(Swahili, derived from Arabic safariyya, "journey, voyage")

Originally, a hunting expedition in the wilderness, especially in Central, South and East Africa. In this sense of the word, the first safaris were carried out in the wake of the last wave of African exploration by Europeans and Americans.

However, during the period between the World Wars, the safari as a quasi-recreational "adventure" attracted growing attention in the Western world, particularly through the writings of Karen Blixen and Ernest Hemingway. Until well after World War II, though, the safari was a luxury activity, reserved for the wealthy. It was only with the growth of international tourism in the 1960s that this form of vacation became more accessible to the "common man".

Today, the concept has been expanded to include "photo safaris", where only cameras are used to "shoot", and guided tours into wildlife preserves. Legal big game hunting, on the other hand, has become almost obsolete, with the advent of game protection laws and the classification of many of the large animals of Africa as endangered.

R-R-Roaring action for big game players

Safari was one the first fifty or so arcade games ever made. This 1977 release was a joint venture between Sega and Gremlin. It came in a green dedicated cabinet with sideart of a hunter in a jungle scene. This may have been the first game to utilize twin joysticks. The first was a 4-Way joystick that controlled the movement of your hunter. While the second was a 2-Way joystick with a top mounted fire button. That one was used to aim and shoot. The 2-Way joystick with fire button is no longer produced, use a standard 8-Way with fire button as a replacement (removing the microswitches for left and right).

I may dream in technicolor, but I trip the fuck out in old-school black and white

This game was in black and white, not greyscale (like many early games used), but just two colors, black and white. But the characters and animals were large, and very detailed for just using a single color. I had no problems telling exactly what kind of animals I was hunting. (This game requires a black and white CRT, and does not correctly display if a color one is used as a replacement).

There were four different animals that you could hunt. Snakes and lions were both rather slow moving, and good for 100 points each. Wild boars would run quickly across the screen, but would net you 200 for a kill. Finally, vultures were small and would move around erratically near the top of the screen (being worth 300 points if you could hit them). Touching any of the beasties meant instant death, but it mattered little, because this game played on time limits anyway. Death only meant that you would lose a few seconds waiting for your intrepid big game hunter to reappear (the game lasted 90 seconds total).

You may say to yourself, "I want to be a big game hunter"!

There are two ways that you can play this game even today. The first is to seek out and find an actual working copy in an arcade somewhere (or buy one at an amusement industry auction). But good luck on that, most of the original versions of this game have long since been converted, scrapped, or have simply stopped working. A few of them are still in the hands of dedicated collectors. But they usually don't let people just pop by to play their prized games.

But Safari is perfectly emulated by MAME, except that the sound emulation has not been implemented (at least not as of when I am writing this). So I would suggest playing some jungle type music while you play (like the background music to Donkey Kong Country). Most computers will have no problem emulating this game while playing an mp3 file. (It just doesn't take that much power to emulate a Z80.)

Four song EP released by The Breeders in 1992 on 4AD Records. The first Breeders release after the breakup of The Pixies, it showcases what would become the new Breeders sound, much louder and rougher and poppier. The gentle sparse nature of their first album, Pod, was largely abandoned, but one acoustic guitar still charms the majority of these tracks.

The two middle songs here, the ones not found anywhere else, have an bitter acerbic edge that wouldn't be redoubled on their next album, Last Splash, which the first song would be rerecorded for. Last Splash yielded the top 40 breakthrough Cannonball, which, along with the band's opening for Nirvana on their In Utero tour, would lift them out of the indie rock neighborhood and into the mainstream of "alternative". To me it's a shame, because that bitter wedge of spite sticks in you a lot longer than some of the bouncy fluff to come.

Track list:

1. Do You Love Me Now?
2. Don't Call Home
3. Safari
4. So Sad About Us

The eponymous third track spends three minutes orbiting around a single abrasive riff. There is no chorus, just changes in amplitude and instrumentation, and a short 4-bar bridge leading into the second verse. The female accusing the male of being too sensitive and clingy isn't something you hear too often in pop music. Delivered in Kim Deal's breathy yet scratchy alto, it's inflammatorily sexy.

In production for over twenty years, the Lamy Safari probably will be regarded as classic pen. The Safari was originally designed for pre-teen age range, where the child gets greater input into the selection of school supplies. It has since grown to have fans among adult pen collectors.

The basic Safari is made from ABS plastic, with a wire clip that makes it look quite distinct. The nib is steel, but quite responsive. The pen sports an "ink-view" window to see the level of the cartridge or converter, and an ergonomical triangle grip. It comes in a fountain pen, a ball point pen, a roller ball pen and a pencil.

The overall look is the same as a Sony "Sport" Walkman, and about as tough. One pen store has what they call a "Volvo Test," by which the president of the company rolls over the pen with the front tire of his Brick. The Safari passes without a scratch.

The basic ABS Safari comes in blue, yellow, red, black, grey, and white. There is an "Al-Star" version, with an aluminum overlay, and the new "Vista", which is clear. It makes for a good introduction to nice pens, or a good pen to tote around in a harsh environment. Mine accompanied me on my trip to Walt Disney World.

Safari is Apple's very own web browser. A public beta was released on the 7th January 2003 at the San Francisco MacWorld expo. It is based around the KDE's KHTML rendering engine and runs on Mac OS X 10.2 and higher, with Safari 1.2 requiring Mac OS X 10.3 or higher.

For some time rumour sites had been speculating that Apple would release its own browser. Many have grumbled about Internet Explorer. It was commonly believed that if such an "iBrowser" were to exist it would be based around Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, like Chimera (now called Camino), especially as Chimera's lead developer David Hyatt now works for Apple. Instead Safari is based on KHTML and KJS.

Features:
Note: This is my view of the situation. I'm not really taken in by Safari's wonderful bookmarks. They're just bookmarks.

• Lightweight: The Safari download weighs in at just 3 Mb, and the application itself is just 7 Mb. By comparison, Chimera is a tad over 21 Mb, IE is just under 20 Mb and Mozilla is about 35 Mb. For version 1.0 this has changed to about a 7 Mb download and a 14 Mb executable (not counting the WebKit framework), with subsequent versions all being more or less the same size. Most of the size increase is due to the fact that Safari is now available in 14 languages.
• Fast: This was one of Safari's main selling points at the keynote. Steve Jobs produced benchmarks that claimed that Safari was 3 times faster than IE in a standardised HTML rendering test. Safari is also supposed to be faster at javascript. (the benchmark used were Ziff Davis' iBench). The same benchmarks also shows Safari to be faster than Netscape 7 and Chimera. This has only got better with successive versions.
• Popup blocking: This has been around for some time in a number of browsers, including those based on Mozilla. But for the first time, it's available in the default browser on a mainstream platform. People who don't have the knowledge to grab a copy of Mozilla will have this at their fingertips. Mozilla's popup blocking is however more powerful and allows a more fine-grained control of things.
• Snapback: A back button on steroids. It takes you back to the last page you entered the url or submitted a form for. For example if following a google search you dive deep into one of the results, snapback will take back to the Google results page.
• Tabbed browsing: Public beta 2 brings tabbed browsing to the masses at long last! Like many I was not convinced of the usefulness of this until I actually started using it, now I'm hooked. Tabbed browsing is brilliant at reducing clutter. Instead of having 30 different browser windows (unwieldy even on my 23 inch Cinema display, I will usually have 1 or 2 for each of the sites I am reading.

Appearance:

Safari is a bundled Cocoa application. Installation is trivial. You download the disk image, open it, agree to the license agreement and it copies itself to your application folder. Following Apple's recent trend, it's a brushed metal application which people tend to love or hate (you can of course turn that off using Interface Builder). It's generally fairly slick. For example the progress bar appears as the background of the URL bar.

Now that the facts are out of the way, my own opinion.

It's Fast

Safari loads in mere second or two (take note Firefox), and pages render quickly. I was stunned the first time I tried Safari and Apple have managed to improve on this with each new version. Beyond subjective notions of speed, tabbed browsing saves me time as does the handy Google search bar (especially with the advent of the Google Calculator).

It works

When I first wrote this I commented that Safari was "pretty stable" but now (1.2.1) it is nothing short of rock solid and can handle pretty much anything you will throw at it. You can play quicktime movies in it, waste countless hours on silly flash games involving penguins, and of course node. The best thing is that it keeps getting better, the rendering errors that used to crop up occasionally are all but gone.

It's scriptable

Applescript is one of the less well known crown jewels of Mac OS X. Starting with version 1.0, you can tell Safari to run a piece of Javascript from an Applescript. This is hugely powerful and used by several of the example scripts Apple have released. For example one can write scripts that will pick all of the linked pictures from the front window and open each one in a separate tab.

It makes life easier for developers

With Safari 1.0 the WebKit framework became available to all developers. Apple applications such as Mail or Sherlock have all been updated to use this to display HTML. Recent versions of OmniWeb also leverage Safari's HTML rendering code (although OmniWeb doesn't actually use WebKit, it uses a customised version of WebCore, the framework that sits under WebKit). WebKit is available to both Carbon and Cocoa applications and makes fetching and displaying HTML in your program an absolute doddle. Carbon developers may want to note that all the Carbon functions do is allow you to create a WebView, to actually control it it is necessary to write some Cocoa (personally I have a framework written in Cocoa that makes a set of plain C APIs available).

It's open source friendly

It's nice to see that Apple hasn't just taken from the open-source community. In the year and a half that Apple has been working on Safari they have of course made many changes and optimisations to the KHTML and KJS code they started from. Apple released the source code for those changes and emailed KDE developers with a detailed changeLog on the very day Safari was released. The developers also received an email thanking them for the work they had put into KHTML and KJS and asking for their feedback.

I first wrote this shortly after the initial preview release of Safari, and finished off by saying

Overall Safari shows great promise, and I for one hope that it will mature into a great browser.

A little over a year later I can do nothing but say that Safari has lived up to my initial hopes. In this relatively short period, Safari has gone from a promising new browser to my reference point, burying Internet Explorer on the way (Microsoft have officially ceased development of the Macintosh version of IE). Hats off to Apple.

Sources: http://www.apple.com/safari
The MWSF January 2003 keynote
A few hours of my own testing
Text of the mailing list posts sent to kde developers:
http://mkb.n3.net/khtml.txt or http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104196912316326&w=2

Apple's Safari 1.0 (v85)

At the 2003 World Wide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs announced the release of Safari 1.0 for immediate download. Though the betas had a reasonably polished feel, this final version brings the browser up to par with the rest of the Mac OS X browsers. Javascript and CSS issues seem to be evaporating quickly, and with more and more Web sites rendering correctly, the true innovation of the user interface is allowed to blossom.

Apple's process really shines in Safari. The decision to use KHTML rather than Gecko raised more than a few eyebrows when the first beta was released. The main reason for this was ostensibly because it is a lighter, more optimized code base that Apple could leverage for speed and build on where needed. But beyond that I view this as a good thing for the simple reason that innovative browser work with Gecko is already being done on OS X in the form of Camino (formerly Chimera), Firebird, and even Mozilla and Netscape themselves.

The next great thing is that Apple got Dave Hyatt to lead this project. His blog at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/ provides invaluable updates to Web developers and hobbyists interested in the progress he is making. The browser itself has a handy bug reporting feature that allows the sending of screenshots and source code directly to Dave and company to make sure that your problems get noticed and fixed. This feature is not to be underestimated since often times rendering problems occur in private or dynamic for which a URL alone does not give identical page views.

As a professional web developer, I have to stay abreast of all the browsers out there to make sure my sites are functioning correctly. Safari had proven itself a wonderfully intuitive browser for all my common surfing needs, but the lack of tabs has made it impractical for every day use. With the release of version 1.0 I have made the switch full-time, and many of the subtleties have been extremely useful:

Safari Features

Tabbed Browsing
Safari gets tabbed browsing right. Not only can it be turned off for those who despise its very existence, it can be set to either immediately jump to new tabs or not. Using the various combinations of Command, Shift, and Option, links can be opened in a new tab or a new window with focus staying where it is or changing to the new link. I can not express how convenient this is for a heavy tab user.

Bookmarks
Toolbar bookmarks: check, Bookmark folders: check, Bookmark management: triple check. Safari offers the handy iTunes-style interface for managing bookmark groups. Additionally it lists bookmarks from your address book and Rendezvous web servers (I didn't even know my printer had a Web server built in til I saw this), as well as keeping your bookmark menu distinct from the toolbar bookmarks and all the rest of them. The bookmarks page can be toggled on and off like Internet Explorer sidebars, except for it uses the whole browser window to allow for much more robust management. It also automatically imports IE and Mozilla bookmarks. But the really cool part is that iSync will synchronize bookmarks with various PDAs and other Macs.

AutoFill
My biggest problem with Camino has been that it doesn't save form fields. In fact, I got so used to IE Mac saving form fields that I thought all browsers did it. Unfortunately I realized that not only does Mozilla ignore this handy feature, but IE PC also drops form values when navigating around using the forward and back buttons. Of course IE Mac is unviable, so it was with much relief that I realized Safari saves form values. It even goes a step further to provide form auto-completion address-bar-style so you can have multiple possible values for a field, and it even culls from your 'My Card' in the OS X Address book. As if that wasn't cool enough, it also specifically allows the enabling/disabling of username/password fields. Finally, it allows you to see and clear the stored values for any domain you choose directly through the preferences.

Security
Similarly to the AutoFill values, Safari also allows robust cookie management on per-domain basis. Other cool features include pop-up blocking, history and cache clearing, snapback, toolbar search, and extension disabling (plug-ins, Java, and Javascript).

Activity
A totally understated feature on the Window menu. Shows a tree of all the open web pages with all the linked elements contained therein. A great way to jump to linked stylesheets and scripts. Invaluable for the Web designer who frequently looks at these things.

Overview

Safari is just another brick in the wall of reasons why Mac OS X is the most impressive consumer operating system today. Not that I'm a zealot, I'm not out to dis Windows or Linux, I use them both extensively, but the last few years of leadership under Steve Jobs have put together a software platform that meets my needs in amazingly intuitive and time-saving ways. Obviously the result of user-centric interface design at every stage, Safari packs in hundreds of quirky interface details to make it work more efficiently.

The way that Safari integrates with the rest of the OS and Apple programs leaves other browsers at an unfair advantage. Apple even is shipping a Safari API for developers to use the browser's features directly in their own software (kind of like IE PC without the heavy-handed integration). Perhaps this is why Microsoft recently announced the discontinuation of Internet Explorer development on the Mac. Good riddance I say, and welcome to iLife!