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Linked List: April 30, 2005

Saturday, 30 April 2005

Safari and Setting Your Default Feed Reader 

Apple did the Right Thing with regard to Safari’s new built-in support for RSS: it allows you to specify any app as your default RSS reader. So if you use, say, NetNewsWire or PulpFiction, you can subscribe to feeds in your preferred reader simply by clicking the “RSS” link in a Safari browser window.

Omni Group Considering Switching OmniWeb to Web Kit 

From a post to the OmniWeb users mailing list, from OmniWeb product manager Scott Maier:

Beyond 5.1.1 one of the most immediate concerns is updating the engine to make use of the latest updates that Apple has released. At this time we’re investigating two possible avenues:

  1. Sticking with our customized versions of WebCore and JavaScriptCore
  2. Moving OmniWeb on top of WebKit.

Our customized versions of Apple’s frameworks are A Good Thing™ for many reasons, but it means that we’re constantly having to play catch- up as Apple releases new versions of the frameworks. It also means that a lot of work is involved when it comes to supporting new technologies like the scriptability extensions recently added to the Netscape Plug-In API — something we would practically get for free from WebKit.

I think in the long run, switching to Web Kit would be best. As of today, with Safari 1.3 (for 10.3) and 2.0 (for 10.4), OmniWeb’s rendering engine is way behind again. Whereas a Web Kit-based browser like Shiira has the exact same renderer as Safari.

Automator Programming Guide 

Developer documentation for one of the best new features in Tiger. What’s neat is that you can implement actions in Objective-C, AppleScript, or both. (Via Brent Simmons.)

DropDMG 2.6 

Another app update with Automator support. I’m much more intrigued by the apps that are adding Automator support than those that are adding Dashboard widgets. DropDMG nows supports the creation of .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 files, because Tiger’s version of tar finally maintains Mac file metadata.

Quicksilver b40 

Tiger-only update to Blacktree’s free launcher-and-all-sorts-of-other-cool-things utility.