Apple recently added their Safari web browser to the Apple Software Update and pre-checked the box by default. This effectively means that a lot of Windows users will now, possibly without knowing it, have installed Safari.
I'm not going to discuss the ethics of this practice here, instead read John's Blog - CEO of Mozilla.

But what it means for the humble web designer or developer is that we should really be installing Safari on our Windows machines and adding it to the list of browsers we test our sites against as the number of users is bound to increase as a consequence.

Competition in the browser business is good and over the last few years Firefox has begun to gain ground on Microsoft's Internet Explorer domination. It has also forced the browsers to become more standards compliant, thereby helping web developers and designers design cross-browser, cross-platform web pages.

According to Apple, Safari is a standards compliant browser built on the open source WebKit project, so hopefully if your pages have been built to W3C standards they will require minimal checking, but it is always wise to test. Apple have a range of web developer resources for the Safari browser, including the Safari CSS support, Safari developer FAQ, and a general web development best practices guide.

USB flash drives have increased in capacity in leaps and bounds since I last purchased one. In the few years since I bought a Crucial 128MB Gizmo!, the price of flash memory has been literally free-falling, due partly to economies of scale and the mass adoption of flash-based mp3 players.
The size and sheer variety of these devices is astounding, but what I wasn't expecting when I inserted the drive was for a Launchpad application to start running, pre-loaded with special software!

I had in fact purchased a 4GB SanDisk U3 Smart Drive. U3 is a technology developed by SanDisk which effectively creates a platform for developers to build applications that install directly onto the flash drive rather than the host computer. This means that not only can you take your data with you, but you can take your applications too!

When you insert your U3 Smart Drive into a USB slot on any computer, the U3 Launchpad is loaded, which is effectively like the Window's start menu, but instead contains menus to configure the drive, run installed applications and access your data. Nothing is installed on the host PC, so you can take your applications and data with you and its all secure and synced with your data on your PC back home.

The software that's available includes Skype, Firefox, Opera, various password safes, Thunderbird, OpenOffice... The list goes on. Some applications are free, while others cost a small amount of money, but most have downloadable trials. Here's a full list of U3 software.

Watch the video below for a quick guide to the U3 Smart Drive technology.

It's fast approaching the anniversary of the release of Windows Vista to business users, home users have been buying new PCs with Vista pre-loaded since the end of January 2007.
I haven't upgraded to Vista yet; my DVD upgrade is still in its box. I've installed it a couple of times to have a play around with it, to see which pieces of hardware and software are compatible, but that's it.
There are a couple of reasons why I haven't taken the plunge. Firstly, my PC can run the new Aero UI on Home Premium, but when I add the CPU monitor widget to the desktop to see how well it copes, it tends to max my processor out just opening windows etc. This is probably to be expected with a 4 year old computer. The second reason is the hardware and software support for Vista. You would have thought that manufacturers would have started to factor in support for a new Microsoft operating system, wouldn't you?
The word that springs to mind when talking about Vista compatibility today is "patchy", and today is almost 12 months after the official launch!

Future Proof Your Hardware Purchases

Most people who buy hardware or software for their PC will be expecting it to work with Vista out-of-the-box. They don't want to be updating firmware, or worse still finding out that their new device only supports XP! Why does Microsoft bother having alpha and beta testing periods when the likes of Apple can't even make their flagship iTunes work?

My advise to anyone thinking of buying a new piece of hardware or software is to make sure it supports Vista, even if you're sticking to Windows XP for the foreseeable future. You never know when you might buy a new PC, and do you really want to have to replace your hardware once you've upgraded to Vista?

I finally received my Vista Home Premium upgrade DVD this morning. I got an email claiming it was being shipped earlier this month and commented on my thoughts here.

Unlike the retail versions of Vista you don't get the snazzy clear box with the rounded corner. I can't complain though, it came in a clear DVD case with a quick start guide and a new OEM Certificate of Authenticity (CoA). You may remember I bought a copy of Media Center 2005 with a Vista Upgrade voucher last year.

It also comes with a slip of paper that states the following:

Licensed Device. This Windows Vista software replaces the Microsoft Windows XP software that is eligible for the upgrade to this software. You may install and use this software only on the device on which you acquired the Windows XP software.

Reassignment to Another Device.

You may not reassign the license for this software to another device.

It also goes on to talk about transferring to a third party and support services.

This goes someway to answering some of my questions. When I get around to installing Vista I'll no doubt be adding some more posts here. I need to give my hard drives a spring clean before I can do that though ;-)

I signed up to test the new Windows Home Server Public Beta a while back and received an invitation to download and review it.

Like a lot of people I am frequently running out of storage space on my machines and needing to upgrade. I am also fairly concerned about data backups too, so much so that I upgraded my main machine a while back to include a SATA RAID 1 mirror for my core data over 2 x 320GB drives.

Most people however don't have the need or knowledge to set up a decent backup or redundancy solution, so Windows Home Server when purchased installed on a piece of purposely designed hardware should fill this gap in the market.

When I get a spare few minutes I'll download the DVD and test on an un-used machine. I'm particularly interested in the usability of the software since it will mostly likely be bought by and used by people who are not particularly technically minded.

From what I've heard it does not include Media Center (since it's a headless OS), but it features Windows Media Connect, so I'll be able to stream my music and video straight to my XBOX 360 without having to have my main machine running.

I finally received an email yesterday confirming my Vista Home Premium upgrade has been dispatched.

Way back in October 2006 I upgraded my main machine from XP Professional to Windows Media Center Edition in order to be able to stream content to my Xbox 360 in my living room. I bought an OEM version of the operating system with a Vista Home Premium upgrade voucher included.

On receiving it though I discovered what was needed to claim my upgrade. Microsoft don't make it easy I can tell you that now! Firstly the offer was restricted to system builders registered with Microsoft, this wasn't made clear on the site I purchased it from. It didn't phase me though, I registered and now receive lots of system builder spam :-)
I went ahead anyway and fingers crossed it's paid off and I'll get my hands on the new OS shortly.

My next problem is going to be installing it on my aging computer and trying to understand what pieces of hardware I can upgrade without having to re-validate my OEM copy of Vista. Oh what have I got myself in to?? :-)