iCab beta 49
23 May 2008
Little report about the latest iCab ß49 release.
It now supports GeoTags in a bigger way, extract from the release notes:
- RSS feeds and GeoTags were only searched in the root document of a frame page. Now iCab looks for this information in all frames as well.
- The GeoTag support now includes some workarounds for Flickr. Flickr supports geotagging photos, but unfortunately Flickr uses only a proprietary internal solution instead of all the standards and common solutions. Especially Flickr does not save the Geo data in the photos where one would expect to find them. So iCab will now search for the proprietary geo data from Flickr as well.
- Since MacOSX 10.4 iCab is able to show all the Exif data for images. You can get these data by opeing the contextual menu on an image and selecting the menu item “Image > Information”. Also in the “File Overview” window of the “Tools” menu, the preview area will list all the Exif data for the selected image.
- When entering the URL “settings:” in the URL field and opeing this page, it’s now possible to get access to some “experimental settings”:
+ Enables support for GeoTags in Images (requires MacOSX 10.4. or newer. Currently not very useful because you won’t find many geotagged images in the web yet, especially because photo sites like Flickr prefer their own proprietary solution (see above). So at the moment the support for geotagged images should be switched off, if you don’t need this information. Switching this setting off will save processor time and memory)…
Exif data for images:
Also iCab now seems happier when run on webkit nightlies, in fact so much so that it achieved a perfect score in the Acid3 Test (see the Running on Webkit page) and actually beat the webkit it was running-on in the Sunspider javascript speed test.
Growth
Comments
4 Responses to "iCab beta 49"
A browser than can read and display EXIF data from inline images is great to see. How does it handle display of data from multiple images in a single page?
The obvious next is do do something with that data. Just as the tools listed here can extract coordinates from metadata and/ or microformats and plot them using Google Maps (for example), iCab should be able to plot the coordinates in EXIF as CDFinder can.
Well, for instance, take one of your images that sits within an iframe – which prevents auto detection – so a contextual/⌘ click is required to display data and the data will have to be manually copied to say Google Maps or one’s own map page.
However, when the photo is taken out of the frame, auto detect works like iCab was set-up to do when it entered said list – it does what it says on the can.
I will try to find a page that contains a number of geotagged photos, to see if there is a multiple detect facility, or even what happens in that scenario. But, I doubt iCab is that sophisticated at this early stage in it’s development. Perhaps you know of or can create a page of geotagged images, obviously, most such pages are mere collections of thumbnails stripped of info.
Alexander Clauss did say there was going to be more happening in this area, and he’s been true to his word thus far.
I’ve put a page up here to demonstrate that it appears iCab is already capable of displaying multiple geo-data.
There are three of you photos uploaded and my page head contains ICBM geodata – thus there is a list of four GoogleMap links – the first is termed GeoData, the other three are identified by their jpg number. (Textpattern assigns a number to a photo when it is uploaded and that is what is being detected in the menu.)
Pretty damn smart
I agree; that’s very cool.