Browse the Web from Your Wrist with µBrowser

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2021/12/12/browse-the-web-from-your-wrist-with-µbrowser/

Ever wonder what it would be like to surf the Web on your Apple Watch? For just 99 cents, you can find out! Eat your heart out, Dick Tracy.

(Given its use of the Greek letter mu, which is the abbreviation for SI prefix “micro,” µBrowser should probably be pronounced “microBrowser,” but most people will probably call it “ubrowser.” Just don’t search for “ubrowser” in the App Store because that will pull up multiple apps with that name that are not µBrowser. It’s all Greek to me! But if you want to type the µ character on the Mac, it’s Option-M.)

Now that’s a sign of classy journalism! Most wouldn’t have mentioned such things, but it’s these ‘TidBits’ of info that adds greatness. Props for that!

As for the app, well I use his PiPifier app a lot (thanks to YouTube’s restrictions on PiP functionality for paid subscribers only), and that one works a real treat.

This new app takes Watch functionality to very quirky territory. Again, it’s definitely one for the desperate emergency need category, for sure. :slight_smile:

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To get uber-nerdy about it, Unicode has two separate characters that would seem to be duplicates, but seem to be named to distinguish purpose. The Option-M mu (µ, U+00B5) is called MICRO SIGN, while μ (U+03BC, GREEK SMALL LETTER MU) seems intended for use when entering Greek text. But, the latter has no keyboard shortcut.

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Well it’s all μZiq to me. :wink:

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Makes sense to me. Unicode breaks up characters into blocks of broad categories (most of which are languages).

U+00B5 is in the Latin-1 Supplement block. This aligns with the 8-bit ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set and is a mixed-bag of symbols designed to augment ASCII for the most commonly-used characters used by European languages. It includes characters (mostly vowels) with accents and some typography and math symbols (including Mu).

The 8-bit MacRoman character encoding (used since the first versions of Mac OS) has most of the same character that Latin-1 uses, but the non-ASCII characters have different code-points.

U+03BC is in the Greek and Coptic block, containing the base alphabet for these languages, with Greek Extended containing accented characters.

In the early days of classic MacOS, when MacRoman was the only encoding, Option-M would map to its Mu symbol. Since MacRoman is a close analog to Latin-1, it makes perfect sense that typing this keystroke into a Unicode text element would produce the Latin-1 representation of the character and not the Greek representation.

I would also expect that if you install a Greek keyboard in macOS and type the keystroke for a lower-case Mu, you will get the version from the Greek/Coptic block.

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