Apple intro­duced the latest ver­sion of Safari one of my favorite browsers. One impor­tant fea­ture that was dropped until now is phish­ing pro­tec­tion, I don’t mean the sport of drown­ing worms, I mean scams which are used to try to find out your pass­words or used for iden­tity theft.
I you have installed Apple’s Safari 3.2 you can test drive it at Phish­Tank.
And as an old fish­ing saying goes: “All good things come to those who bait”

Some­times I get annoyed with the func­tion­al­ity of the Dock. One prob­lem of the dock is ‘overcrowding’ when you want have access to your appli­ca­tions and you open a lot of appli­ca­tions, your Dock will soon become over­crowded by appli­ca­tion and doc­u­ment icons. Second prob­lem is orga­ni­za­tion related: you can’t switch between Docks, this would resolve prob­lem number one and two.
Well now there is a solu­tion called Dock­Spaces. It allows you to have ten dif­fer­ent Docks and swap between them any­time you want. One of the great fea­tures is inte­gra­tion with Spaces which rad­i­cally improves your pro­duc­tiv­ity, because you already defined that space for a spe­cific task. So if task driven actions are impor­tant part of your daily needs, this is the appli­ca­tion for you. One improve­ment could be made it could use some Apple visual panache in appli­ca­tion lay-​out and for switch­ing between Docks. But I say thumbs up for this application.

Is Apple aban­don­ing FireWire or is it just poor mar­ket­ing? We’ll get to that later. FireWire or IEEE 1394 is a serial bus inter­face for high-​speed com­mu­ni­ca­tions and isochro­nous real-​time data trans­fer, fre­quently used in per­sonal com­put­ers, dig­i­tal video camera’s and data stor­age devices. The inter­face is also known by the brand names of FireWire (Apple Inc.), i.LINK (Sony), and Lynx (Texas Instru­ments). FireWire has replaced Par­al­lel SCSI in many appli­ca­tions, due to lower imple­men­ta­tion costs and a sim­pli­fied, more adapt­able cabling system. IEEE 1394 has been adopted as the High Def­i­n­i­tion Audio-​Video Net­work Alliance (HANA) stan­dard con­nec­tion inter­face for A/V (audio/visual) com­po­nent com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­trol. FireWire is also avail­able in wire­less, fiber optic, and coax­ial ver­sions using the isochro­nous pro­to­cols.

So why the hell has Apple ditched FireWire in the new Mac­Books? The Mac­Book Pro has a FireWire 800 port. Will these ports also be dumped with the revamped iMac? Is this due to the Intel deal or only in con­sumer machines? Only time will tell! FireWire is far supe­rior to USB in a lot of ways. But with USB 3.0 at the hori­zon, which aims at speeds of 4.8 Gbits/s (600MB/s), FireWire S3200 (which uses the same con­nec­tor as exist­ing FireWire 800 and is fully com­pat­i­ble with exist­ing S400 and S800 devices) will soon be out­dated! One thing is clear it will com­pete with the forth­com­ing USB 3.0. Did the market choose (cheaper) USB 2.0 in favor of FireWire 400 (VHS vs Video2000)? Apple states clearly yes with the release of the new Mac­Books. But if Apple wants to com­pete with USB 3.0 it HAS to include it in con­sumer machines because Intel will surely roll it out like USB 2.0 (no dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between high-​end or low-​end). USB doesn’ t sup­port Target Disk Mode for man­ag­ing files or cloning sys­tems, as USB 2.0’s archi­tec­ture lacks the capac­ity to sup­port that fea­ture. Con­clu­sion Yes and No, the future isn’t quite clear, for con­sumers USB will prob­a­bly do but for Pro’s Apple prob­a­bly keep FireWire 800 a little while alive.

Google announced today that they would be releas­ing a new open source web browser called Google Chrome. The new browser will be avail­able for down­load as a beta start­ing tomor­row. Google states that the reason for a new web browser is that the com­pany believes that it “can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive inno­va­tion on the web.” The new browser is said to be “streamlined and simple” and “clean and fast”. The under­ly­ing ren­der­ing engine is based on Webkit which is also used by Apple’s Safari. Under the hood, we were able to build the foun­da­tion of a browser that runs today’s com­plex web appli­ca­tions much better.

By keep­ing each tab in an iso­lated “sand­box“, we were able to pre­vent one tab from crash­ing another and pro­vide improved pro­tec­tion from rogue sites. We improved speed and respon­sive­ness across the board. We also built a more pow­er­ful JavaScript vir­tual machine called V8 (hidden class tran­si­tions, auto­matic memory man­age­ment, native com­piled machine code… among others) to power the next gen­er­a­tion of web appli­ca­tions that aren’t even pos­si­ble in today’s browsers. Just like the Google spirit: “launch early and iterate”.

The World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence 2008 had an unusual high atten­dance (52.000 atten­dees). CEO Steve Jobs announced a couple of inter­est­ing items during the event: Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leop­ard), Mobile Me and of course the iPhone 3G. The ses­sion of Mac OS X 10.6 this after­noon will be cov­ered under non-​disclosure, so don’t expect any offi­cial fea­tures or announce­ments to be coming from Apple but as usual some infor­ma­tion is cer­tain to leak. The iPhone is finally coming to the Nether­lands, sorry you guys who’ve bought it recently on eBay. Again and again I’ll tell people the same mes­sage, it’s a devel­oper con­fer­ence not a con­sumer event. So for those who are dis­ap­pointed wait for the next event and you’ll be amazed!

MobileMe will hope­fully bring the long over­due upgrade to .Mac. Now I only have to wait until July 11 to buy myself an iPhone 3G.

Apple’s iPhone SDK press con­fer­ence will be held at 10:00AM PT / 1:00PM ET

08:00AM - Hawaii
10:00AM - Pacific
11:00AM - Moun­tain
12:00PM - Cen­tral
01:00PM - East­ern
06:00PM - London
07:00PM - Ams­ter­dam
09:00PM - Moscow
03:00AM - Tokyo (March 7th)

Due to the nature of Adobe Flash plugin, Adobe’s pro­pri­etary soft­ware would need to be recom­piled and opti­mized for the ARM archi­tec­ture for run­ning on mobile devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch, so is stated by many web­sites. Quick­time wasn’t build from the ground up to sup­port these devices either (power and memory con­sump­tion wise). But not all QuickTime’s codec’s are sup­ported only H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-​Complexity ver­sion of the H.264 Base­line Profile…(see iPhone Specs for more infor­ma­tion). My ques­tion is: IS THIS TRUE? Adobe is oper­at­ing on Apple’s play­ground (Format Wars). HD-​DVD has left the build­ing in favor of BR-​DVD. But the dig­i­tal format for video isn’t decided yet! H.264, Win­dows Media or Adobe Flash. Adobe has an install base of 90%> it even comes bun­dled with Mac OS X. Quick­Time is installed on every com­puter with iTunes (Apple’s Trojan Horse) and every Mac. Apple and Adobe are com­peti­tors busi­ness wise: Final Cut Pro isn’t one of Adobe’s favorite appli­ca­tions. Apple is expand­ing hor­i­zon­tal in the soft­ware market. Rumors even point to trou­ble in the mar­riage of Apple/Adobe when Apple released iPhoto. Apple had to down­grade iPhoto’s fea­tures. When Adobe bought Macro­me­dia, there was no com­peti­tor left in the market and com­pe­ti­tion is always good! Either Apple will solve our prob­lem or Adobe will the market demands a solu­tion. I am not a big Flash fan as you prob­a­bly know so I am not cheer­ing on Adobe side.