After waiting a decent length of time to make sure that there were no serious issues with Snow Leopard1 and with the release of OS X 10.6.1 I’ve finally got around to installing the thing. Here’s how things went for me. Hope my experiences help you if – and – when you install.
Archive for the 'Software' Category
Internet Explorer 8 was released on Thursday but I have to admit that I haven’t touched it. The last beta that I saw (which wasn’t that long ago) still identified itself as being IE7 in the about dialog but there have been a lot of improvements made over previous version. There are new features too: increased performance, “porn mode” private browsing, data accelerators and improved crash recovery (here’s an idea: try and not crash in the first place).
I have an issue with the first sentence of Wired’s First Look review. Internet Explorer is not the most popular web browser in the world. It is simply the most widely used.
Looking at the IE8 page of the Microsoft website doesn’t bode well for Microsoft’s claims of paying attention to standards compliance or maybe this doesn’t apply to all aspects of their work. Of course, there’s also the __VIEWSTATE nonsense that results from coding your pages with .NET and in this case the hidden form field value is a whopping 68KB which is included in any request.
On visiting the page I was prompted to upgrade the Microsoft Silverlight plugin. I first installed this purely for CNN’s Photosynth of Obama’s inauguration two months ago. The Silverlight 2 GDR1 upgrade was released one month ago which just goes to show you just how low the adoption rate has been from the slew of websites I visit.
Silverlight isn’t the only threat to Adobe’s Flash dominance. Emergent technology like HTML5 and CSS3 Chrome experiments that are being supported in modern browsers like Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari are being used with JavaScript to achieve some promising results. Competition is good.
Speaking of Safari, the browser was also in the tech news on Thursday but for the wrong reasons. Safari was the first to fall to a serious vulnerability – albeit with several hours of preparatory work. IE8 and Firefox fell soon afterward. Chrome was the only browser to resist the attentions of the hackers. Interestingly, there was no mention of Opera. Does it really have that insignificant share of the browser market that nobody wants to try and exploit it?
The Internet tubes today were mainly full of comments about two things: Gmail going down and Apple releasing a public beta of Safari 4. Had the Gmail outage coincided with Twitter going belly-up at the same time then I think that productivity levels around the planet would have rocketed. As it was, Twitter stayed up as people whined about Gmail and I bathed in some smugness as I rarely use it because of this exact scenario. Then Apple came along with something to distract the Twitterverse from bemoaning their complete lack of emails: a new version of Safari.
From my early impressions, Safari 4 has taken the best bits of other browsers and added a bit of Apple polish to them. The Awesome Bar from Firefox, Opera’s Speed Dial, Chrome’s Tabs-on-Top, Webkit’s blazing fast JavaScript engine (but with a sensible name) and Developer Tools. Notice the glaring omission from that list? Yes, nothing from Internet Explorer made the grade. Funny that.
The new functionality that is included in the version 2.0 software release fixes a couple of the few things that annoyed me with the iPhone. I installed it last night after people with too much time on their hands found the software on Apple’s servers thanks to examining a bunch of XML files. I was in two minds as to whether or not to go ahead or wait for the official release from Apple but I was starting to adjust my body clock and needed something to do. I did have problems and was kicking myself for being impatient but after a few restarts of software and reboots of hardware I managed to restore my iPhone and update the software successfully.
Isn’t technology wonderful? I was worried about missing the Champions League final and probably would have had to change my flight had Liverpool beaten Chelsea in the semi but it turns out that I needn’t have worried. WestJet had ESPN available on their seat-back screens so I managed to catch the game at 40,000 feet. Annoyingly we landed 30 minutes ahead of schedule so I missed a large chunk of the second half but I made it through baggage reclaim in plenty time to take up a seat at the bar for extra time and the ensuing penalties.
I have to say that I’m glad Manchester United won. I only actually dislike them now compared with hating Chelsea with a passion and I think that it was somehow a fitting victory 50 years on from the Munich disaster. Bobby Charlton showed so much decorum when Platini tried to give him a winners medal and you have to admire the sportsman in Paul Scholes who went straight to console the opposition.
I had another celebratory pint with the Liverpool supporting barman and then made my way into Vancouver on the Airporter bus trying to spot anything that looked vaguely familiar but a lot has changed in the six years since I last visited the city.
