There are many great mysteries on planet earth, but none
greater in 2013 than the Harlem Shake youtube phenomena. Millions, no tens of
millions of people, myself included, have wasted a portion of the little time
they have on planet earth watching groups of people do a ridiculous “dance”,
which in reality is little more than a uncoordinated spasm. In my defense, I
only watched one Harlem Shake video as there was a Brooklyn indie rock band,
now defunct, that went by almost the same name that I quite liked back in the year
of 2009. Turns out they named
themselves after the original Harlem Shake dance, which has nothing whatsoever
to do with the nonsense on youtube today.
The good news for
OS X 10.5 PowerPC users is that if you so desire, you have yet another
supported, lightweight browser you can watch the real Harlem Shake videos on, Roccat.
While Roccat is not new, version 3.0 is, and I’ve been using it for a couple
days now. It’s definitely worth the bandwidth to download. Why? Well,
for one, Roccat is fast, in fact its one of the faster browsers on OS X, and
the developer has stated he intends to support PowerPC for as long as he
possibly can. Not many people say that sort of thing these days, and I for one
intend to support any developer who says they’ll support PowerPC.
Roccat is yet another of the army of webkit browsers out in the
wild, but the only one with built in Facebook and Twitter integration. Now,
this Dr. is utterly convinced Facebook is evil and Twitter is for the birds,
but if you use either social media service, you will probably enjoy the ease of
integration Roccat provides. Pulling down the Facebook login caused me nothing
but headaches and a restart of Roccat, so fair warning, your mileage may vary. Another nice feature of
Roccat is a built in user agent switcher for spoofing your bank into thinking
your one of the 54% of people dumb enough to actually use Internet
Explorer. There’s also an “undercover” private browsing option for the one
PowerPC OS X user in Iran. If there is another use for private browsing, I have
no idea what that could be…
Best of all, Greasekit
and Viewtube now work in Roccat 3.0, which was not the case with prior
versions. In fact, on my ibook G4, prior versions of Roccat would crash on
launch if Greasekit was present. For the uninitiated, Greasekit is a way of
making Greasemonkey scripts work on most webkit browsers. Firstly, you will
need to download and install SIMBL, and then Greasekit, from here. In Roccat,
Safari or Leopardwebkit you can then use the Greasekit menu that now appears to
manage which webkit applications Greasekit will work for. Fair warning: Greasekit is OLD not all
Greasemonkey scripts will work with Greasekit, and as always with anything
javascript you need to be cautious about what you install. But this enables you
to head over to userscripts dot org and install viewtube, a greasemonkey script
that nicely swaps the hated FLASH for Quicktime, allowing for very decent embedded
video playback on youtube and quite a few other sites. I am pleased to say
playback is MOST EXCELLENT in Roccat 3.0, though I do have a slightly annoying
bug where I have to scroll down then back up to get the video playing to be
visible. This however may be a pecularilty of my system and no one elses.
Please give Roccat a try, and if you like it, tell the
developer, and make sure he knows you are on a PowerPC mac, or as we used to
say back in the old world days, a Power Macintosh.