Nikoport

Last week, Apple has released the new version of their browser Safari to all operating systems - Safari 3 final version was included into the 0s X 10.4.11 update for Tiger users, and Safari 3.04 for Windows users. It was quite an important update remembering that a couple of weeks ago, with the release of the Leopard, Apple has launched the 3rd version of Safari for the OS X users who has upgraded their system. The new Safari has brought some restyling to the user interface - now it has the unified look and feel of the Leopard operating System. Also it finally includes (after 4 years of waiting) the possibility of styling the form controls with a css. This is a major improvement for GUI development, i believe every web developer went nuts with Safari, because of not being to style the controls.

This is a major upgrade for all systems. On windows a new beta version is much faster then the previous version. Not only the so called “cold start” but also the navigation, loading times and all the rest appears to be quite faster then before.

The list of the recent improvements to WebKit - on which Safari is based is quite impressive - it includes stability and speed improvements, improvements to the Enhanced Rich Text Editing: it includes TinyMCE and FCKEditor (think visual editors for Drupal and Wordpress), SVG (after Opera and Firefox one more player coming to this market, IE team - are you still sleeping ?), XPath and XML improvements (think XMLHttpRequest and Ajax).

OS X safari version include some development tools, which must be enabled by hand (do they continue to be in alpha stage?)

There are some bugs though to work on the Windows version - thats why it is still a beta, i believe. I have managed to see Safari loosing its look and feel and some of the windows control buttons appearing (quite an unpleasant change).

Apple is taking quite serious this Safari offensive, and if they will spend just a little more time implementing Web Developer tools and stabilizing the Windows version, i believe the time when some users will start switching to Safari.

The brand new version of the GIMP is already available on www.gimp.org. It seems that i was a kind of sleeping for the last month or so, since i completely missed this so much awaited and needed release. The 2.4 Version has been released on the 24th of October bringing all the changes that were made during the last couple of years by the GIMP developers. The most important of them for me are:

• Scalable brushes - one can finally scale brushes while editing the photos, it has been a pain doing it without this feature
• Selection resizing - you will wonder how have you lived all this years without it
• Foreground select tool - yes yes yes !! no more suffering watching Photoshop users doing it on a instant basis
• New crop tool - no more “keyboarding” for a simple operations

One thing i am very excited to see if the GIMP developers has managed to improve the color handling - in a lot of situations it was quite disastrous in the previous versions (2.2), but hey i am so grateful for having the Gimp that i am not whining, really =O)

The only missing thing at this moment is the absence of the MAC OS X port of the GIMP 2.4 version. The latest release available is still the 3rd release candidate. If you are an open source user and you are doing some visual stuff from time to time then you do not wish to miss this release.

A new project is under development, it is called “SiteRouter“. SiteRouter is a system for managing RSS, Sitemaps between other things - judging by the name, one can easily imagine some of the things that this software hopefully will have. The SiteRouter is being developed as an easy plugable system - this means that with some easy adjustmentes everyone will be able to integrate it into already existing or developing project. The first version is being written in PHP 4, but if it will pass the tests with success, the version in ASP.NET will come right after the first stable release. MySQL is the choice for the database, but there are plans for PostgreSQL as well. At the moment I am looking into releasing it under GPL.

SiteRouter will have a plugin system some day, this will help other databases and action modules integration, development and upgrade. As for the visual part there are some icons that i have found on the net, but which will be eventually replaced in the nearest future.

I am still not sure, when the first version available to the public in general will be available, but i hope, that at some point in October it will reach this stage.

I was quite unprepared to hear that the Movable Type has announced the Movable Type Open Source Project today. On the very same day as the announcement of the new beta of the Movable Type, they have announced that in a short time, after releasing the final version of the 4th Movable Type, they are going to release an open source version available for everyone for any use, including commercial one. Until now, the available for a free download version of a Movable Type is free only for the non-commercial use, which strictly limits the potential users of this blogging platform.

For me personally, this makes the Movable Type much more interesting for experiments and eventual use. Without making a clear free open source competition there is no way of appearing to the mass market, and i think that every company has already understood it - the best examples are Oracle and Microsoft with their Oracle XE and SQL Server Express Edition and, smile, IBM with a free version of a DB2, which is just a kind of a recognition, of the situation when the starter and independent developer markets are completely occupied by MySQL, for just one simple reason - it is free.

I am not going to wait until the release of the new open-source Movable Type to see if its really worth, but tomorrow is going to download the personal version and experiment a little bit with it, the same thing i recommend to everyone working with the web.

Today, Sun has officially turned Java open source, they have given the source code to the Open JDK Community. This is the next step (and a very important one) in a series of changes in Java licensing structure. In 2006 Sun has promised to turn Java into open source and now, after more then a half year they finally did it.

First the java complier, then a hotspot engine and now finally Java is an open source. I think that Sun has chosen good strategy in fight with Microsofts .NET, which has conquered the internet (and intranet) by the storm. There are not too many firms still holding to java and the best way of fighting back is giving the source to the people, so the enthusiasts can hack and improve it. This will give the world a big topic for a discussion as well, which can produce a good word of mouth and more people may consider choosing or coming back to Java’s world.

This announcement comes right in time, so the developers still have time to contribute for the next JDK SE, the seventh one, Codename Dolphin, which should arrive somewhere in 2008. Btw, a good link on this topic is an Wikipedia article about history of Java versions.

Being a lot of years a Java enthusiasts i am just thinking that it would be much better for all of us, if it would have happend some 5 or 6 years ago, but a lot of things has changed since then, and Java is not anymore an internet favorite or open source darling. I hope this step change some things in the future, though there are not much space for maneuver, but we will see - open source community have proven quite a lot of times that there are mountains that can be moved (remember firefox?) … =O)

Silverlight is the name of the newest Flash concurrent. Based on .NET, implemented by Microsoft and supported by the Expression Studio (a product, to produce Silverlight content), with a support for ASP.NET, AJAX and Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) this is a quite serious attempt from Microsoft to enter the web plugins generated content market and to make some concurrence to Adobe’s Flash. During the MIX’07 conference, Microsoft has announced the availability of the the alpha and beta versions of the Silverlight for both Windows and Os X. Time will tell how popular it will get, with a Microsoft marketing machine behind it, there are no doubts, that this year there will be enough Silverlight content around the web.

What is a big difference between Flash and Silverlight for me ? The fact, that supposedly Silverlight supports VB, C#, Python, and Ruby. All of them against ActionScript from Flash, and lets not forget some Javascript and AJAX for both of the plugins. Such a big amount of the programming languages will give a wide choice for web developers to start creating content and logic for Silverlight, without troubles of learning a new language and interface.

Microsoft will probably get support of the open source community, especially those who are implementing MONO for other operating systems, like Linux. Miguel de Icaza, chefe developer of the MONO already thinks about implementation on Linux - should this happened, this may make a lot of things really interesting and different. MONO is expecting to deliver the first beta of Silverlight for Linux late this year (2007). One of the essential parts of flash success is its availability for all major operating systems, and since Silverlight already made a move from Windows to Os X, this is a very big and essential part of conquering the market, because a very big amount of the web developers are working on Os X. A good idea in distribution for them would be inclusion and integration of the Silverlight into the new Microsoft Office for Mac, and i have few doubts that they are already working on that. This way Silverlight distribution will achieve a very high percentage on Macintosh in a very short amount of time.

If it is going to be the way it is written, then Microsoft has found a new way to substitute some of the ActiveX content (in the sense of windows-based content but all other systems to be supported in the future) and a reasonable alternative to offer the market in order to gain some bigger market share.

The other question is will the Flash give up any part of the share to Silverlight, and what will Adobe do - turning Flash open source ? Does it sound like a browser wars from the last century, when Netscape made Navigator free and then open source ? They do not have a lot of options as it seems to me, but they do have quite a big fan base which will see have to face the Microsoft developers fan base, and there will be a lot of heat and discussions on the web, but in the next couple of years i do not believe in any big changes in the current situation.

Spend 10 minutes of your precious time and take a web design survey at the “A List Apart” page, which is just 37 questions, and the most of them are multiple choice. After that, we will hopefully get to see, what kind of people are working all around the web. This might give a slightly idea, about the professionals working on and perfecting the same goal.

There are currently several prizes, all to be won by random participants: a ticket to “An Event Apart”, an IPod or a funky “A List Apart” T-shirt, for example. Thus survey will remain open until 22 May, 2007, so do not waste any time, participate and invite people you know.