I upgraded my computer to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) over Thanksgiving. I'm now getting used to some of the "over 300" improvements in the system.
I think the absolutely best new feature -- in fact the feature that sold me on Leopard -- is Time Machine where back-ups are built into the operating system. For years we've gone around telling people, "Always back up your computer" -- with the likelihood of anyone actually doing it around nil.
Here comes Apple and they make it part of the operating system! Really I think this is the most remarkable thing I've seen since they incorporated iLife into the OS. Amazing stuff.
As a personal contribution to iPhone-mania, I'd like to present 'iPhoney' -- a software program (mac only) that gives you "pixel-accurate" views of how your site would look on a real iPhone (if you had one). This may be of slight consolation to those of you who'd rather have the unit itself but hey, iPhoney is free for the downloading!
Meanwhile in other mobile news, you can also try out your website in Operamini's new online Simulator.
Zoom in and move around and you'll see different tags show up. Click on the link, 'View on World Explorer', for a larger map and a photo browser. (h/t O'Reilly Radar)
"I've seen the future of web browsing", writes John Allsopp with self-conscious hyperbole, "and it is Operator."
What's 'Operator'? It's a new extention to Firefox (yes, another one) that allows you to save pieces of information from a web page provided the information is correctly marked up using microformat tags.
You might want to save a phone number to your address book or an event to your calendar. So long as the information on the page has the proper mark-up, 'Operator' can do the job.
I spose I'm showing my age by using 'Redux' instead of '2.0' but, boys and girls, I remember the first round of browser wars as if it were yesterday!
Essentially Internet Explorer booted Netscape off the face of the planet not because of any particular advantage it had over the competition but simply because it was part of the Windows OS and lock-in trumped all.
Well, since then, Microsoft has sat on the thing (so much for 'Freedom to Innovate') while an offshoot of Netscape, Mozilla, refined its own product, the open-source FireFox. Now finally MS has woken up and released IE7.
So it's the IE-Firefox Browser War all over again. But, but, argues Read/WriteWeb, what this really is is a proxy war between Microsoft and (who else?) Google with nothing less than the "multi-billion dollar advertising industry" at stake. How so, you ask? Well, read the rest of the post...
I spose I'm showing my age by using 'Redux' instead of '2.0' but, boys and girls, I remember the first round of browser wars as if it were yesterday!
