Roccat 3.0


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.

3 comments:

  1. Trying this out on my G4 iMac running 10.5/Leopard, some initial reactions:

    Even as an abstainer from general purpose online social networks, I like the built-in ability to clip to Evernote.

    I like the indication of a website loading by the progression of color underneath the URL, and the visual tabs, both a la Opera.

    I also appreciate omnibar rather a la Chrome.

    It isn't obvious how to import my AuroraFox bookmarks; it doesn't seem to recognize them as Firefox bookmarks (though I can save them to Safari then import them from Safari).

    Can't get dar.fm to load at all, no idea why (it just spins and spins, never resolving the page), and I managed to cause it to fail twice in the first fifteen minutes of usage, again, not sure why.

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  2. I too couldn't get dar.fm to load, but then I put www. in front of the dar.fm and all was good.

    I never import bookmarks from one browser to another, just a personal preference, had too many disasters back in the early Mozilla days. I currently have five browsers (Leopardwebkit, Tenfourfox, Camino, Omniweb and Roccat) in my dock, and have just gone to using different ones for different things..

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  3. I love the Roccat Flick feature (if you have multiple macs or an iPhone or iPad) - I can easily send a website from my PPC Mac straight to my iPhone it makes me happy - and the RClouds feature keeps all my tabs synced between my Mac and iPhone - super happy, haven't found another PPC browser where I can do this (at least one that actually works).

    I also love the Roccat Reader which is new in Roccat 3 - it makes for easy reading of articles without distractions from the website or my mac in general. (doesn't work with all my favorite news sites, but most of them)

    ^ Also if you're having problems contact Runecats from the site: http://runecats.com/runecatsupport.html - the best support I have ever witnessed - better than Apples :)

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