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So far, Apple’s doing all the right things with the new iPhone SDK. AWESOME.

I needn’t mention, I suppose, that my NEED to purchase an iPhone just jumped to near Critical.

“Big Cat” references aside, Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” is pretty nice. My favorite feature so far is probably Spaces - though others have pointed out that it’s hardly the 1st implementation of “virtual desktops’ on Mac OS X, and it’s missing some features, it’s (understandably) the best integrated of any implementation so far. And it makes my 17″ monitor at work actually useful. My only gripe is that I want/need different desktop backgrounds for each Space so that I can remember where I am.

Apple is going to need to up their security staff, esp. with a”real OS” on the iPhone. Exhibit A: an iPhone browser vulnerability:

Dr. Miller, a former employee of the National Security Agency who has a doctorate in computer science, demonstrated the hack to a reporter by using his iPhone’s Web browser to visit a Web site of his own design.

[via: Daring Fireball]

What is that “Share” button doing in Safari on the iPhone? It only seems to show up in the demo during web searches or when entering a new address. Anyone have a theory? (I’m suspecting “Email this page”.)

John Gruber on YouTube on the iPhone

Here’s what I’m thinking: If you can download YouTube content directly to your iPhone, why not iTunes Store content? I predict that direct-from-the-iPhone iTunes Store integration will be announced (at a special event?) next week.

And since iTunes now supports reverse-syncing of purchased content to an authorized Mac, you could download to your iPhone and then later sync it with your desktop. Yeah baby!

I’m currently beta-testing two new Mac apps that I love and at least one is approaching “can’t live without” status.

Mailplane is a desktop wrapper around GMail that used webkit and provides all kinds of Mac-like spit-n-polish for Google’s ubiquitous webmail platform. There are ⌘-keys for new message, discard, archive, star (a favorite: ⌘-*). etc. You can drag files onto the Mailplane compose window to attach them to the document, and it even has a shortcut for taking a screenshot and emailing it to someone. Using Mailplane means that I can close/open new browser windows all day long (and being a web developer means I am) without having to remember to re-open Gmail when I accidently close that window/tab. It also means that clicking mailto: links open in Mailplane/GMail. W00t!

The other is Plasq’s Skitch, which I was turned onto after Merlin Mann mentioned it on Macbreak Weekly.

I’ve been using Skitch for all my screenshots on this site for a few months now, I’ve used it at work for processing screengrabs for our applications, and it’s a huge timesaver. While Plasq provides a “MySkitch” web service to host your screenshots, I setup SFTP so uploading an image is as easy as clicking “upload”, then “copy” and pasting the html into a blog post.

Yesterday on the Surfin’ Safari blog, it was announced that the webkit nightlies have a new web inspector. This new inspector is vastly improved over the previous web inspector and is actually approaching Firefox’s Firebug extension in usefulness.

The new inspector (like the old one) is enabled along with the Debug menu, and is accessed by right-clicking on the page and selecting “Inspect Element”. The inspector can be docked to the bottom of the current window (ala Firebug), or left as a floating (and now non-transparent) window.

So what else is new? In addition to the outline-view-based DOM tree the previous web inspector provided, the new inspector lets you switch between a browsable DOM tree and a syntax color-coded view of the page source. It’s a vast improvement over Safari’s built-in source view. Clicking an element in the DOM view darkens the webkit view, with the element highlighted on the page, and a pane to the right of the DOM view shows all the styles applied to the element, including browser-default styles.

The web inspector also now provides an iTunes-style sidebar with Documents (the current doc and any iframes, etc), Stylesheets, Images, Scripts, and Other. Clicking a stylesheet shows the source of the css file, clicking an image in the list shows the image and a few useful properties. There is also a search field, so you can find instances of a class, tag, or element on the apge quickly. Clicking a line in the search results highlights the element in the source or DOM view, as well on the page.

So, is it all wine and roses? If I have to ask the rhetorical question then you already know the answer… no. The biggest omission in my mind is the ability to edit the HTML, CSS, or individual element properties and see the page re-render in real time. For web developers (and who else is the target here - I mean really) this ability is Firebug’s coup-de-grace and what makes it an invaluable tool for debugging or for pre-flighting some change to your CSS before getting into your editor. The good news is that a bug has already been filed (Web Inspector should have Firebug-like CSS editing) and it looks like patches are on the way.

Overall, the new web inspector is a great step toward making Safari much more developer-friendly; and while Safari is not as extensible as FireFox’s, based on a note in the blog post, the new inspector should be easy to upgrade over time:

So show up in #webkit or on the mailing list and suggest new ideas or implement them yourself (remember everything is HTML, JavaScript and CSS)!

Go WebKit!