Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada

OK… I’ll admit it. I’m an Apple/Mac Fanboy… Have been since I bought my very first Apple Computer on August 30, 1991, a Mac Classic with an awesome forty megabyte hard drive and a whopping 4 megs of RAM… I remember thinking that I’d never fill that hard drive when I first bought it… Ha!

I still have a Mac Classic with the same configuration of hard drive/RAM sitting in my office just as a reminder of how far things have come since my very first Mac… Total Awesomeness! I love watching technology advance, though my bank account could at times benefit from a little less tech lust…

Well Safari 4 Beta is one of those things that won’t have a huge impact on my bank balance, and even in the few days that I’ve been playing with it, I’m really enjoying! If you swing over to the ‘Features Page‘ you can go over the ‘150 Features – Leading the way with Innovation’ as Apple puts it, but the two features that really caught my eye and have already been very useful are –

1. Top Sites – This feature brings your 12 most visited websites onto a single page where you can click between them at ease. I was interested to see what my top 12 sites were going to be the first time I clicked it and a couple of them were the pages I had to use to log onto the internet when I was on the GRAND Princess last week… I’m sure over the next week or so those will drop off and others will take their place.

2. Full History – Again an excellent graphical interface that is very similar to cover flow in iTunes. The ability to scroll back and visually see the pages I’ve visited has been awesome as when it comes to things like websites, a quick snapshot of the site is far more useful than the name of the site. I may remember something I’ve read off of a certain page, but being able to see it in the context of the page it was a part of, to see the layout, to see some of the graphic elements makes getting back to a site I’ve visited but neglected to book mark a snap!

Oh… The fact that this software beta is available for both Mac and PC (Windows) is also pretty cool. Having used Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape and others over the year’s it’s pretty cool to see a company make some really cool innovations to a web browser and even cooler that’s it’s not platform specific. Often Public Beta versions of software are riddled with bugs, but this one actually seems pretty solid and will only get better.

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