Safari 5.1 is the latest version of Apple’s web browser. People who work on websites should notice a change in the Web Inspector, when compared to Safari 5.0. Previously, clicking on the Resources icon brought up the file size and loading time data, which is useful for diagnosing why a particular web page may be loading slowly.

In Safari 5.1, you can still view this data; however, it has been moved under the Network tab. Another difference is that in Safari 5.0, you could inspect this data after a page load. Safari 5.1 changes this. If you do not have Web Inspector open at the time a page loads, the Network data appears blank. That’s why I could not locate this data at first glance.

If you want to look at the Headers, clicking on the name of one of the files brings up the Status Code, Request URL, and Response Headers.

I don’t get Launchpad. It may be a cool feature if I didn’t have the most often used applications already in the Dock. As it is, the feature set seems a bit duplicative. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you should already be familiar with the UI–drag related applications on top of each other to create folders.

By default, Launchpad displays all the application icons in grid format in alphabetical order. And, when I say all, I mean all, including rarely used utilities like ColorSync Utility, Dictionary, Java Preferences, and Boot Camp Assistant. It will take some organizing for Launchpad to be useful.

Mac OS X Lion marks the end of Rosetta, the transition technology that allowed Intel Macs to run PowerPC applications. After installing Mac OS X, I took a peek at the Applications folder. If you have been migrating all your applications from computer to computer over the years, you may have some Power PC applications, such as Internet Explorer, sitting around unused on the hard drive. Now would be the time to clean up the computer because clicking on Internet Explorer (which now has a slash through it) brings up this warning:

You can’t open the application Internet Explorer.app because PowerPC applications are no longer supported.

No offer to download Rosetta separately. Game over. Of course, losing a 2004 version of Internet Explorer is no big deal with Safari, Firefox and Chrome offering newer and better options. The bigger problem is Quicken 2005. I haven’t committed to any of the alternatives yet. That’s why I installed Lion on the older MacBook Pro and not the newer one that has all the mission critical applications and data.

On one hand, I don’t have to drive to the Apple Store, find parking, pick-up a tiny box with a disk in it, wait in line, check out, and then drive back home.

However, waiting 1 hour and 55 minutes to download Mac OS X Lion, which weighs in at 3.74 GB, is far from instant gratification.

Last week, I received an ominous note from Intuit regarding Quicken, a personal finance product that I have been using for long, long time.

I can still remember when I first installed Quicken on the Powerbook 100. (The Powerbook is long gone, but for some reason I have kept the Quicken install disks in storage). I was immediately captivated with Quicken and proceeded to tell all my family members to switch to Quicken instead of using Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 to manage their finances. As the years passed, I consistently upgraded Quicken until I reached Quicken for Mac 2005. I skipped 2007 and Quicken Essentials for Mac received disastrous reviews. So, I held off as long as I could.

After a pretty good run, I may have reached the end of the line with Quicken since Intuit tells me that Quicken for Mac 2005 is not compatible with Apple’s upcoming Lion operating system.

Since Intuit was offering a 50% discount for Quicken Essentials for Mac and a 60-day money back guarantee, I decided to take the plunge. I did not experience any problems migrating all my financial data to Quicken Essentials for Mac. However, the inability of the program to track investment transactions is a non-starter. I could look past the changed UI that displays transactions in one line instead of two, which makes Quicken Essentials look like a spreadsheet. (Gasp! If I wanted to use Excel, I would launch that app instead.) I could probably deal with transfers between accounts that are now recorded in a transfer field instead of the category field. But, the loss of investment transactions was too much to bear.

In 2010, the Macworld review for Quicken Essentials noted that a “promised Quicken Deluxe comes out next year” that may address the lack of investment tracking. But, we are into the second half of 2011 with no product in sight. I tried to pry some information from the Intuit support staff, but I couldn’t get any response other than phrases cut-and-pasted from the Intuit website. Since Quicken Essentials for Mac did not meet my needs, and I have no idea when an upgrade to Quicken Essentials for Mac or a rumored Quicken Deluxe may show up, I decided to give iBank a look.

At first glance, iBank looks more like Quicken than Quicken Essentials for Mac. Despite the superficial similarity, iBank does have some differences from Quicken. For example, categories work differently. In Quicken, I had to add a new category through “Lists > Categories & Transfers.” I could not find a parallel menu in iBank and found the solution by happenstance when I tried to type the new category in the category field. I actually like the iBank method.

I also liked the transaction search in iBank where I can enter a term in the search field and iBank instantaneously filters the transactions. Much faster than the Find and Replace dialog in Quicken.

But, what absolutely aggravated me was iBank’s treatment of short sales. The portfolio summary incorrectly reported that I was fabulously wealthy. After some sleuthing (by generating another portfolio report with all transactions), I found the offending transaction that threw off my portfolio balance. Within the portfolio report, I could see a share adjustment transaction at the time of a short sale. Well, iBank would not let me sell shares that I did not own, so it added the shares to the account before the short sale. If that wasn’t bad enough, the share adjustment transaction only showed up on the portfolio summary and not in the account register. The resolution is to change the transaction type for the short sale from “sell” to “sell to open.” After that, the portfolio balance plunged back to a more credible level.

This major bug has shaken my initial faith in iBank and wasted an inordinate amount of my time. I will be taking full advantage of the 30-day free trial period before I commit to Quicken or iBank. I like the iBank UI and feature set, but I cannot deal with maddening bugs like the above. For now, iBank is in the lead, but if I find another significant glitch, I might be returning to the tried and true Quicken 2005.

I use Apple’s Grab application to take screenshots. Naturally, when I needed to grab a preview frame from a video, I followed my usual workflow: open video, pause video, select frame, grab video window, copy video window, open image editing application, paste, etc. Then, I read this and realized I was doing it all wrong. I can copy a frame directly from QuickTime Player. No need to launch the Grab application. OK, that’ll save a few steps next time around.

I’ve encountered this problem for the first time today. While using Transmit to upload some files, Transmit reported a read error. Transmit then lists the file that I attempted to upload as having a size of -7,686,868,318,640,340,840, if that is possible. The only recent change I made was upgrading to 10.5.4.

I don’t know what to think about Microsoft. The Europeans believe that Microsoft is a bad actor that cannot be trusted. When a third-party application encounters compatibility problems with Microsoft software, the Europeans automatically attribute some nefarious monopolist motive to the Redmond behemoth.

But, what if Microsoft was just incompetent and not ill-mannered? How else can one explain the compatibility problems between the two latest versions of Microsoft Office? I downloaded a Microsoft Word file that was encoded in the new .docx format. I opened the Word document using Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition and I didn’t see any formatting issues. However, when I viewed the same document using Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 (Windows), the document was formatted differently. Specifically, spaces that appeared in the Mac version of Office did not appear in the Windows version of Office. How can this be?

After some testing, this is what I discovered. When I saved an Office 2008 document in the .docx format, Office 2007 stripped out some of the spaces. By some, I mean a lot of spaces, including spaces between words as well as a series of leading spaces used to align text. If I saved the same document using Office 2008 in the .doc format (i.e., Word 97), I had no portability problems between the Mac/Windows versions of Office.

So, you tell me. Are incompatibility between Office 2008 and Office 2007 due to evilness or incompetence?