Apple recently released Safari 4 beta and if you haven’t given it a try, I highly recommend you do.

The primary reason for passing on this tip is that my web browsing experience with Firefox over the past few months has been extremely frustrating (read slow!). From the moment I started the Safari 4 beta it was clear the performance was superior to Firefox. I realize there may be more to this than simply a faster browser, as my system could use a good house cleaning. However, I continue to go between both browsers and Safari is no doubt my new browser of choice for the bulk of my time on the net.

There is one default setting that I immediately had to change in Safari, and that’s the location of the tabs. If you haven’t tried the new browser, the figure below shows how the tab bar is now on top.

I just couldn’t get used to this. Here’s how to change the tabbar to the “normal” location – from a terminal enter the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

You can find a list of additional configuration changes available in Safari 4 here. Beyond the tips, the About page is worth a visit, an interesting bit of trivia to be had…

Highlights
Let’s begin with the highlights of this book, and there are many. You’ll notice from the moment you crack open the book, it’s filled with color. Not just color figures, all code examples are in color, as in, color syntax highlighting. And the colors match what you’ll find in Xcode, how cool is that?

The author does a nice job of calling out concepts that have not yet been explained, or are otherwise outside the scope of the book. You’ll find notes about points of interest based on the topic on hand, explanation of terms used that are to be covered later in the book, as well as insightful tips/tricks.

The integration of concepts into the examples is well thought out. For example, when moving from the command line version of the application to the MVC design pattern, Fritz opts to use the command line tool as is, and essentially embed the tool into another project. This is a nice approach as you get to see how to work with application bundles, targets and dependencies.

The coverage on most all topics is quite deep. This is a good thing from the perspective of the sheer volume of information available in the book. Which is a good segue into talking about areas where I think the book could be improved upon for a future edition.

Suggestions
Continuing the thought from above on deep coverage of information, to his credit, it’s obvious that Fritz clearly knows Xcode and development on a Mac. And on that same line of thought, this experience is used any number of times to deep dive into various topics. The downside is that unless you are experienced with Mac development, it’s easy to get lost in the details. The back cover of the book lists the "User Level" as beginner to experienced. For the former, it would be helpful to offer smaller, bite size examples to grasp concepts. More than once I found myself longing for more self-contained examples, rather than always building upon one example throughout the first section of the book.

In Chapter 20, Navigating an Xcode Project, the author covers many of the nuances of working with the Xcode development environment. From my perspective, I would of found this much more valuable as an early chapter in the book. The reason being, since most all topics revolve around using the Xcode environment, I think a better understanding of the interface would be helpful as one goes about building projects and learning other concepts.

Although the book does a good job of integrating concepts into the examples, the one drawback is that without clear references to such information in either the Table of Contents or the index, if you ever want to come back to the topic at a later date, it can be hard to track down. This realization came about when I was reading about how to integrate one project into another (mentioned above as a highlight of the book) and when I thought about how I would find this information again in the future, I couldn’t find a reference in either the Table of Contents or the index. Not a big deal for sure, however, the little details such as this would go a long ways to make this book a good reference for the future.

All in all a very good book, with extensive coverage on all things Xcode. Good use of examples, quite readable (the color coded examples and figures are a nice addition) and written by someone cleary well versed on developing applications for the Mac.

I’ll wrap up this series of posts on Xcode 3 Unleashed by posting two tips that are derived from information in the book.

I’ll continue to write tips here as well, however, the primary focus of my career is now iPhone centric, so the bulk of my writing will focus on the iPhone.

To get things rolling on the iPhone blog, I have migrated the iPhone tips shown here to the new blog. If you are the author of any comments on iPhone tips that started on this site, and have a few minutes to spare, I would encourage you to copy/paste your comments onto the new blog.

For the iPhone developers in the crowd, I hope you find the new site a valuable resource.

John

If you have ideas, suggestions or questions that might make for good iPhone tips, pass along your thoughts by commenting here or dropping me an email.

This blog won’t vaporize, however, I am in the midst of a transition after nearly 8 years in mobile development with J2ME to move the iPhone, so the pace may slow a bit.

If you are involved in working with the iPhone or Xcode as a developer, author of a book, trainer/courseware development or otherwise working on the iPhone, send me an email if you are interested in exploring the possibility of a partnership or other opportunities for working together. It’s been a good run with J2ME, where I’ve had the opportunity to work with many of world’s most prominent names in the mobile device business. I’m ready for what’s next, and this time around it’s all about the iPhone!

Although this is not a Mac tip or trick, I know there is a great deal of application development done on a Mac for a range of mobile devices and platforms. Also, seeing as all developers who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing to win an Amazon voucher worth $1000, I thought you might be interested :)

The survey consists of 5 pages of questions, somewhere around 10-15 minutes of your time. The deadline to complete the survey is Friday, June 27th. The winner will be announced on Friday, July 4th.

If you are working with mobile devices, give it a go, your insight might be helpful to someone else down the road…

The primary goal of an evangelist is to create a thriving community around a technology and/or product. One key aspect of this effort is to educate by providing insightful content and tutorials. To that end, I recently wrote an article for Dr. Dobbs that demonstrates how to build a Mojax application that searches for and displays real-estate property information.

The example that I created is built around the web services offered by Zillow.com, which provides a set of interfaces for accessing real-estate property information.

The figure below is a screen shot of the application running on a mobile device emulator. The information shown is from the primary residence of Bill Gates (and just who has the unenviable job of cleaning those 19+ bathrooms?)

Another tool of a developer evangelist is the screencast. If you’d like to see some of my work, and learn more about Mojax, you can kill two birds with one stone by following the links below:

• Mojax Introduction – A Short Tour
  
• Developer Tools Installation
• Build Your First Mojax Application
• Importing Mojax Examples into Eclipse
• RSS Viewer in 15 Minutes (Eclipse Project Source)

And I’d be remis if I didn’t tell you that I don’t really advocate killing birds with stones :)

Rob Demmer from the NetBeans team contacted me about posting the video on NetBeans.tv. I’m all for spreading the word in the developer community and if the video I created can play even a small part in helping to reach a few more developers or otherwise introduce a new technology to this audience, count me in.

As far as NeBeans.tv, there are several sections to the site: Interviews, Community, News, Screencasts and On the Road. The last section is quite interesting as it is a video diary of sorts that chronicles the days and nights of two guys traveling around the world meeting NetBeans developers (which sounds like a great job, if you can get it). It’s an interesting website, definitely worth a look.

If you would like to watch the video, as it appears on the NetBeans.tv site, click the image below: