A rotten little apple by Ashley Harding

Apple has had a nasty Safari bug since December which breaks SmugMug, Facebook, Gmail, and lots of US banks.

3 months later, it’s still not fixed. Your only option is to use Firefox if you’re affected.

Apple’s known about the problem since December, and has lots of internal bugs on the issue (30+ I last heard). (For my Apple readers, here’s our bug on the subject and the one it was marked as a duplicate of).

I’ve done everything I know how to get this resolved – Apple employees have been internally working on our behalf, we have an AppleCare Enterprise Support case open (#332101), I tried to open an ADC Premier case (it was denied because they don’t “provide code-level support for content creation issues” whatever that means). Still no luck.

Apparently this is fixed in Mac OS X 10.5.7. We have the latest seed, so we’re going to find out, but 10.5.7 is likely a month or more away from shipping, so expect this stuff to be be broken at least until then. Use Firefox.

Safari happens to be my favorite browser, so this is especially disheartening. The good news is you may not be affected. Not everyone running 10.5.6 with Safari is, for some reason, but lots of you are. You’ll know you are if you see SmugMug galleries which appear to be empty (but aren’t) or see ugly white pages with undecipherable error messages. For that, I apologize – I really wish we could help but we can’t. You can help yourself, though – use Firefox.

Put another way, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, sits on Apple’s board of directors. Gmail has also been broken for 3 months. Apparently he’s powerless too.

Man, to say I’m excited about this would be a major understatement. We’re huge Apple fanboys over here, so when we got accepted to the first wave of SDK developers at Apple, we were stoked. Shizam went to town almost immediately and after a few months of hard work, SmugShot was born. (And as I’m writing this, we’re #1 in “What’s Hot” on both iTunes and the iPhone interface!)

So what is it? Well, we knew early on we wanted something very simple and elegant that did only one thing – but did it extremely well. We didn’t want a kitchen-sink photo-sharing / -browsing / -taking application. We already have a fantastic iPhone application on Safari, so the obvious thing to tackle first was actually taking the photos on your iPhone and getting them up to SmugMug.

SmugShot makes it incredibly simple to simply whip your phone out at a moment’s notice and take as many snapshots as you’d like. The photos will be automagically geotagged with your location, should you wish it, and you can quickly and easily enter a caption and some keywords – or not. Your call. We’ll queue them up and send them along to the SmugMug gallery of your choice – over EDGE, WiFi, or 3G.

And that’s basically it. Simple, elegant, clean – just the way we like it. If you’re new to SmugMug, you can create a free trial account right from SmugShot. You can set up a default Caption and some default Keywords to make entering them a breeze. And you can even upload photos that are already in your Photo Library, rather than from your camera (and you iPod Touch users can do this, too). One big Apple bug with that, though – the SDK only give us access to 640×480 versions of photos in your Library. I’m hoping they’ll fix that soon.

The really wild thing is how much I actually use the app. I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to things like cameras and lenses, and lets face it – the iPhone’s lens can’t compare to some fabulous Canon glass. But as the app has spread throughout the office, everyone’s learned the same lesson I have: There’s an awful lot of value in convenience.

SmugShot is so shockingly convenient and easy to use, it trumps the limited image quality for almost all of my normal everyday shots.

So go grab it from iTunes, read more about it, or even get some answers. Definitely let us know if you like it and what we can improve on – we already have our own list but would love to hear yours!

Getting lots of requests about an iPhone app for SmugMug. As you no-doubt know, we’re enormous Apple fans over here, and iPhone fans in particular. Most of the company camped out in line at the Palo Alto store (see stories here and here), we were the first photo sharing app with an iPhone optimized interface (and one of the first web apps anywhere), and we designed our awesome new video sharing service with iPhone in mind. So I think it’s no secret that we’d love to have rich, intuitive native iPhone applications for ourselves and our customers.

However, the iPhone SDK NDA is still in effect, so I can neither confirm nor deny that we have an iPhone app in the works, or even whether we’ve been accepted into the iPhone SDK program. I have no idea why so many companies have chosen to break the NDA and talk about their apps today, but that’s just not the way we roll around here – we like to maintain a great relationship with any partner companies, and Apple is a company we’re especially fond of. (Ok, ok, so I’m a fanboy )

If / when we get to build an iPhone app or two, we’ll do our absolute best to make sure they’re intuitive to use and takes advantage of all the power the iPhone provides. As you can imagine, we’re especially excited about iPhone 3G.

(Thank goodness Michael Arrington stole the wrong iPhone from me this morning. Whew! )

photo by: Simon Barnes

I swear I’m not making this up.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I found it. Safari is one of our favorite browsers, and we love their work on standards compliance and speed, particularly JavaScript, but this particular bug is really driving us crazy. I’ve logged it with Apple (#5786274), and a fix is promised, but in case you’re getting hit with this and are as baffled as I was, here are the details:

• If your computer has less than 1GB of RAM, Safari fails to cache items larger than 104,857 bytes.
• If your computer has more than 1GB of RAM, Safari failes to cache items larger than 209,715 bytes.
• JPEGs, at least, are temporarily cached in RAM. Whew. But upon browser restart, you’ll see they didn’t make it to the disk cache, so you have to get them again.
• Other objects, like SWFs or videos, though, don’t even make it to the RAM cache, let alone disk. Load the same SWF back-to-back, and you’ve just transfered the bytes twice. Ugh.

Very easy to reproduce yourself from the comfort of your own home, so go for it. Just fire up HTTP Scoop or Wireshark or tail your server’s HTTP logs and start hitting stuff. Marvel at the # of excess bytes transferred across the wire that you didn’t need.

Here are a couple of test URLs so you can see for yourself:

• JPEG test
• SWF test

As a self-professed Apple fanboy, I can’t wait for a fix. In the meantime, we’ve had to jump through all sorts of hoops to ‘dumb down’ some of our most exciting new features.

UPDATE: Yes, I’ve tried with every Cache-Control and Expires header known to man. No, it doesn’t make a difference. Try it yourself.