March 2008

Java on the iPhone

With Apple showing no interest in keeping Mac OS X 10.5 up to date with current Java versions (they are 14 months behind the final release of Java SE 6 for other systems now, despite some beta versions for certain Mac OS X versions and Intel chip sets) or in providing Java on the iPhone at all, it seems it's up to Sun or the Open Source community now.

And it actually seems Apple has become irrelevant for the future of Java on Mac OS X systems (including the iPhone) by now! While a port of Java SE 6 for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5, called SoyLatte, has been around for some time now, Sun announced yesterday that they intend to put Java on the iPhone!

They'll start with Java ME (a reasonable decision for a mobile phone platform), though it won't be released before middle of this year. Java SE and JavaFX might be following later on.

So, let's wish them good luck and let's hope Apple won't put too many obstacles in their way...

iCab 4.0.1

Three weeks ago a new public version of the now WebKit-based browser iCab has been released. Here's an excerpt from the version history included with the iCab archive:

New Features:

• Added localized resources for Danish, Norwegian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish (thanks to Mogens Thyregod, Leif Halvard Silli, Michael Krekin, Hans Yu, i_zac, Manuel Montero Barro)
• When saving a web page it's now also possible to save it as plain text.
• Under MacOSX 10.5 the contextual menu will now include special menu items for PDF files when PDF files are displayed.
• In MacOSX 10.4.11 and later the TEXTAREA fields in web pages can now be resized
• In MacOSX 10.4.11 and later iCab will now enable the Web-Inspector of the MacOS. The Web-Inspector can be opened by choosing the menu item "Element Information" from within the contextual menu.
• Added support for the JavaScript call "print()"
• It's now possible to use small icons in the browser toolbar.
• New option in the "Page Layout" preferences to enable support for language-specific quote characters
• It' now possible to drag URLs into the Tabs toolbar to open it as Tab.
• iCab can be configured in the bookmarks preferences to add a menu item "Open as tabs" in each submenu of the bookmarks menu to open all the menu items of such a submenu menu as Tabs.
• In the search engine settings you can now also set the text encoding that should be used for the search engine.
• Help files in German are available (English ones will follow)

Bugfixes:

• The size of the searchbox in the browser toolbar was not processed correctly
• iCab now rechecks if all the plugins that were available before are still available when it is launched.
• Fixed a bug in AppleScript support which prevented that URL-Manager can get the history of the active Tab
• Fixed a bug which could prevent that certain old WebArchives from iCab 2/3 could be loaded.
• Fixed several bugs in Kiosk mode
• Page Overview and the Links overview didn't work for XHTML documents.
• Fixed a bug so that JavaScript Bookmarklets will be accepted even when they contain characters that are not allowed in URLs.
• Fixed some bugs in Download Manager which affected the download of whole web sites.
• When printing iCab didn't repect the landscape mode setting.
• Fixed a problem when importing Omniweb Bookmarks.
• Fixed several bugs in the error report which reported a few false error messages.
• Added a workaround for a bug in MacOSX which can cause that all Cookies are deleted. This MacOS bug also affects other browsers like Safari. In iCab this is now fixed when the private Cookies storage of iCab is used (which is the default).
• Fixes some minor issues in MacOSX 10.3.9 where some MacOSX 10.4.x/10.5. features that are used by iCab are not available.