Archive for June, 2009

Safari 4 Arrives

Today was Apple’s big World Wide Developer Conference which brought out several big news storied for Apple nerds like me. Among the new software and hardware announcements, Apple has brought Safari 4 out of beta and into full release. The browser is available for Mac OS X and Windows and offers a far superior native look and feel to the previous releases of Safari on Windows. I mentioned the new features of Safari 4 very briefly when the beta was released.

One of the biggest changes to the browser is that it brings the tabs above the navigation menus, much like Chrome. Unlike Chrome, however, the browser tabs act as the title bar (to move the window around) as well as allows you to do tab manipulation such as close tabs or move tabs around. Whether this change is good or bad has been debated around the web, but it does allow the browser window to not take up as much valuable screen real estate as it combines the space that would be used for showing tabs as well as the space for showing the title bar into one. Personally, I like it as my 13″ MacBook sometimes gets a little starved for screen space if I’m flipping between multiple windows.

UPDATE: Well.. I finally got around to actually installing Safari 4. Turns out they ditched the whole tabs above navigation idea as my tabs are all below the navigation buttons again. How disappointing..

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 8th, 2009

The Onion Reports Accurate Analysis of Bing..

The Onion was trying to make fun of Microsoft’s new Bing service and hit the nail on the head.. Of course the third reaction was completely ridiculous, but they got it right with the first “opinion quotes”. The first one reads:

“Bing? Interesting. I’ll have to Google that when I get home.”

Hehe that’s exactly right. They can’t take down Google for search when it’s a household word the way it is now. Time will tell, but I can’t imagine any market share going to Microsoft for quite a while (of course excluding a short burst of traffic from the launch).

The second opinion reads:

“Finally a search engine for the Zune age!”

So true.. Microsoft has done a great job with market penetration with Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. With iPods and Google.. er, media players and search engines? Exactly.

It’s only funny because it’s true.

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Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Jun 4th, 2009

Asus Embarrassed by Linux Netbook?

At the Computex trade show, Qualcomm showed off an Asus Eee running Google’s Android OS. We’ve been hearing about Android as a possibility on netbooks for a while now, but haven’t seen a vendor who’s done it until now. Asus should be proud. Instead, Asus chairman Jonney Shih has apologized for the showing, saying:

“Frankly speaking … I would like to apologize that, if you look at Asus booth, we’ve decided not to display this product. I think you may have seen the devices on Qualcomm’s booth but actually, I think this is a company decision so far we would not like to show this device. That’s what I can tell you so far. I would like to apologize for that.”

Why is Asus so scared of showing off a netbook with Android as its base? I’m guessing Microsoft has something to do with it.

So far Linux has been met with very little success on the netbook — just like the desktop. This should be expected as netbooks are suppsed to be just a smaller version of laptops and I would expect that people would prefer the same operating system on both. Why should Microsoft be stiff-arming Asus like this? In a word: Google. Microsoft hasn’t had to play catch up to anyone for nearly as long as they’ve been chasing Google. Obviously, Google has a long ways to go (in fact, they have hardly gone anywhere so far), but Microsoft appears to be a bit nervous and trying to keep its friends in close check.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Jun 3rd, 2009

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