Apple has published a new reference to CSS support in Safari version 3 which any web developer concerned with Macintosh support will probably be interested in. You can download the reference as a PDF file so you can use it offline as well.

Safari version 3 is bundled with Leopard, included in the iPhone and is in beta for Windows.

The reference includes CSS properties that are Safari-specific and not supported by other browsers. While I’m not a proponent of using browser-specific extensions they can be helpful to enhance the experience for specific browsers.

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I haven’t been the only one annoyed by the problems with X11 in MacOS X 10.5 Leopard. I’m lucky enough to only really be depending on X11 out of habit rather than need, though. Folks who do depend on it have now managed to put together a new build of Xquartz, the library that interfaces X11 to the Macintosh Quartz drawing engine. The new build solves some of the problems people have been encountering.

You can find a rundown of issues involving X11 and Leopard on MacOS X Hints forums.

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I mentioned in MacOS X 10.5 Leopard, From a Developer’s Perspective that X11 under Leopard was seriously broken. There’s some new information on how to properly work with ith which helps quite a bit.

The confusion lies in a change in the way that the X server is started. In Tiger, when you wanted to use X11 you’d start the server manually. In Leopard, it’s started automatically via launchd, which controls the DISPLAY variable and detects when something’s trying to talk to the X server and starts it.

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Apple’s eagerly awaited operating system, MacOS X 10.5, also known as “Leopard”, is now in our hands, and there are quite a few features in it that will be interesting to developers. Amazon is still offering Leopard for $20 off list and Leopard Family Pack (5-user license) for $10 off list.

I do limited development on MacOS X. I don’t write Macintosh applications, but I do write web-based applications that I deploy to non-Macintosh servers. The Mac is a great environment for doing this; I get a real UNIX environment under the hood with Apache, MySQL and Perl, and a nice layer of Macintosh over the surface. After years of struggling with Windows and Cygwin, or living with Windows and Linux, it’s been wonderful moving to a single, reasonable environment for working.

Given that, my emphasis on development under Leopard will be on the kinds of tools a web developer might use, rather than XCode, although I’ll touch on XCode at the end.

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Last week, Wordpress 2.3.1 was released – a bug fix minor update to 2.3 which also corrects some security issues. It’s a strongly recommended update that should just drop in easily if you’re running 2.3 already.

As always, it’s available from http://www.wordpress.org/.
[tags]wordpress, update[/tags]