Safari launched Safari version 4 Beta on Tuesday. There’s some good things and bad things about it.

I won’t go through every facet of the update (you can find a list on Apple’s site). I’ll be focusing on the features that stand out to me the most.

Tabs

Tabs are the most obvious UI change in Safari. In version 3 and earlier, Safari had inverted tabs placed below the address (and bookmarks) bar.

before:

Now, tabs are integrated into the top window bar and serve 2 functions:

- a draggable bar to move your application window around
- a group of individual tabs you can cycle through

after:

the bad: Because the top bar is now serving a dual function, it’s harder to focus/select an individual tab. This is because Safari’s first response to an interaction (click/press) with the top bar is to treat it as an application window you can drag. If the interaction hierarchy were flipped, and tab selection was first priority, window dragging would prove to be nearly impossible.

While you can focus a tab by carefully clicking anywhere on the bar, it takes a few tries, unless you start to train yourself to move straight to the right corner of a tab, where you’ll see the ‘grip’ lines.

Bottom line, Fitt’s Law is being comprimised.

the good: On a positive note, about 20 pixels of vertical screen real estate is gained with the combined browser/tab bar. Economy of space is a great thing and it’s especially relevant on laptops.

Web Inspector – Design Consistency & Data Visualizing

A great feature that I probably won’t be using very much is the Web Inspector. For developers out there that use programs like Firebug within Firefox, the Web Inspector will look very familiar. It allows you do to look behind the scenes of a given page and view the HTML and style sheets as well as see how quickly all the elements within a page load. Coupled with the Activity window, it’s a great way to debug websites.

Like all things Apple, its not only how well the Web Inspector works that makes it great, but how well it’s visually designed. When I toggled from Elements view to Resources view, I was again pleasantly surprised to see that they had appropriated repurposed the iTunes Resource visualizations for the iPod and iPhone:

Web Inspector – Resources:

iTunes – iPhone capacity:

RSS Feeds

I don’t get the option to choose what application/service I want to use to read feeds when I click on the RSS icon in the address bar. Firefox gives me the option to choose Google Reader.

What happened, Apple?!

Address Bar & AutoComplete

This is the clincher for me. Safari 4 Beta does not let you type in any part of the address, or title, of the site you want to go to. This has become an integral part of navigating the web for me and the best improvement from Firefox 2.

It’s a feature that’s easy to overlook until you don’t have it anymore, then you realize you can’t live without it.

Summary

Safari 4 is in many way’s a solid step up from from Safari 3. Nothing feels broken or incomplete, and it is dramatically faster (as reports have claimed). Along with the autocomplete issues, the lack of add-ons is the only other major drawback that’s keeping me from switching from Firefox 3. Adblocker, Delicious, Tabs Open Relative – sure I only have 3 add-ons, but they make a world of difference when browsing.

For the non-techie user, Safari is an excellent choice.

It’s like a Porsche without power windows and door locks – sure they’re drawbacks, but the car still drives like a dream.

Geoff Cubitt, President and Chief Technology Officer, speaks with Joshua-Michéle Ross of O’Reilly Media, Inc. about the evolution of search and how it relates to RIA. Cubitt explains how Roundarch and FAST have worked together to bring search out of “the little white box.”

FASTforward’09 Interview: Geoff Cubitt, CTO, Roundarch
Joshua-Michéle Ross
February 10, 2009

Next week Roundarch will participate as a Silver Sponsor at FASTforward ’09 in Las Vegas. FAST, a Microsoft subsidiary, will host the conference which focuses on FAST’s technology platform and enterprise search solutions. We are very excited to be a part of this event because by partnering with FAST Roundarch has been able to develop first-of-its-kind tools to solve complex issues for our clients and take search out of the white box. Roundarch has worked with FAST to develop rich web solutions that work with existing content management systems and integrate search technology into an environment that is efficient and a joy to use. We will have a booth in the Partner Pavilion at The Mirage so stop by and check out our solutions.

Geoff Cubitt, President and Chief Technology Officer, will be presenting “Financial Services and the Role of Search” on Tuesday (2.10) at 1:20 PST in the FASTforward ’09 Partner Theater. The presentation will focus on the evolution of search as Rich Internet Applications become increasingly vital to the success of Financial Services.

Please contact us if you want to plan a visit during the event or just stop by our booth (#302).

At Roundarch we often work behind the firewall – which for people not familiar with our terminology, means we work on projects we’re not allowed to discuss, much less show publicly. As designers, not having a public audience/forum for our work can be both liberating and frustrating. So when Sam Lessin and Chad Stoller from drop.io contacted us to assist them in redesigning their simple yet powerful service, our ears perked up. Not only would we have an opportunity to creatively contribute to a product we all believed in, but we could do so publicly without risking the ire of valued but secret clients.

I can’t stress enough how useful their tool really is. I use it all the time. I have used it for an internal Roundarch presentation on Cloud Computing as well as for other personal things like picture drops and quick file transfers (when my IM craps-out). The ways in which to use their service seem to grow with each user’s imagination.

Roundarch and drop.io
Roundarch was brought on board to work with drop.io for a few reasons.  As a company, we are focused exclusively on designing and building leading edge digital experiences.  We are known in the industry for tackling the toughest design challenges and for bringing both breakthrough design and enterprise scale technology.  We are also known for being a leader in the development of Rich Internet Applications.  This is really a long way of saying we understand design, user experience and technology and we know how to bring them all together seamlessly.  We also understood that drop.io has a long-term road map for the services it provides.  The old design was quite a bit confusing and not able to keep up with new technologies and service improvements.  They needed a design that would complement and grow with future services.  We understood this challenge and were able to collaborate on a design solution.

The Challange
Drop.io is “Simple, Private Sharing”, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy service to understand. Simplicity can sometimes be confusing. Retaining simplicity while providing a design that was easy to use and understand from day-1 was our primary focus. The real design challenge is that if a user is new to drop.io, and they’re given a URL to go to from someone, say, at a party who has just taken some photos among friends, when that user arrives at that URL they’re deposited right in the middle of a “drop”. No context. No on-boarding. The user just wakes up in a room and needs to figure out what it all means. So the nature of their service is simple: online storage space where files of any type can be dropped, viewed and shared, but partnering with Roundarch was critical to presenting their service to the novice user in an easy, understandable way.

At the core of the drop.io service is inputs, views and outputs – but their old UI and design strategy didn’t reflect this. Switching views was confusing, output controls and parameters were located in a few different places and their choice of using the color red (to be ironic) was amusing to only a few. Our task was to collectively figure out a UI template that met a few key criteria: input, view and output needed to be clearly defined and the design had to be extensible for co-branding and personalization. We also wanted to target Drop.io For Business (DFB) with a template design and information-page that showed the flexibility of their service for businesses.

The Process
We began by taking their existing logo and “growing it up” a bit. We chose a beautiful and clean typeface (Archer) and chose a simple typeset execution.

Our next task was to nail the header. This was critical because the header is really where the concept of the service is expressed in the navigation of the site. Input, view, output became Add, View & Share. By keeping that functionality hidden but handy we eliminated the need for users to hunt around the site to trigger functionality. The trick was that when the user is browsing their drop, we wanted to keep the maximum possible vertical space for their content. It’s only when the user wants to do something with the drop that we wanted to surface UI controls (while retaining the statefulness of the page).

From there we chose to execute the body elements, the actual content of the drop, in a clean and simple way that clearly separated drop-content from any customization the user might choose to perform and future-proofed the content-display area from any other view paradigms drop.io might choose to implement moving forward. At the forefront of our minds was scanability. We needed the user to quickly scan the page and understand where their drop content was located. Through the use of iconography and a change in type size we were able to accomplish this while adding to the aesthetics of the experience. Lastly, we addressed the home page. Like most of the rest of the strategic planning for this site, the home page had a trick to it we needed to get just right. Unlike most homepages, the drop.io home page was most likely not the first page a user new to the experience would see. This is because users most likely would encounter drop.io in the context of viewing someone else’s drop. And in that scenario, the user would be deposited in the middle of a drop as explained above. So their drop page is really their homepage and their homepage is really their drop-provisioning page. It was in this light that we wanted to streamline the process of beginning to use their service as much as possible. 4 steps vs. 3 steps is a big deal in the web 2.0 world of zero patience. We solved this by defaulting certain settings in a collapsed menu and brought the number of steps a user had to do in order to create a drop down to two. Name it and put files in it. Done.

The Results
Needless to say the project was a success and all sides were thrilled with the results. I encourage you to check out drop.io for yourself.  As I mentioned earlier, this is really an outstanding service that will continue to push the limits of what can be done with file sharing and beyond (geotagging, freedom to upload from many sources, collaborative sharing options, etc.).  Sam Lessin sums it up thusly, “Roundarch did a very nice job learning about our product and our future feature roadmap and then helping us conceptualize some of the design vocabulary necessary to meet our immediate users needs, while still leaving us open to future growth and extensibility.” Agreed.