Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Flare - Developmental Browser for Mac OS X

G

grabberslasher

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 2, 2002
409
1
Éire
Hi there, I have posted about my browser 'Flare' (formerly 'AeroBrowser') before on MR, and I just want to tell you all that Flare is now available as a public alpha.

What does that mean? Flare is currently very early-development code, and I'm trying hard to make it as interesting as possible (I am the sole developer), but if you want you can download it and give it a spin.

I have spent most of my time around developing the UI and aesthetics, and integrating the latest technologies in Tiger like Core Image. Features include live page scaling, Tab Exposé and Speech. Of course, it's a Universal Binary, and runs great on 10.4.6 Intel.

Please do not provide me with bug reports, I am well aware of issues and am working hard to fix them for the next release. This is alpha code, after all. :) Any other feedback is very welcome, and there's a link to iChat with me in the application.

UPDATED Download here, 970Kb: http://rapidshare.de/files/18337361/Flare.zip.html

 
Very nice job! I really like the look and feel, and the page scaling is a great touch. Will keep an eye on this to see how it develops.

Thanks.
 
Nice work! It looks very nice and the scaling feature is cool. Great logo too. Good luck with further developments, let us know of your progress.
 
max_altitude said:
Nice work! It looks very nice and the scaling feature is cool. Great logo too. Good luck with further developments, let us know of your progress.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the positive feedback guys, I appreciate it. I have just finished adding 3rd button support to Flare - now you can middle-click to open a tab in a new window, or even you can middle-drag to pan around the web page (like grab scrolling in Photoshop). This will be present in the next release.
 
Looks nice...I remember you mentioning AeroBrowser on here before.

A couple of comments/suggestions:

- I don't like the star for the bookmark button...it gives no clue as to what the button does. (I know you didn't want bug reports, but I will point out that after clicking on the star button to bring up the bookmarks, a second click on the button reliably crashes the app on my system.)

- In the "Search" field, I'd like an indication of what it is I'm searching. I had to actually do a search to see that it was using Google.

- Page scaling is a very neat feature.

Nice job...looking forward to following Flare's progress!
 
A very interesting browser! I will use this as my primary for a while to see how it performs. I love the scaling feature, although it does seem to produce anomalies on MacRumors and blurs text a bit, although not enough to make me stop using this cool feature. I would be happy to donate if the real thing is any good, and judging from this Alpha, its going to be a great browser :)

I'd like if the search feature could be customized (like AcidSearch) or if I could be given the choice of Yahoo (because I prefer it to Google for some unknown reason). :D

EDIT: Scaling doesn't blur text, I meant images :eek:
 
BlizzardBomb said:
A very interesting browser! I will use this as my primary for a while to see how it performs. I love the scaling feature, although it does seem to produce anomalies on MacRumors and blurs text a bit, although not enough to make me stop using this cool feature. I would be happy to donate if the real thing is any good, and judging from this Alpha, its going to be a great browser :)

I'd like if the search feature could be customized (like AcidSearch) or if I could be given the choice of Yahoo (because I prefer it to Google for some unknown reason). :D
Click to expand...

When I have the Preferences window implemented the search engine will be customizable. All the groundwork is there, just waiting for the right time.

By the way, I have a new build ready that fixes some of the most glaring problems with the original release. Also includes middle-button support/scrolling, and fixes Tab Exposé for Intel Macs.

http://rapidshare.de/files/18022771/Flare.zip.html
 
j26 said:
Wouldn't launch for me (10.3.9)
Click to expand...

Sorry about that, but Flare was originally developed on Tiger and will run on Tiger and up. I actually started coding Flare on Xcode 2 on the WWDC Tiger build. The whole UI would fall to pieces if I made a Panther version (no unified toolbar, buttons would look out of place, no Core Image effects like the ripple in the About window, etc).
 
jsw said:
Nice!

Would you like me to mirror it?
Click to expand...

If you'd like, maybe for the people who can't use Rapidshare, although I intend refreshing the build often so it might be a pain to keep mirroring it. Thanks though :)
 
It's a nice start. I'd recommend allow for holding down the space bar and being able to click and move the mouse to move around the page (like a photoshop document). This would make scaled up pages much easier to navigate.
 
grabberslasher said:
If you'd like, maybe for the people who can't use Rapidshare, although I intend refreshing the build often so it might be a pain to keep mirroring it. Thanks though :)
Click to expand...
Cool. Well, if you ever find yourself in need of a mirror, just PM me. :)
 
TeraRWM said:
It's a nice start. I'd recommend allow for holding down the space bar and being able to click and move the mouse to move around the page (like a photoshop document). This would make scaled up pages much easier to navigate.
Click to expand...

Due to constraints in WebKit, when I attempted to do that it would mess up all other clicking/dragging in a web view. Instead, if you hold down the third button you can move around the page (like Photoshop).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back