You can now get the BBC iPlayer on the Nintendo Wii games console!

Before you can start watching programmes broadcast on the BBC over the last 7 days you'll need to connect your Wii console to the Internet (see instructions below) and download the Opera web browser from the Wii Store (Which costs 500 Wii points or about 3.50 Pounds Sterling).

Before you can buy Wii points to purchase the Opera web browser you'll first need to register online at www.nintendo-europe.com and "link" your Wii console to the Nintendo account you just created online, Nintendo have a guide on how to link your Wii Shop Channel Account to your Club Nintendo Account.

Once you've linked your account to your Wii console you need to go to the Wii Shop accessed from the Wii Home Menu on the console and purchase (by using a credit or debit card to buy some Wii points) and download the "Internet Channel".

Once downloaded and installed you're ready to go!

From the Wii Home Menu select "Internet Channel" and navigate to www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, you can then use your Wii remote to zoom, pan and scroll around the web and the iPlayer.

You can read more info about the BBC iPlayer on the Wii console at BBC Internet Blog.

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To connect your Nintendo Wii console to the Internet with Wi-Fi follow these steps:

1. Go to the Wii home menu
2. Select "Wii options" on the bottom left
3. Click on "Wii settings" on the right
4. Click the right arrow
5. Select Internet
6. Click "Connection Settings"
7. Select "Connection 1"
8. Choose "Wireless Connection"
9. Select "Search for Access Point"
10. Click "Ok"
11. You should be presented with a list of local wireless routers, select your wireless router from the list
12. If your wireless router is secure, you'll be prompted to enter your Wi-Fi password
13. Click to save your connection settings
14. Click "Ok"
15. The Wii will now test your connection and then prompt you to perform a system update, click "Yes"
16. Return to the Wii menu when prompted

I've just read a post over at Search Engine Journal about statistics from Hitwise UK suggesting British users are increasingly using browser toolbars to search for domains they know already like tesco.com rather than typing them directly into their browser address bar.

I use this technique a lot because I frequently misspell a domain name or get the wrong domain extension for a website. When this happens more-often-than-not you get a holding page, cyber-squatter site, or worst still a site that attempts to mimic the intended destination in order to "phish" log-in details.
When you use a search toolbar to navigate to a domain the top search result is most likely going to to be the real domain.

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.