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Apple wrote to me today, letting me know that the iPhone Developer program renewal has been extended until July 11 with 60 days to renew. That hopefully should put people’s minds at ease who are worried about their programs expiring. Code onward!

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, Developers, iPhone SDK, App Store

Something is odd about Safari 4’s user interface. Daring Fireball summarized many of the concerns around the tabs layout.

But I think Apple’s designers had a secret design criteria for Safari 4: Multi-Touch.

Apple is known for their minimialism and attention to detail. And a few things about the Safari 4 interface only make sense with this new criteria:

• A Moved Close Tab – Close Tab buttons now sit on top of the address and search bars – and further away from the bookmarks bar. Accidental touches will only activate the address or search bars, instead of activating a bookmark.
• A Modified Reload – Reload now matches iPhone’s Reload. Visually, this is a much harder thing to mouse click with, but makes perfect sense to someone familiar with a multi-touch interface.
• A New New Tab – Safari has gained a button. New Tab. Why? Well, there used to be no way to get a new tab opened without a keyboard or menu (we use ऎ-T), also the reason why iPhone added a button here.
• A New New Bookmark – Minimalists adding another button? Why? Again, same reason here. No way to add a new bookmark without a keyboard or menu.

I’m guessing that multi-touch user interactions are more positionally accurate (which is why Safari 4’s reduced hit area for “drag window around” works in a multi-touch scenario) due to direct user manipulation. That might explain some of the slight inconveniences Apple is making to pursue a unified multi-touch but full computing interface.

I don’t know if Apple’s Netbook will run full Mac OS X, but I’m pretty sure that Safari 4’s user interface will at least be consistent:

Technorati Tags: Apple Netbook, Safari, Multi-Touch

Safari 4 has entered public beta. It’s blazingly fast (unless you’re using WebKit nightlies already) and has tons of features, even outside of the WebKit core.

Apple’s press release

Some additional notes:

• The Safari 4 Welcome animation is done in HTML5 and CSS Animation. It’s not a video. (Well the compass is) But still very sexy.
• I swiped the welcome animation audio and placed it in this post.
• The Top Sites feature is slick. Those curved preview surfaces are just not ready to be done in CSS Effects.
• CSS Transforms 3D is not available in this public beta.
• Tabs are placed on top. It’s a little harder to drag them around for me when re-arranging, but see if you like them better.
• Safari 4 does not use 1 process per tab contrary to other news reports.