Please join me in congratulating Rob.

Apple Stuff

• Daring Fireball <http://daringfireball.net/>
• Crazy Apple Rumors <http://crazyapplerumors.com/>

News & Information

• Digg <http://digg.com/>
• Wikipedia <http://wikipedia.org/>
• Valleywag <http://www.valleywag.com/>
• Slate <http://slate.com/>

Media & Celebrities

• Television Without Pity <http://televisionwithoutpity.com/>
• Ain’t it Cool News <http://aintitcool.com/>
• The Internet Movie Database <http://imdb.com/>
• The Superficial <http://thesuperficial.com/>
• Apple Movie Trailers <http://www.apple.com/trailers/>

Amusement

• Cute Overload! <http://cuteoverload.com/>
• The Onion <http://www.theonion.com/>
• YouTube <http://youtube.com/>
• Ricky Gervais Podcast <http://xfm.co.uk/article.asp?id=3673>
• Homestar Runner <http://homestarrunner.com/>
• Spamusement <http://spamusement.com/>

Communication

• The Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/>
• GMail <http://mail.google.com/>

Shameless Nerdery

• xkcd <http://xkcd.com/>
• World of Warcraft Community Site <http://worldofwarcraft.com/>
• WebKit Buildbot <http://build.webkit.org/> - but only when it’s green

Please join me in congratulating Sam.

Another tip you might find handy as a web developer is the “Show Page Load Test Window” option in the Safari Debug menu. You can turn on the Debug menu by typing defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu YES at a shell prompt, and then restarting Safari. This menu includes a number of rough debugging tools that we created mainly for browser testing, but you may find some of them handy for web development. The page load test in particular is interesting because it measures page load time in a more precise way than either onload timing or just using a stopwatch. If you change the “Suite” pop-up menu to “URL”, you can type the URL of your choice and get a fairly precise time for loading it. If you empty the cache first, you can get an uncached time.

I recommend trying this a couple of times as you test your site. We’ve found that it’s a lot easier to improve performance when you have a precise way to measure it.

Even more exciting, Adobe has announced that Apollo will use WebKit as its HTML layout engine. Welcome to the world of WebKit, Adobe.

First of all, if you correct unprofiled images to sRGB, you have to correct all drawing to sRGB. This includes everything drawn by CSS (borders, backgrounds, text). This is not difficult to do under the hood, although it is difficult to do it with no performance regression in our benchmarks at all. In fact we even tried this during the Tiger development cycle (just correcting everything drawn to sRGB), but it slowed us down.

The big hurdle that we ran into, though, was with the drawing we did not control, namely the Flash plug-in. The problem is that designers specify colors in Flash and colors in CSS in the Web page, and they expect those colors to match. Because Flash’s drawing isn’t correcting to sRGB, if we did it in Safari, there would be color mismatches all over the place. These mismatches look far worse than if we just don’t correct at all.

(This mismatch with plug-ins is presumably the reason that this feature was not enabled by default in Mac IE.)