Go to Apple Menu - - > About This Mac –> More Info.

On the left pane under the Contents list click Graphics / Displays

On the right pane you should see “Quartz Extreme” for each display you have.

It will say “supported” if this graphics card is installed in your computer. Then you’ll need either an ATI Radeon GPU or an NVIDIA GeForce2 MX or later, either with 16 MB of Video RAM or better.

What Quartz Extreme does is speed up window resizing and scrolling. But in Safari 4, it ensures that the Top Sites and Cover Flow features work smoothly.

Now, once you’ve established that you do have the hardware support for Safari 4’s Top Sites, then you can go ahead and use Top Sites in similar fashion to Opera’s “Speed Dial” and the Google Chrome interface, which I have not used.

I’m still playing around with what comes up after clicking the Edit button in Top Sites. Use the X to remove a site and use the push-pin to pin a site to a particular thumbnail position. If you want to move a thumbnail to a different position in the grid, just drag and drop the thumbnail in whatever position you wish. Notice that all the other thumbnails in the grid spaces will sway aside to accommodate the move.

The “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” buttons on the lower right allow you to increase or decrease the number of thumbnails and accordingly, the size of the thumbnails.

And to see webpage “album art” check out the Cover Flow view by clicking the bookmarks button next to the Top Sites button on the Safari 4 Toolbar.

Now, the other day I was checking out the Cover Flow, but the web page “album art” previews didn’t automatically appear. In fact, there were many black slates staring back at me.

This window drops down after clicking the bookmarks button, so of course I click on Add Previews Now. But still, black space. Why? Because it takes a while, at least on my machine - MacBook Pro, 2 GB RAM, 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - for the Cover Flow images to appear.

Patience, grasshopper.


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