Update (25th February 2009)
Looks like Apple had a read of our post! It’s great to see the new Safari 4 implementing a feature we wanted. It’s even better to say “Hey Apple, we beat you to it!” But we don’t like to gloat. It was a fairly obvious decision for Apple to put such a great looking visualisation tool into an application that arguably needed it more than the Finder. I think people will quickly forget just how difficult searching their history was when all they had was a long list of URLs and page names.
The Idea (before Apple implemented it)
A lot of people [including me] would like a better way of browsing their vast arrays of bookmarks and visited sites.
A lot of people have suggested that Safari had some way of visually doing this, just like a lot of plug ins can for Firefox and other browsers.
But, it occurred to me recently – wouldn’t it be cool if Safari had Coverflow? Whenever you go to a page, Safari could capture a small thumbnail and save it in a directory for fast viewing much like iTunes does with cover art, and the Finder will with images and other documents in Leopard.
It would make so much sense – iTunes for Mac and Windows already has Coverflow, so surely it wouldn’t be such a mammoth task to get Coverflow in Safari for Windows as well.
I know it would save me a ton of time – much more than just eye candy – websites are, just like documents, not the easiest thing to distinguish when jumbled up in lists of 100s if not 1000s of similar items.
Also, with an almost identical version of Safari on the iPhone, browsing your history would become much the same, and just as easy as browsing your music collection.
All in all, Steve and co, if you’re listening, this one’s a no-brainer 😉
