Microsoft offers 44.6 billion dollars for Yahoo

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Microsoft is offering this staggering money for buying out Yahoo – 44.6 billion dollars in money and share. They hope for a bigger share of advertising market, and i hope that this deal will fail, we need more enterprises in the internet area and not 1 or 2 which control the market completely. Right now, there are 3 major players out there in the internet: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – and i see absolutely no reason for .

Last year there were rumors, that Google were considering into buying Yahoo – that is not a good thing either. I would welcome any company into competition with those 3 but not one of them buying out another one.

I know, that Microsoft’s offer is also about 62% premium on share price, but i hope for reason and greed (this one should work better then the first one in the major corporations) to resist this offer. I feel that if Microsoft will get their hands on Yahoo there will be nothing good for all of us: besides less competition i believe that Yahoo and all what it stands for will disappear in a couple of years.

Tarh Lda v2

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I have designed a new version of a website for TARH lda, which was finally launched a couple days ago. The site at the moment is completely static xhtml (php version is already in plans for the end of the 2008). Besides reworking graphic concept the new version includes a home page with news and archive, and a special page for the firm CEO José Martins Carvalho, also the work is being finished to add Spanish and English versions for the international visitors.

TARH Lda is a portuguese geological company in the area of ground water development. They are one of the most respected portuguese specialists in the project and supervision of ground water research as well as working with mineral water for spa and bottling and geothermal purposes. They have a very vast curriculum of doing works on 3 different continents and with no doubt are one of the finest portuguese firms.

At the moment it contains only a portuguese version, while english and spanish are still under revision, but they should arrive in the next weeks (english is almost ready, just a couple of small things are being reviewed and refined). The PT letters which stand for portuguese bellow the main menu are basically the start of the international menu.

The site of TARH was created using XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1 with a fluid design which is viewed best with 800×600+ resolutions.

Some words of dis appreciation go to the infamous Arsys hosting: no .htaccess access – guys, in which century are you living ? Anyway – enjoy the rest of the prepaid year – because it is the last one when TARH is still hosted on your servers. 2GB of traffic per month seems to be like a bad joke to me, especially in the year 2008 when most providers offer you no limits on the web traffic.

Safari 3

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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.

Dino Consult

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A couple of days ago i have put online a new site for “Dino Consult“, that was developed on Drupal. The design is very simplistic, to accompany the visit card that the owner of Dino Consult has. It was also based on the schematic design that was created by the client. Dino Consult is by their description a “consultancy firm for the export of innovative technologies, process comparisons and project management”.

Besides creating a xhtml/css template I have used the following modules: Views, Google Sitemaps, Update Status, TinyMCE (i still argue that it or any other editor should make into the core of the Drupal), PathAuto, Meta Tags, i18n and IMCE.
Basically the Views were used to place together. I still cannot imagine more or less complicated site or even a normal one (like Dino Consult) without Views module, it simply can do so many things for you.

The new GIMP

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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.

Internet Explorer 7 – one year later

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It has been more than a year, since Microsoft has released the most awaited and anticipated version of their browser – Internet Explorer 7. 18th October 2006 saw the final release of the browser – available for Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003, from the start it has been released only for the users who passed “windows genuine advantage” validation procedure. A couple of weeks ago, on the 5th of October 2007, it has been released for all the other users as well.

Now, one year after the initial release i decided to take a look at what part of the share of the browser market it has conquered so far, since the removal of the validation for installation is being a clear attempt into a wider distribution of it.

So, lets start with the numbers:

1. this site has a total of 44.84% of the Internet Explorer Market (not total one, just between all IE visitors), being about 10% behind Internet Explorer 6 (54.44%). For one year, i think these results are very nice, but this site contains more technical information, and tech people are fast for upgrades

2. One local portuguese site, has a 15.24% of visitors using IE7, with 82.78% visiting with an old and not so good IE6. The missing percentages are going for IE5 likes. It shows that in Portugal users still are bound to IE6, and thats sad, cause we desperately need to move on.

3. Portuguese on-line shop, which has actually more Brazilians visiting than Portuguese has 18.50% of the visitors using IE7, and with slightly more then 80% are still using Internet Explorer 6.

4. One web design firm, has 33.33% of the IE visitors using Internet Explorer 7.

5. Another web design firm, shows 29.98% of Internet Explorer 7 users between all the IE users.

6. Furniture store site shows 30.18% of the IE vistors using IE7.

7. A site dedicate to the medicine has 23.14% of the Internet Explorer market conquered by IE7.

8. W3schools on their statistics page shows for September of 2007 shows that globally 20.8% are using IE7, 34.9% – IE6, and 1.5% are still stuck on Internet Explorer 5. If we do some math, then the global market of Internet Explorer is 57.2% of which Internet Explorer 7 users are representing around 36%.

9. A site, with some references to the literature, has 16.39% IE7 market share of the all Internet Explorer visitors.

10. w3counter has a 29% of the IE market attributed to the IE7.

Looking at all those values, i am thinking that the true values should be ranging somewhere between 20% and 30%. I believe that the 25% should be the real value of the conquered market for Microsoft’s IE7.
I know that these statistics are not covering every possible area, and are not really, but i feel that they give the general feeling of what progress IE7 has made in one year.

I think that these results are fine, obvious is that Microsoft is not satisfied with them, and even more obvious that a lot of big companies are not going to do the upgrade, before fixing all incompatibilities in their sites and intranets. We all would be much more happier if in one year we would have another the situation when IE7 will dominate the failing IE6, and i believe that after the last Microsoft’s move this situation is going to happened for sure.

Apple’s Leopard

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A couple of days ago Apple has launched a new version of their Operating System OS X 10.5 codename Leopard.

Apple has presented more 300 of new features in Leopard. I would highlight some of the features, which i consider relevant:
- Bootcamp (allows Windows to be installed in parallel with OS X on Intel-based Macs)
- Time Machine (deleted files restoring, multiple version system)
- Finder (iTunes-like preview of different file types)
- Spaces (Unix-like virtual desktops)
- Safari (new version)
- Parental controls (the name speaks for itself, doesn’t it ?)
- Desktop enhancements (stacks of files on your dock)

One of the more important changes in Leopard is finally dropped support of the old Mac OS code. Apple has officially “burried” OS 9 about 6 years ago, in an official ceremony, but only with this release the support has been finally removed. I think it is a good thing, because evolution requires old stuff to be renewed or be removed. This is one of the problems that Windows has faced – some of the elder code of Windows 3.11 still could be found in XP, though Microsoft claims that Vista is finally fee of it.

Being an OS X user since a couple of months, i do not see a lot of reasons doing upgrade to Leopard right now. Do not get me wrong, i will move to Leopard in the coming months, and i do think that the new version of OS X was worth developing and it brings a lot of good features (some of them like Time Machine almost revolutionary), but at the moment i see this upgrade as unnecessary.

My first argument is “rush” – no doubt that Leopard was rushed, in order to be launched at the promised date – (Ocotober), some features like a wireless net backup with a Time Machine were surprisingly removed at the last moment, Sun’s ZFS is still not being enabled by default and resolution independent feature still appears to be in development. There is an old good saying that one should never buy a 1.0 system, cause it is always a beta version of what is to come. I am used to follow this idea and so far it has been always true.

The second argument against doing an immediate upgrade is the fact, the some of the features are available for the Tiger (especially the Bootcamp) and some other are just of no use for me personally ( No additional hard drive for Time Machine on my MacBook Pro =O) ). =O) Other feature is Safari 3 which is available for download (a beta version at this moment). Though i have to admit that i have some second thoughts – will new Bootcamp versions be available for TIger and will the final release of Safari ever come to it as well for example.

Everything else is just as it is needed. I love the idea of the “ITunes”-like changes to the Finder, the automatic preview feature is something that i was hoping that someone would implement. I find it ignorant, that i have to open all possible types of programs in order to preview the content of different files. I attribute success of such programs like ACDSee to the fact, that their just previewed almost any type of the graphical file.

Leopard is an amazing operating system, with a lot of the features, that the well-known Redmond software company is going to copy and represent in a couple of years in their next operating system. It is quite a step into the future, but it is more evolutionary update, then a revolutionary upgrade.