Want to have Wave as a standalone application, with a badge that reflects the number of unread waves?
Follow these steps:

1. Download the excellent Fluid.app

2. Run it and create a new application like this:

   

   Download the icon I used here and make sure to select it in the appropriate dialog dropdown.

3. Launch the application. When Wave loads for the first time, it’ll think you’re using an unsupported browser. This is not true, since Fluid.app is Webkit-based. Disregard this message and press continue. Google will remember this setting.

4. To get the badge count functionality, I developed this userscript. Unzip it, go to the Google Wave applications, find the plugins menu and click Browser Usersripts Folder. Drop the file there and then make sure it’s enabled.

   

5. One last useful setting for any Fluid.app you create is to make sure it doesn’t unload the website when you press ⌘ + W. Make sure only hides the window is checked:

   

I’ll review the key new features of Safari 4 next.

Better browsing screen real state

They probably got the hint for this idea from Google Chrome. But I doubt Chrome for Mac can come with a half as nifty implementation. Each tab has a handle to regroup them into new windows, and the default behavior of dragging them is moving the window, which is nice.

No more about:blank for new tabs

This feature is called Top Sites.

Again, another feature that Chrome already has, although Firefox was playing with the idea before.

What sets Safari 4 apart is the implementation and style. It’s easy to trigger it whenever you like by clicking and the screenshots display takes up all the window space. The rounded display of the windows also helps you find the one you’re looking for more easily, definitely a nice optical trick.

Even better for us web developers

If you have used Webkit nightly you know what I’m talking about. Safari 4 includes the revamped developer tools that more or less offer what Firebug offers.

The CSS inspector now works exactly like Firebug’s. It displays all the declarations related to a particular element style, crossing out those that are overridden by another declaration. Hovering the element tags in the inspector adds a blue shade to the rendered element, a feature I’ve been long missing. It also seems to differentiate padding or margins in the shade.

The live DOM HTML element editing is much niftier than Firebug’s. It does syntax highlighting, and you just have to double click what you want to edit, and only a particular section will be selected. If you just want to edit an attribute, you can do that. The same applies for the node content.

What is the inspector still missing? A boxed representation of the element with the element, borders, padding and margins width, and a better location for the “Inspect Element” icon, which I use all the time. Highlighting of the element when an attribute or its content is altered, which is a very useful Firebug feature.

The conclusion

The performance has also been enhanced, which you can tell immediately. The Javascript engine is one of fastest out there, and it overall works excellently for a beta.

While it really doesn’t have any truly innovative features, I insist that Safari succeeds at integrating what it was missing with astounding elegance. That applies for the Dev tools, the new tab bar, the tab page placeholder, the history search, and much more.

Maybe Safari can now become both my development and browsing platform.

If you’re an OS X user and a web developer, you know how difficult things can get to test your websites or scripts on Windows browsers. Some of the alternatives you might be familiar with are:

• Installing Windows XP and Parallels
• Installing Windows XP and VMWare Fusion
• Installing Darwine and IES4OSX

Each of them has its disadvantages. The first two involve purchasing software (and the OS, if you don’t have it), and the third can turn out to be slow, crash or provide a different browsing experience.

After watching the screencast by Jeff Couturier I finally achieved the cross-browser, cross-platform testing Nirvana. Here’s how

1. Install an IE8 Beta Windows XP VPC with VirtualBox (IE8). Follow the instructions here. Unlike the original article, we only set up one virtual machine for all our testing needs. You can use The Unarchiver in place of 7zip.
   
2. Install MultipleIE (IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6)
3. For IE7, use IE8 Tools > Compatibility View option
4. Install Safari or Google Chrome (Webkit)
5. Install Firefox (Gecko)