Nikoport

For the last 2 weeks I have being using and testing the latest release of Safari for Windows. Having a “new” browser on such saturated market as browsers for Windows, is a subject which will stay one of the headlines for the rest of the year. At least, as long as Nintendo or Sony are not thinking about launching their own version of browser for windows =O)

First of all, one of the most important Apple claims about Safari for Windows as being “designed to be secure” - has already being proved to be wrong. Till this day, there have been reported several security flaws. Apple has already included 2 patches in 1.02 version of Safari - it was quite a lot for a new browser, i have to confess. Claims like that reminds me about Microsoft claims about Vista security, and everybody knows that security updates for it are still coming out. =O) Important to say, that it does not make Safari for Windows an insecure browser - go to Frsirt or Secunia and check the list of the unpatched problems of the IE and Firefox, for example. There is no absolutely secure software, and Safari for Windows will have quite a number of security holes during the next year. What is important - how Apple is going to handle them and how many will be there after the version 1.0 FINAL RELEASE will be available.

Secondly - the first 1.0 beta version was quite unusable on a lot of computers where i have tested it - constant crashes after visiting sites with some national characters, no help available, bookmarks completely unusable (immediate crash after the launch), between some quirks with bold fonts etc. Some of the bugs were to fix with just copying some of the files from one folder to another (unacceptable for normal users), while others seemed to be more like an implemented “features”. Safari for Windows 1.02 update has solved the majority of that problems and right now it is finally possible to use bookmarks and help system.

Safari for OS X is quite a standards compliant browser, and everybody knows about it. For example, Safari for Os X have passed the famous ACID2 test, while many other browsers are still fighting to get there - Mozilla Firefox for example. I have checked the ACID2 test on Safari for Windows, and it seems that it perfectly passes it, without errors.

About the browser speed - it seems to be on the line with other major competition and for the most i have to confess, that a “hot-start” of Safari for Windows is quite impressive, not even IE6 is somewhere near, it is really instant.

The update mechanism is quite irritating - for each update (1.01 and 1.02) i had to download about 9MB of the content; even Firefox had less stuff when it had no automatic updates, and Opera while is below 5MB. Apple have to do something about it, as for example while using a laptop and having a bad connection it may take some time to download each update.

What Safari for Windows gives ? It gives you the feeling of how it will be on Apple Os X platforms. On one of the latest projects i have saved quite a lot of time and stress aligning things in OS X, while developing and testing for Safari for Windows. It will give the opportunity for Web 2.0 developers to adjust their sites for iPhone.

I see absolutely no reason of dropping Firefox and switching to Safari right at this moment - besides the absence of the extensions, which make work easy in Firefox, Safari for Windows continues to perplex with different and unexpected crashes. It would take quite a lot for anyone i know to switch to safari right now, when it still lacks the stability and its security still needs to pass the most essential of the tests - the test of time.

This view, i would love to have from my house window… Waking up every morning and seeing this makes me feel so much better =O) Especially, the fact, that there were almost no people around, it is far away from overcrowded Algarve, and one week before the “summer invasion”, it is something to enjoy.

I have spent in Peniche last week and it was worth every little single moment. If you will ever stay there, try out the fish plates, almost in any restaurant, there are not many places around, you will be able to compare with. =O)

Apple has announced a big bomb during this year WWDC keynote - they are implementing a version of their flagship browser Safari for Windows. I know that this sound crazy, because we have already got 3 major browsers in the market - IE, Firefox and Opera, so now the last of the Mohicans is coming to Windows platform !!! What is even more surprising, is that beta version is already available for download. The beta version of Safari browser for windows, which is available for download, is just a first step, because Apple is promising to deliver the final version in October, together with a release for all OS X versions that matter (included in Leopard, as well as a free download for the Tiger - OS X 10.4). Thism i hope will help bringing web designers to care more about OS X, since they will not have any excuses about not being able to test how it looks there: Firefox is already available for both platforms, and Safari will be as well. May be this is one of the main ideas about bringing Safari to Windows, because besides iTunes (which is a cash cow for Apple), i do not remember much Apple applications available for Windows. This also may help the future iPhone users to feel at home even on Windows platform, and web designers test their applications for it, because iPhone is going to run on OS X, and the only browser available there at the time of release will be Safari.

Entering a market, which is about to be filled almost to its maximum capacity (i would say about 95% wont easily change their browser), it takes a lot of strength and confidence. These are hot times for the browsers, and what i hope, is that Safari is going to make this entrance a strong commitment.

I am taking a look at Safari right at this very moment, and even if it would be one of the worst browser on the market, even if it would be source of jokes, Apple deserve such a big credit for not being afraid and for trying. I am taking my hat and taking a big bow.

Guys, you won a great deal of respect for me once again, and even if you are not nr 1 on the market, for me you are.

p.s. but sincerely, i am not an Apple fan-boy. =O) hehe

While being confronted with a question a couple of days ago, if the 800×600 resolution is still matter for the web design, my first reaction was to say that even if it matters, then not much, but after remembering seeing some statistics from some portuguese sites, i have remembered. So i have checked just statistics for 5 different sites with a different audiences, to see if the 800×600 resolution still matters. The results were a kind of surprising for me.

But first of all, a good site should have a liquid design, this way it should display in 800×600, more or less in the same way as in other higher resolutions. I am still trying to convince the designer with whom i am working on websites to start moving into making flexible designs, and the next project i am finishing at the moment is quite a step from the previous experiences. =O)

But back to the resolution statistics - in a specific theme site (geology), having more than 90% of the visitors portuguese - the percentage of users having a screen resolution of 800×600 was 10.59%, in a general shopping site the percentage was 8.54%, a site connected with the children had 8.47%, some web design site - 1.82%, this site on the contrary to the others i have compared has only 2.85%, but the most users visiting my site are not from the Portugal =O)
And if you still think that such numbers as 8% or 10% are not really important, then the fact of not ignoring the Macintosh users, which is more or less accepted across web community, seems to be ridiculous, because for the general statistics Os X users do not represent more then 1% in Portugal.

After seeing that numbers i decided to check on the statistics from other sources, so this what i have found about the users using 800×600 resolutions:

• W3Schools - 14%
• Digital Web - 28% (January 2006)
• tamingthebeast - 10.88%
• Upsdell - 12%
• Jakob Nielsen - 17%
• Game Producer - 2.57%

In short - in Portugal it is still matters, to test sites for this resolution. As for the web in general - i believe that the answer is pretty much the same, there are many users, who are still bound to the 800×600 resolution, and we have no right of ignoring them, or at least we should try to pay attention. =O)

=O)
I would even add, then when in General the 800×600 resolution statistics will drop below the percentage of the Macintosh users, then it will be the time to consider of ignoring it.
=O)
On a more serious note, the phone, palm and smart devices with browsers are becoming more and more common, thats why we should pay more and more attention to them, and they are so far from that “miserable” 800×600 resolution, so i think there is no way we will ignore this resolution in the next couple of years.

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.

At the moment, in the spare time between projects (a very virtual thing - spare time, i have to say), i am writing 2 new modules for Drupal - one of them is a submodule for using Flash in a advertisement module and the other one is a directory module for Drupal. Both of this modules will be based on the 5th branch of Drupal.

First module was born out of the need for the current project i am doing, when i found out, that Advertisement module has had no support for flash-based ads. While smaller sites are basically using animated gifs (images), the bigger companies are using flash for advertisement. I was told by a couple of different people, that the “big firms” they are or were working for created the biggest the part of the online advertisement in flash. When i was responsible for one of the Fortune 100 sites in Portugal i saw a big percentage of their inner advertisement done in Flash as well. On a personal note, i would add that i do not like flash ads, and prefer the “normal” images - they are lighter and do not appear like a buddy-spam. After finishing this submodule or better “ad type”, i am thinking about submitting the code to the author of the Advertisement module, for his decision of inclusion into the “official package”.

The second module is being born for the other project, since it looks like there is no real directory module for Drupal, which seems to be quite a negative surprise. I am still in the phase of projecting it, but leaving the doubts behind, this module has to be implemented this year, because the website based on drupal, i am going to implement, is going to need it badly.

While the Flash Type submodule is virtually ready and being tested, the Directory module is likely to be finished in the second part of the 2008, mainly because of my newest personal project, which should go live in August this year.

This month, Google has released quite a number of updates to its services: Google Trends, Google Analytics and Google Maps.

Google trends has introduced a new area - “hot trends“, which display the hottest trends in the search, or the way i understand it - it should show those phrases which have received a sudden increase of the searches. Besides hotness (right now from “medium” to “on fire”), the results also displays related searches (similar ones), peak time and most used searches location. During an intensive web search engine optimization it could be quite an important criteria to look for.

Google analytics has launched a completely redesigned interface, completely based on Ajax. They are still maintaining the elder one, for a couple of weeks, but the users are suggested starting their “migration” to the new one. I found the new interface sometimes being quite unstable, crashing the Firefox completely, but since it must be a “beta” release, i hope they will improve the service very fastly. No webmaster or search engine optimizer, who uses Google Analytics will like to continue using quite buggy product. Besides some crashes (something to do with the Firefox extensions ?), the new interface is quite different, and one have to get used to it, so i confess, that for the most of the time i still continue using the old one, while trying to push myself into learning the new one. I hope to be able to “move” to the new one during next couple of days.

I am still fuming about Google Zeitgeist and the absence of Portugal from the results, and by the way, at this very moment they have 2 Irelands listed at the menu links, which should be quite a surprising fact to the united kingdom government. I gotta email to someone at Google, telling them to stop ignoring portuguese optimizers. =O)

p.s. I have forgotten to mention the Google Maps update, which includes now 360 Streetside Views. As usual, this update is for US-based map only(it will be available in Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco at the moment), but in the nearest future. Some people over the net have already reported that it helped them avoiding traffic, so it sounds to be a good update, but since Portuguese map has arrived more then a year after american and british counterparts, i am not expecting any “important” info for me in the next months.