New Software updates from Apple and they are huge
Apple released an update to OS X 10.6 and the iPhone & iPod Touch this week. How big are they?
They are almost half a gigabyte. This is going to be one very long, slow download and update process.
Looks like Mac owners with iPhones are going to have their computers tied up for a number of hours sometime this week.
Remember the old days when the operating system just occupied a few tracks on a 113 kilobyte floppy disk?
On the other hand, the state of the art for OS X technology has advanced another notch this week.
Labels: apple, iphone, macintosh, macosx, software
another computer user gives up on the Windows fray, joins the Mac flock
Someone had a poignant yet sensible story about how they deeply regretted their decision to save two hundred bucks up front by buying a PC running Windows instead of an Apple Macintosh.
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/05/yet-another-entry-in-the-great-macpc-debate/
After spending hundreds of dollars and losing at least a couple days' wages they are now enjoying their Mac and very happy for a change.
Labels: macintosh, mswin, snafus
Safari 5 has shipped with HTML 5 and many new features included
It is very safe to say that Apple has leapfrogged the competition these days with some crucial,
new features built into Safari 5:
- HTML 5 - giving it more security, greater interoperability, offline storage/validation for forms,
- faster JavaScript (faster language, faster JSON, etc.)
- faster page fetching (prefetches DNS addresses, etc.)
- built-in developer tools for diagnosing mistakes and things that are slowing performance, etc.
- closed captioning of video for handicapped people (or those in noisy environments)
- flexibility in choice of search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo are supported out of the box
- means for developers to quickly create Safari extensions visually and a Safari Developer Support program from Apple
If the Extension Builder is good, it might have leapfrogged what Firefox currently offers. Firefox has a way that makes it possible to create powerful extensions which users just love.
Firefox does not yet have an official way to make that process easy for developers, however. They have been working on at least one for a while. But it is not clear if it will get the nod from Mozilla management and get included as a standard part of the web browser.
Performance is usually an issue in web browsers these days, especially in JavaScript based rich applications like web mail, social web 2.0 portals, and so forth. Apple made improvements in a number of areas (DNS, JSON, JavaScript, web workers) that will speed this up.
Apple is making fast implementations of existing standards, not making wildly incompatible ones and this is a nice touch on their part that is very consistent with how they operate most of the time.
Labels: apple, application, browsing, html, safari, software, web
Firefox adds client for its browser to iPhone
Mozilla said they will be releasing a new iPhone app that gives you convenient access to the bookmark keywords and titles you have saved in Firefox.
The pages will then be rendered by the Safari web browser in iPod/iPhone/iPad, since Apple insists on the Safari WebKit web view pane being the only web rendering component in the system.
Understandable, because if you look at the statistics, you would not want Opera or IE based rendering components in the system because they are unsafe even in their own apps. Someday things might change. But it does not look like it so far.
This new app could be a great convenience and a nice way for Firefox users to save themselves a lot of typing effort on iPhone when they browse the web.
Labels: apple, application, browsing, firefox, iphone, software, web
