May 2008

iCab 4.1.1

Last weekend Alexander released a new public version of iCab. There are quite a few bug fixes, changes and enhancements since the last public version (4.0.1).

I have been asked why these release notes don't appear on icab.de, where they belong. Honestly, I don't know. It's Alexander's decision. But as long as the release history isn't available anywhere else, I'll post it here so Google (and other web crawlers) can search it.

So, here's a copy of Alexander's readme file (which you'll find in the iCab download archives as well):

New Features:

• New feature implemented: "Tab Overview". The "Tab Overview" can be activated from within the "Window" menu or by clicking the new icon at the right side of the Tabs Toolbar in the browser window. The "Tab Overview" requires at least MacOSX 10.4.x. The "Tab Overview" is something like Exposé for Tabs. When activated, all Tabs will be shown as small thumbnail images ontop of a dark transparent fullscreen window (like Dashboard). You can easily identify the Tabs, activate another Tab and also delete Tabs. This can be done either using the mouse but also using the keyboard: Tab/Shift-Tab and the arrow keys can be used to select a new Tab, the "Return", "Enter" or "Space" keys can be used to activate the selected Tab, the "Backspace" or "Delete" keys will close the selected tab and the "ESC" key will close the "Tab Overview" itself.
• iCab recognizes geo-tagged web pages. The status bar now has an additional icon which indicates if the currently displayed web page is geo-tagged via META tag. Clicking the icon will then open a popup menu where the location is displayed in plain text (if provided by the web page) and when selecting the menu item in the popup menu the location is shown in google maps (At the moment the popup menu of this GeoTag icon will only have one menu item. Later it may have additional menu items for geo-tagged images or other geo-tagged media that is found in the web page).
• In the Filter Manager there's a new text field in the "Page Layout" panel where CSS code can be entered that will be applied to the web pages which are addressed by the filter. The new advertising filter which you can find in the iCab archive uses this new field to filter out the ad banners of the mactechnews.com web site. So you should replace the old advertising filter by the new one if you're using this filter.
• New setting added in the "Special websites" section of the "Forms Manager". It's now possible to change the form checks to be less strict. This way filling out forms can be made as comfortable as in other browsers (but also as insecure as in other browsers).
• Using MacOSX 10.5.x the contexual menu of the browser will now also include meu items to search the text selection in the "Dictionary" and in "Spotlight".
• In the URL completion preferences it is now possible to configure which URL schemes iCab should use for the URL completion feature and which schemes it should ignore.
• The contextual menu in the browser window can now be also opened by holding down the left mouse button for a while, if this feature is enabled in the Preferences dialog in the "General > Contextual Menu" panel. The standard way to open the contextual menu (Right-Click or Control-Click) does always work.
• It's now possible to enter Cmd-Return, Cmd-Shift-Return, Cmd-Alt-Return and Cmd-Alt-Shift-Return in the URL field and Search field of the browser toolbar to open the URL or search result in a new window or Tab in the background or foreground.
• Syntax hilighting for the source code window implemented
• Colors and bold face text in the error report window help to find the important keywords.
• The HTML attributes "cite" and "longdesc" are now also listed in the "Link Manager" window.
• Double-clicking in the background of the Tabs toolbar will now also create a new Tab.
• When searching in the History window iCab will now also search in closed folders, opening them automatically when needed.
• When loading files from a local disk ("file:" URLs) iCab will now show a "proxy" icon in the titlebar of the window. Control-Clicking or Cmd-Clicking the proxy icon will display a popup menu where you can access all the parent folders of the local file, so it's very easy to locate the file in the Finder..
• Added a new option in the Tabs settings to swap the keyboard shortcuts for new windows and new Tabs. Before this shortcut swap was bound to the option "Open Tabs instead of Windows". Now these are individual settings. This way you can get the same shortcuts as in Safari (which doesn't have the option "Open Tabs instead of Windows").
• In the Network settings you can now configure if iCab should process FTP links itself or if the external FTP application that is configured in the system as default FTP application is called instead to precess the FTP link.
• When loading Session files iCab will now (optionally) ask if it is OK to overwrite the current session with the one from the file or if the current session should be saved before the file will be loaded. This confirmation can be anabled/disabled in the "General" preferences in the "Other" tab.
• Javascript code is now able to use databases (via "window.openDatabase()")
• When saving a web page, iCab will now also offer to save it as PDF file. So it is no longer necessary to use the "print" command to save it as PDF file. Using the "save" command is much more intuitive.
• The "YouTube Video Download" filter from the folder "Filter Manager Examples" is improved now. It will now offer to download the video as Flash movie or as MP4 movie (though the MP4 format is not yet avaiable for all videos). So when you're already using the Youtube download filter you should import the new filter again to replace the old one.
• The new keyboard shortcut Control-Alt-T can be used to switch on the Tabs Toolbar when it is hidden (for example because the window only contains one single document and iCab is configured to hide the Tabs toolbar in this case). The shortcut can be useful if the user wants to drag the document of this window as Tab into another window to combine the two windows into a single one.
• iCab now supports the ".url" files of Internet Explorer (Windows or Mac version). These files are the windows counterpart of the "webloc" files on the Mac.
• French translation added (Thanks to Pierre Rudloff)
• Help is now available in English as well.

Bugfixes:

• When explicitly opening a link in a window by the user the "Referrer" information gets no longer lost.
• The "Save" button in the PDF view (a PDF document is opened without any PDF plugin) does work now in iCab as well.
• When changing the titles of bookmarks in the Favorites folder of the Bookmarks window, iCab didn't update the Favorites toolbars immediately.
• JavaScript bookmarkslets can now open windows even when the JavaScript setting "open windows without user interaction" is unchecked.
• Bugfix for the shareware reminder dialog box which could cause a crash in very rare circumstances under MacOSX 10.4.x.
• The error report feature didn't always select the right location in the sourcecode when showing the error location. This happened only when the source code contained some Unicode characters from a "higher" Unicode code page.
• If the Force-Quit-Command was disabled in the Kiosk preferences, which also disables Exposé and Dashboard, Exposé and Dashboard were not enabled again when the Kioks mode was left.
• Small adaption to the new WebKit release (Safari 3.1) where the click with the third mouse button (middle button) didn't work anymore. Now iCab hooks itself into internal WebKit structures to get such clicks again.
• When the user edits the URL of a finished download to repeat the same download with a different URL, some internal Download settings did not refect the new URL immediately.
• If the option "Stack windows" is enabled in the Window preferences, iCab will no longer remeber the sizes of all the open browser windows. This is only done when this setting is switched off.
• When quitting iCab while downloads are still running, iCab now asks the user if iCab should really abort the downloads and quit.
• Asking for the number of windows in AppleScript did also take the closed and invisible windows into account. This doesn't happen anymore.
• The "Search" window will now always on the active "Screen" when "Spaces" of Leopard is active.
• Bugfix for the Error report. iCab could crash if an extrenal CSS file was completely empty.
• When imported bookmarks files did use an invalid text encoding, bookmark titles with non-ASCII characters could be imported with an empty title instead. Now iCab will try out different encodings and if none will result in valid text, iCab will just remove the invalid characters and keep the rest.

finally { apple.releases( java6ForMacOSX ); }

Only one and a half years after Sun released Java SE 6 for Windows, Linux and Solaris, Apple released the Mac OS X version (called Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 1) this Tuesday. Phew. Thanks to the engineers for their effort to get this release out finally, no thanks at all to Apple's management for delaying the release. Anyway, you'll find the release notes here.

And regarding this blog post's title: There is no catch? Unfortunately, there is... There are some exceptions (and you shouldn't throw exceptions within the finally block, right?).
First, Apple's Java 6 implementation requires Mac OS X 10.5.2 or newer, but this was to be expected. Second (and more important), the release is for 64-bit Intel Macs only (i.e. Core2Duo or newer). No Java 6 for PPC Macs or even 32-bit Intel Macs (CoreDuo). Bummer.

If you've installed a developer preview version of Java SE 6, the Java update probably won't show up in your Software Updates. Deleting the preview installation should fix this:

  sudo rm /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6
  sudo rm -R /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0

If you want to change the system's default Java version, do not mess with certain symlinks in the system's directories but use /Applications/Utilities/Java/Java Preferences instead (you have been warned).

And if your Mac or your operating system does not meet the requirements, there's always the possibility to use the Open Source Java 6 implementation called "SoyLatte".