesn’t mean you have to use it.

This morning, I was thrilled to see that my favorite task manager, Remember the Milk, now has push notifications. This makes sense. Pop up alerts for due tasks! Finally!

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Living in Safari in a Firefox world

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I’ve had it with Firefox 3. It’s slow, crashy, a resource hog and did I mention it’s slow? Not quite IE 7 slow, but not nearly as fast as I wish it was. Yes, it could be add-ins slowing it down, but I really don’t run that many as you’ll see below. I don’t even use Greasemonkey.

At least until Firefox 3.5 (which I know is as soon as next week) or a release version of Chrome for Mac comes along, I am trying to run with Safari 4 as my default browser. It’s tons faster, especially for heavy sites I live in like Salesforce and Fever. And while it can be as much of a resource hog as Firefox, it takes a lot longer to get to the must-quit-and-restart-this-beast point than Firefox does.

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