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I’ve been using Safari as my RSS reader today, to see how it works, and am actually pretty surprised at how well it handles all of my feeds (after going through a roundabout process to get all 390 feeds imported from NetNewsWire Pro 2.0)

The combined display has grown on me - at first I absolutely hated it, with my body physically rejecting it in preference to manually cycling through posts by title in a list, and seeing the selected post individually displayed in a pane. Once I let go of that, it’s a much more magazine-like experience, and it’s not bad at all.

I’ve found a few weak points, however:

• No way to show only the new items. You can sort so that new items are at the top, and select “Today” as a filter, but even that is a bit lacking. My current Safari RSS feed display page says “25 new, 1173 total” - that’s with only today’s posts, and sorted so that new items are on top. It loads all 1173 items at once, which is a bit much, since it also grabs images etc. for each post. As a result, performance can kind of suck when viewing a lot of posts. This would be solved by having a “New items” option in the “Recent Articles:” sidebar filter widget.
• Enclosures. No support at all. It would be cool if it could automagically detect enclosures, and pass audio files off to iTunes, and store other files appropriately. Sure, it’s not a newbie feature, but it sure is taking off and it would be a shame to leave everyone out of the podcasting craze…
• No real way to import feeds from other tools. A nice OPML bookmark importer would be nice (and provide the option to automagically transmorgify the urls from http:// to feed:// protocols)
• No .Mac web access to the feeds. It’s got all of the data sitting there in my iSynced Bookmarks - why not give me access via the web for when I’m away from my own machine?
• Having to click on the bookmark folder (I call mine, creatively enough, “feeds”) in the Bookmarks Bar, then scrolling down to the bottom to select “View All RSS Articles”. That’s clunky when I’ve got a lot of feeds in the root folder. It would be nice if I could set the folder in the Bookmarks Bar to “Auto-RSS-View” (like a regular folder’s “Auto-tab” option), and it just jumps to the “View All RSS Feeds” page with one click.

Things I really like:

• It’s free and bundled with the OS. Everyone’s going to start playing with RSS. No excuses about it being too hard or not having access to the software or anything.
• Being able to use iSync and .Mac to synchronize my feeds on any machine I use
• The magazine-like display really grew on me. I love that the “Article Length” dealie lets me switch from full posts to abstracts to just titles without hitting a menu or a preference or anything
• Using “View All RSS Articles” nicely recurses through deeply nested folder hierarchies, grabbing all posts from all feeds. Nice.
• Being able to email links to RSS view pages. That rocks. I could set up a folder of feeds, and link it on a web page or email it, and anyone clicking the link (and using Safari on Tiger) will get the aggregator page. Easy way to share blogrolls (or just subsets of them).

I’m a pretty die-hard NetNewsWire Pro user now, but am dabbling with Safari’s built-in RSS aggregator on one machine. It lacks some of the things that i really like about NNW (marking posts as read and/or flagged). The all-posts-in-one-long-page thing is growing on me. I never got into the “Combo View” in NNW, but for some reason this is working for me (perhaps it’s the “article length” slider doowackie that lets me easily switch from titles-only to whole-enchilada mode).

To really test it out, though, I’ll want to import all of my NNW subscriptions over to see if it falls on its face. Any ideas on how to move all 390 feeds from NNW –> Safari? The OPML file wasn’t recognized by Safari’s “Import Bookmarks” function. Perhaps a job for Automator? (couldn’t find the Safari “add bookmark” automator action, though…)

Update: Well, there is this hack/technique to get feeds from NNW –> Firefox + Sage –> Safari. The import ran nice and easily, but having Safari display all of my feeds is taking for freaking ever - wonder if that’s just a first-time-you-view-a-bunch-of-feeds thing, or an it-just-doesn’t-scale-to-390-feeds thing…

Update: Looks like a (hard?) limit of 40 feeds per folder. That kinda sucks… Oh, well. I won’t be using Safari RSS for much, then. I also much prefer the one-post-at-a-time style of interface in NNW, rather than the here’s-everything style of Safari RSS (and NNW’s Combo view). It’s much easier to absorb the content one post at a time…

Update: I just filed a bug on Safari for the 40-feed maximum. Hopefully that’s addressed in an update. If they want people to start really using RSS (and the one-click implementation is so nice that people will start really using it), then they need to be able to handle lots of feeds.

Update: I looked into it a bit further, and it looks like it was only automagically “blessing” the first 40 feeds in a folder by switching the protocol to “feed://” from “http://” - I just opened Safari’s Bookmarks.plist file in SubEthaEdit, and did a batch search-and-replace on the feeds portion of my bookmarks, relaunched Safari, and now it looks like it’s seeing all feeds… So, it’s not a 40-items-in-the-UI limit, it’s something apparently funky with how it checks feeds… At least there’s a workaround.

I’ve been using delicious2Safari for a while now, and it’s a really nice (and free) way to integrate your carefully tagged folksonomies from del.icio.us into your Safari bookmarks.

Combine that with Safari Stand, which makes an extremely useful bookmarks search utility only an F4 away, and I’ve got a very handy offline cache of del.icio.us bookmarks.

I’ve also got a shortcut in the Sogudi extension to Safari, so all I have to do when I’m online is enter “del whatevertagiwant” in the location bar of Safari, and BOOM - my del.icio.us bookmarks with that tag.

Very handy loose integration of small pieces.

John Hicks just posted a link to Stand - an InputManager that extends Safari in new and wonderful ways.

The coolest thing it does is give you a new way to quickly access bookmarks - hit F4 and a search widget pops up. Hit some keys, and your bookmarks are filtered on the fly. Very cool. You can even configure it to close the floating widget after opening a bookmark.

It somehow modifies the View Source window, so that source code for a page is properly syntax highlighted (and you can set any font you like as well).

It also does some other useful things, like optionally forcing all links targeted at “_blank” to open in a new tab rather than new windows. It also provides better searching/filtering of browser history (that’s how I quickly found the URL for John’s post - I last saw it this morning and just hit the history search to pull it up quickly).

Stand probably does a bajillion other things. The website looks like it is in Japanese, so I can’t read the official description or changelog, but it works GREAT!

When Dave Hyatt announced some of the cool new additions to WebCore to support Dashboard etc. - via “extensions” made to HTML - my first reaction was “Hey, that’s cool!”, followed rather quickly with “but, doesn’t that break the standards?”

Things like the cool new <input type="search" /> attribute (announced here) on the input element work great, look awesome, but as a result, make the source page invalid XHTML-Transitional. Doh.

The new <canvas /> element (announced here), which gives you a place to draw bitmaps via javascript (and is used by the analog clock widget in Tiger’s Dashboard), also very cool and useful, but not in the standard…

I’m glad to see I’m not alone in this feeling. Tim Bray just posted on this as well. If it bugs one of the godfathers of XML, it’s got to be a real issue. I’ve implemented the new <input type="search" /> attribute in the search form on this weblog to try it out (you can only see it if you’re using Tiger or Safari 1.3 Dev. Preview - otherwise it looks like a Plain Old text input box), so I’m not religious about it, but this sorta feels like the Netscape/IE “enhancements” of the ’90s…<shudder />

UPDATE: It looks like the Blosxom Autotrack plugin has run amok, hammering Dave’s weblog over 300 times (180-ish on each of 2 posts on his weblog). Holy crap. I’m SO SORRY, Dave! I’ve deleted the Autotrack plugin. It won’t happen again! I’m emailing Dave directly with apologies. Crap, this is so embarrasing…

I’ve had this happen several times, so I guess it’s pretty repeatable. If you are editing some text in a multiline text field in form in Safari, hitting undo (command+z) crashes the browser.

Especially frustrating when editing documents in say, a wiki… I was just beefing up my page for the NMC 2004 summer conference, and accidentally deleted a link on the wiki form. I hit undo, hoping to just drop the link back in there, but was greeted instead by a MacOSX Application Crash dialog box.

Doh. Oh, well… Off to rebuild the text from memory. It might actually make some (more) sense this time…

I’m finally able to run Safari in full screen mode, thanks to a little InputManager plugin called Saft. Very cool. I now have Safari running full screen in desktop #2 on my 18-desktop VirtualDesktop setup. Works like a champ. It even drops the dock and menu bar out of the way (have to remember the menu keyboard shortcuts…)

Saft is a little, well, quirky. It’s not fully integrated, and appears to do some funky patching of the running Safari app. But, it works.

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