Safari 5’s url-entry bar now searches through your history and bookmarks. This is annoying. It does a substring match on the complete URL and title of every entry in your history and bookmarks. This is stupid and broken and useless.

Want a perfect example? Let’s say I just got email that included a UPS tracking number, and I want to go to UPS. When I start typing the string “ups”, what does Safari 5 “helpfully” append to it?

ell-widgets/click.html?ie=UTF8&id=IzuMqjLyzABOgXIyvBfq%2Bb4Thlnt8bTV7mga4c387gBUh2iRceLRXyomIKkOqOwVt3Ls7s%2BXyUX%2F3K9ODY3sNS1N31swH02jL9e94x8tKmHptCn2WgLY1glo3Pjt6JsyfGmIkaAYQvXrtZF7iDSlpbLQ6v4CpAI7LCrB28mooRdPZqrKQ7jVzq2B1ajW6M9X

In the right half of the URL bar, in gray text, it shows the beginning of this amazing string, which turns out to be the result of clicking on one of the “people who bought X” buttons on Amazon. Yeah, that’s exactly where anyone who types “ups” wants to go, every time. Stupidstupidstupid, and no way to disable it.

With regards to Safari 5’s new Reader mode (whose availability is subject to unknown and quite whimsical heuristics):

1. Palatino is rarely appropriate for online reading. Most serif faces not specifically designed for screen use should be avoided, in fact; sub-pixel anti-aliasing only buys you so much.
2. Setting body text fully justified is inevitably a bad idea online. Not only does Safari lack hyphenation, but proper hyphenation is language-dependent anyway. More to the point, the fixed column size in Reader creates rivers of white space in many documents, even for users who don't increase the text size. Those who do are doomed to unreadable crap.
3. Even if Safari did support hyphenation, you should still avoid justification, because the screen resolution simply isn't fine enough to do it well. Not even the magic pixie dust in the pixels of the new iPhone display give sufficient resolution to produce both crisp Palatino and evenly justified columns. There's a reason that 1200dpi is considered low for printing actual books.
4. Open up the stylesheet; hiding it inside the Safari bundle forces people to choose between invalidating your code signatures and putting up with your poor design choices.
5. Allow the new Extensions code to load into Reader pages.

While I’m here, every version of Safari has suffered from the problem that right-clicking a link disables all mouseover events on that page until you click somewhere else. Even the builtin cursor change on mouseover is disabled. This remains true in this latest major revision. Has no one else ever told you about it?

I see that you’ve replaced all of the category links in the App Store with nebulous fluff like “creative editing kit”, “apps from tv ads”, “new home”, and other non-categories. In addition, you now devote a substantial percentage of the front page to a list of top grossing apps. Please, if you would, explain how this list has any value to a consumer? Isn’t it just a way to tell potential developers “there’s gold in them thar hills!”?

Seriously, am I, as an app buyer, supposed to be attracted by the fact that some people were willing to shell out $899.99 for copies of a surveillance-camera viewer? Could you maybe take some of the money you’re getting from these top grossers and spend it on making the store searchable and browsable?

As much as I would prefer a tablet computer to be an honest-to-gosh computer, rather than a media consumption device with support for small-scale commercial applications, I am not opposed to the concept of a “limited” device. I just think Apple has limited theirs too much.

What would be the killer app for me, something that would justify the cost of an iPad? A full-featured light table. Here’s the scenario:

It's 6am, and I'm out on the coast with a thermos full of hot tea, my best camera, a GPS tracker, and a tripod. I shoot the sunrise on the bay, mist and fog giving way to a sparkling ocean. When the light becomes too harsh, I pack up, find a restaurant for a late breakfast, and settle in to examine the fruits of my labor.

I plug first the tracker, then the camera into The Tablet, watching as it files away the RAW images and geotags the matching JPEGs for preview, and then I begin. Sort, arrange, compare, focus-check, rate, annotate, crop, rotate, and flag for further editing, all with a flick of a finger. Then off to the zoo for more pictures, and then lunch and more review.

Back at home, I plug The Tablet into my computer, and it syncs up with Aperture, seamlessly importing the RAW images with all of my annotations and edits intact. Any time I want, I can sync parts of my library back to The Tablet for further review.

Key elements:

• It uses the JPEGs for review, but imports the RAW images as well, and preserves the link between them. Apple's supplied Photo viewer won't do that.
• It supports standalone GPS trackers as a data source, which means reading USB mass-storage devices, something the iPad currently doesn't allow.
• It syncs to something other than iTunes, passing arbitrary data. Yeah, that doesn't work right now, either; most third-party apps have to sync through an ad-hoc wireless connection, which is painfully slow for this use.

It is genuinely new functionality, something I cannot do today on a desktop or laptop. There’s nothing in software right now that gives photographers the power they had with a light table, a loupe, and a box of slides. Sure, you can keep track of 50,000 images on your hard drive, but it’s basically just a poorly-edited dumpster. A real light table will teach you more about photography, your camera, your lenses, and your subject than iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom, and Photoshop put together.

(all of this would be just as cool to have on a larger tablet computer, of course, especially a home machine with a 30-inch multitouch monitor/canvas, but one dream at a time)

[Update: Now that the camera-connection kit is out, there’s a little more information available. Not from Apple, sadly; their product description and documentation are still quite vague. Short version: it will import some raw formats into Photos, as well as some movie formats; it doesn’t appear to sync seamlessly back to iPhoto on a Mac, yet, but can be used as a manual import source; and it has some problems with MicroSD. So, not useless for my scenario, but still very 1.0 and limited. The surprising news is that people were able to connect USB headsets through it and get them to work; no thumbdrives, as expected, but at least they’re letting some data in, unofficially.]

Let me see if I’ve got the story straight: someone sees an unattended iPhone in a bar, takes it home, plays with it, figures out it’s a bit unusual, sends out feelers for a buyer, sells it to Gizmodo for an undisclosed sum, and the only person whose name makes the headline is the Apple employee who lost it.

Did I get that right? It looks like there are two honest-to-gosh criminals and a victim in this story, and the victim is the only one suffering.

I knew the guys at Gizmodo were shameless, but I hadn’t suspected that they were proud felons.

[Update: yup, Gizmodo bought from a thief, and they had to have known it. Based on the fact that the “finder” never even contacted the bar where it was lost, which the owner called every day hoping for news, Gizmodo’s little tale of innocent acquisition and honest attempts to return it looks completely phony.]

Two people at work bought iPads, and they weren’t the two I expected to have them so soon. So now I’ve spent a few minutes playing with it, and since they hadn’t downloaded many apps or bought much content, all I really got to see was its fundamental “big iPod Touch” functionality. This was not enough to persuade me to acquire one, for obvious reasons. And I already wasn’t impressed by the list of apps available at launch, and haven’t seen any exciting announcements since then.

All I can really say that I haven’t seen mentioned before is that they did one subtle thing to keep it from being dropped when held in one hand: there’s a slight lip around the front edge, keeping your thumb from sliding off the glass while your other fingers try to keep a grip on the smooth aluminum back. Without that, it’d be flying out of your hand faster than a strapless Wiimote in a bowling game. You don’t really want to hold it in one hand for very long anyway, but at least you’re not risking a cracked screen if you do.

A while back, I sent my mother a link to Scratch, an educational programming environment for children. She’s one of the relatively few PhDs in the education field who really goes out and teaches children, so I knew she’d be interested. So were her kids; they love it, and they’re learning a lot more than just how to write programs.

Naturally, someone released an iPhone/iPad app to allow a user to run their Scratch programs. The response from the MIT folks who run Scratch was “hey, check this out”. That was early March. Yesterday, as part of their new policy outlawing all third-party development tools, Apple removed it from the app store.

Nice work, Steve; way to throw out a dozen babies with the (Adobe CS5-flavored) bath water. If you were trying to improve the quality of apps in the store, oh, who am I kidding, we both know that’s a bullshit rationalization. Gruber bought it, and preened when you made him think he was a penetrating analyst for saying so, but it ain’t so. The app store is flooded with crap, and is such a poor shopping experience that customers are forced to wade neck-deep into the sewers to find the tiny handful of useful apps (this is what Gruber calls “the killer app” for the iPad; no doubt he also thinks dumpster-diving would be a great first date).

It’s about control. About forcing people to do things The Steve Way. With Flash CS5, tens of thousands of Windows-based developers would have been able to write iPhone and iPad apps, and Steve would rather require the price of development to include the price of a Mac. Apple is, as we’re often reminded, first and foremost a hardware company. The change was timed to fuck Adobe’s major release, but that was just a bonus.

[Update: Official iPad app list (iTunes link)]

I’ve been very skeptical about the iPad. Even if you ignored Apple’s legendary “never buy a 1.0” problem with new hardware and software, there was a very serious problem that Steve Jobs and his famous Reality Distortion Field failed to answer at the announcement, or any time since: what’s it good for?

Shiny. Sexy. Big iPod Touch. Horribly mis-managed —and micro-managed— app store. Extremely closed content model. Out of the box, there’s really nothing to do with it except show off your disposable income in a time of high unemployment and rising taxes. And all those eager app-store developers (or, more precisely, the ones who remain eager after the real pros got sick of Apple’s capricious policies and gave up) specialize in pretty, shallow, toy software. Great for an iPhone that fits in your pocket, but they’re not going to sell a 1.5-pound battery-powered cookbook with a high-gloss screen.

Today, Appaddvice has a list of third-party software that will be available at launch, scraped from Apple’s pre-release web site. And now I have to buy one, because their list includes some real killer apps.

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