Stray Dog Strut

Safari 4 is finally out of Beta so I thought I’d take it for a spin (I never did convince myself to try the Beta and fiddle with webkit frameworks to keep Safari 3 at the same time..). A fresh install of Safari 4 on Tiger looks like this:

First look, seems they’ve ditched the tabs-on-top idea (woo!) although I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a hidden enable option in there (apparently there was the option to switch them off in the beta). Gone is the old metal look in favour of the grey plastic style found in iTunes and other Apple apps (Although I believe Safari 3 was like this under Leopard already??). Despite the modern stylings, I have to say though that the interface now seems quite dull (not that it had much colour before mind). I personally don’t like that the close button on tabs only appears when you mouse near, and even that’s in grey.

Some other changes as far as I can tell, but first a screenie of Safari 3 on Tiger that I managed to dig up:

Firstly, in Safari 4 the reload button takes the place of the snapback button (not shown in the above screenie) which was at the right end of the address field:

I didn’t really use snapback, but I did use the reload button which was on the left, Now it seems the only option is to use the one here since it’s not in the customise toolbar sets (of course ?R does the same thing). Another small gripe, the add bookmark button seems to have shimmied over to right beside the address field. As far as I can remember, the original was a separate button and I may have swapped it round with the Home button, whereas it’s part of the address bar in Safari 4 and a bit too close for my liking.

Safari 3 had a blue loading bar that appeared behind the text in the address bar, in Safari 4 this has also slid to the right and has become a darker blue. Also, while loading there is the option to click the stop icon, doing away with the need for a separate Stop button altogether.

One final thing before you become truly bored with Safari 4′s interface (it’s not really THAT different), when the Safari window is in the background, the title bar becomes pale and the window controls lose their colour (in other apps, only the buttons change colour). A minor change but good visual feedback.

On to actually using Safari 4 then. On the surface it really doesn’t behave much differently from Safari 3 tbh, which is both a good thing and little bit disappointing (I like being surprised). Apple boasts 150 features on their site (not 150 *new* features mind) so i’ll leave it to you to go a Googling. One of the most talked about though was the introduction of Top Sites and so this was my first stop.

Top sites, as the name implies, keeps a record of your most frequently visited websites and displays them to you as a nice curved wall of previews. You can enter Edit mode and ‘pin’ the ones you want to keep, drag them around, or remove the ones you don’t want. A nice touch is the little star icon on sites that have changed so you know which ones to visit. You can have 24, 12, or 6 previews on display and you can also drag links into the window to add them.

It had me enraptured for the first five minutes anyway (It brought back memories of CubicEye – completely different mind! – anyone used that?), then I realised something. Top Sites, while oh so pleasing on the eyes, isn’t anymore useful than what we had before. For starters, if I pin the sites I use the most (Blogs, news sites etc) i’d effectively just be pinning the links that are already in my bookmarks bar. Okay so I get to see them all on one page, but it’s still a click away (The little icon of squares opens Top Sites) which is no more than clicking a drop down of links. Also, while Top Sites does show if a page has been updated, most of the updates i’m interested in are returned by RSS feeds which is already comfortably handled by the bookmarks bar and other RSS readers. I probably will use Top Sites, if only for the visual gloss, and possibly there’s a way to set Top Sites as the home page, but in the long run that might grate. In any case, it’s a nice optional extra.

Another cool feature is the introduction of Coverflow in the history and bookmarks browsers. If you’ve ever used iTunes, you know what Coverflow is. If not, it’s basically a scrollable library of previews that you can flip through to find what you want. In the case of iTunes that’s songs and albums, for Safari it’s websites. It’s really nice and I can see being able to browse your entire history this way being immensely efficient:

I’ve noticed one small issue though: If you have your bookmarks set up with folders as I have, these won’t display as it only shows websites. This is more of a personal problem mind, since I have so many folders within folders (hence the previous post) and I’ve never made use of Collections (Should I?). So I think a reorganisation of my bookmarks is inevitable before I can use Coverflow fully.

Another welcome addition is the Developer tools (I honestly can’t say what Safari 3 had since I used Firefox for all my testing) and, while the Safari 4 Developer tools don’t at first glance appear to have the ability to make changes like you can in Firebug (or at least not as easily, **UPDATE** My bad, how could I miss this? It works just like Firebug.. [also] there’s something called the Snippet Editor but I haven’t tried it yet), there are nice touches like the Resources section in the Web Inspector which shows you the download time and size of a sites files. These are definitely options I need to explore in more detail so I defer to the conclusions of the real web developers out there.

Rather than a comprehensive review, since I’m sure there are plenty out there, this has just been my initial reactions to Safari 4. Overall i’m happy with the new version: it’s not so different as to turn me away, but it has enough sparkle to keep me playing with it. Together with Firefox, Safari on the Mac is still my browser of choice (Everything i’ve heard about Safari 3 on Windows has me in no hurry to try it – Firefox all the way – but maybe Safari 4 will be better?).

I’ve got a few more posts in the pipline: another movie review (maybe), some games reviews, as well as some projects i’m just getting started with (hopefully), so feel free to wait with baited breath;-) Oh, in other news, i’ve accepted an offer from my dad to go home to Scotland to work for the summer. I’ll still be online, but things might
be a bit quiet in the coming week.

Cheers.

Watchmen is this issue’s subject although I wouldn’t really call this a review. This is a difficult one to write and I expect you can find more in-depth coverage elsewhere, however here are some thoughts if you’re interested.

First off, it’s important to establish that I knew nothing of the Watchmen series prior to seeing this film. The history of The Comedian, Rorschach et al means nothing to me, so what follows is based solely on my experience with the film. I won’t really go into detail on the plot either – it’s a bit fuzzy in my head anyway to be honest – since I feel other reviewer’s could do it more justice.

Suffice to say the film is, at least initially, explored from the point of view of Rorschach and his journal entries. Following the death of The Comedian, Rorschach tries to uncover the ‘mask killer’ who he thinks is out to get him and his fellow Watchmen. The film takes place in an alternate 1980s with the US and Russia on the brink of nuclear war. The Watchmen, a group of masked vigilantes, have been retired. It seems they’ve fallen out of favour with America despite their popularity in the past, and the country has become one of criminality and vice. All but one of the Watchmen – Dr Manhattan – don’t have superpowers. As the original Nite Owl explains to Dan (Nite Owl II), the Watchmen were started by frustrated cops deciding to wear masks like the criminals they put away.

Watchmen is a dark, at times gruesome film. That wasn’t unexpected. Having seen Sin City, I expected a similar dark and gritty graphic novel to movie adaptation. Watchmen, however, makes Sin City look like Toy Story. Unlike the superheroes of Marvel and DC, which only dabble with controversial themes, the Watchmen are not the usual knights in shining armour kind of superheroes. They’re all shades of very dark grey in between. Some of them, like The Comedian and Rorschach, are psychotic, while others are megalomaniacs. While it was refreshing to see superheroes who weren’t really superheroes, I felt the film overemphasised their flawed natures, to the extent that it was difficult to identify with any of them.

This was particularly evident with The Comedian, the embodiment of vice in the film. [SPOILER] I felt the scene where he tries to rape the original Silk Spectre was in bad taste. While i’ve come across rape scenes before, Watchmen’s delivery almost glorified it with the camera angles, particular of Silk Spectre’s body. While the rape didn’t take place (although it could be argued the attempt itself was a form of mental rape), and it reinforced The Comedian’s sexist nature, I felt it was overplayed, fetishing the whole thing.

Dan, aka Nite Owl II, drives the narrative with Rorschach and, despite being among the cleanest of the group, he was a bit wishy-washy for me and never seemed to take action. Of course, I think the intention was probably to juxtapose those two characters and it worked, but it made a film that left me feeling pretty frustrated. Rorschach, despite being the character I most identified with, was difficult to stomach. [SPOILER] I liked that he exuded confidence and the glimpse of his back story really helped, but his demise knocked the wind out of me.

That was the hardest part of this film to swallow. At times it seemed to glorify war, while at others it seemed to be anti-war. The latter half of the film saw the main characters desperate to prevent nuclear meltdown, with the frustration of having a character, Dr Manhattan, who could prevent it on a whim, doing nothing. [SPOILER] To witness his return from apathy to concern, only to have him side with the idea that peace at all costs is worth it – ie, the murder of millions to save billions – was intensely frustrating.

Needless to say, I’m still feeling the after affects of a film that paints such a dark picture of the human condition. The film suggests it’s a parody (I fail to see the humor), but it’s a depressingly possible future for us. It seems every other day that some country or another is shaking a stick at everyone else and I suspect it’s only a matter of time before someone decides to throw it.

We just finished watching The Forbidden Kingdom (2008 – Rob Minkoff) as part two of our two night dvd treat. What a disappointment. I have great respect for Jackie Chan and Jet Li, between them they have some of my all-time favourite films. I really admire their martial arts choreography and, in the case of Jackie Chan, his penchant for comedic thrills. From the few interviews/biographies i’ve seen on t.v., they both come across as really down to earth individuals.

It was a surprise then, given their combined legendary status, that they appeared in a film of such low calibre. If you were to take all that is exotic about Chinese culture, combine it with the high-kicking kung fu we’ve come to expect from Asian martial arts films, and a healthy dose of mystical forces. Take all that, and then water it down into some dumbed down Western cliche, you’d have a pretty good idea of what The Forbidden Kingdom is like.

It was worse even than Bulletproof Monk. A film that was unashamedly Westernised but nevertheless enjoyable for its entertainment value. I tried to enjoy this film, the fight sequences were very well done, but the wooden acting and cheesy dialogue from all those involved was hard to stomach. Oddly, the dialogue randomly jumps between English and Mandarin (it’s expected that in an Americanized film the characters will speak English around the American character, but they also randomly speak English to their Chinese counterparts too?!) and Jet Li’s English is delivered very uncomfortably, despite both himself and Jackie Chan speaking fluent English on other occasions. The Forbidden Kingdom could have been so much more and yet failed to take itself seriously. I get the impression that Mr Chan and Mr Li only took part in this film as a favour (one would hope). It would have to be a pretty large favour!

I think Western Audiences are smarter than this film gives credit for, and I would be very surprised if Eastern audiences were happy with the stereotypes on show here. In fact, I have to give the director credit for showboating almost every film cliché possible in the time allowed (Including the hero-stance close up of the lead character stepping up to fight back). Its time that i’m wishing was more well spent. It is seriously worrying that a film this bad made it to No. 1 in the US box office. This certainly won’t be the last Jackie Chan or Jet Li film I watch, and my impression of them hasn’t been tarnished by this outing. I sincerely hope this isn’t the last collaboration between the two masters.

Stray Dog Strut rating: 2 paws.

The other film on our roundup was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008 – Steven Spielberg). I avoided this film when it first came out, expecting that the ageing Indy would be outstarred by his younger sidekick. My concerns weren’t altogether unfounded, but Shia LaBeouf surprised me. I haven’t seen him in a lot of films and i’ve carried misgivings since seeing Transformers: The Movie, but reading his filmography just now has reminded me that he was in Constantine and I, Robot, both of which I favour highly. He does well in IJ, playing the role just enough to complement Harrison Ford but not outshine him. Harrison himself does well to leap around like Indy and delivers the expected quips on cue.

Overall though, the film left a lot to be desired. The plot is preposterous and steamrolls in that direction as it goes. There seemed to be quite a few elements borrowed from other films/tv, not a cut and paste job but i’d seen it before. To be honest, I got the feeling I wasn’t watching a real Indiana Jones film. This is probably tied up with the addition of a younger side kick as I feel this tends to spoil the ‘seriousness’ of these films more often than not. I got the same feeling watching Die Hard 4.0. An enjoyable film, but it just didn’t feel like a Die Hard film. Overall, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a very watchable film (compared to The Forbidden Kingdom which had me itching to turn it off half way through), but easily missable too. I would recommend the original trilogy over this any day.

Stray Dog Strut rating: 4 paws.