Written on 19th June 2009
113 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Look, I know the majority of people reading our blog are geeks on some level and probably early adopters.
While we try not to, I’m also aware of the fact that occasionally we report on stuff your average Joe won’t understand/appreciate. But, I’ve got to be honest, I never for a second thought that this many people had no idea what a browser was.
So it’s all over – the WWDC keynote is complete. Apple over-delivered in some areas, under-delivered in others and even gave us a complete surprise or two.
Here’s everything you need to know in one handy list.
A completely refreshed, cheaper laptop lineup. Available immediately.
There’s now just one Macbook costing $999 / £749. 2GB RAM, 160GB, 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 802.11n wi-fi
3 MacBook Pros: a new 13″ version starting from £899, a 15″ from £1299 and a 17″ for £1849 – all MacBook Pros now have SD Card slots and built-in, non-removable long-life batteries.
The Macbook Air is cheaper now, costing £1149 for the SATA drive version and the SSD version is down to £1349
OSX Snow Leopard is available from September with an upgrade price of a mere $29.
-Despite claiming it would have “No New Features” last year, Apple has decided under-the-hood tweaks aren’t enough and are rolling out some sexy new ideas in the new OS.
Support for Exchange servers in Mail, Calendar and Address Book
Exposé built into the dock (making switching between apps easier).
The OS now takes up much less space, freeing up 6GB once you install.
A new version of Quicktime caled Quicktime X.
It’s got a much improved interface.
Videos can be edited with a new visual timeline and uploaded via email or to MobileMe or Youtube straight from the app.
They covered the already known improvements again (MMS, cut and paste, push notifications etc) but added….
A brilliant Find My iPhone service for MobileMe subscribers. It’ll show your iPhone on a map, you can make it put out a sound (even in Silent mode) to help find it, you can send a message to display on its screen (e.g., “Give it back, thief!”) and even wipe the phone completely if you think it’s lost for good.
MMS won’t be available on AT&T straight away. Americans will have to wait til late Summer for that. Everyone else should be fine from release.
3.0 software will be available from June 17th – free on the iPhone, $9.99 for the iPod Touch.
Turn-by-Navigation is coming
Including Tom Tom, with dashmounted kit to charge your iPhone and use the iPod app while you drive and take directions.
The new iPhone is called the iPhone 3G S
S stands for ‘Speed’. It has 7.2mbps HSDPA data
It looks the same as the iPhone 3G, available in Black and White versions.
It has a 3MP camera with 30 FPS video recording and editing capabilities. Upload by Email or to Youtube or MobileMe from the device.
Voice commands are available, from “Call John Smith” to “Play a song by Fiery Furnaces”.
It’s got a digital compass built in.
It’s available for $199 (16GB version) and $299 (32GB version) from 19th June.
Written on 24th February 2009
6 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Apple has released the public of Safari 4 for Mac/Windows. The new release, features their new Nitro Javascript engine which supposedly increases Javascript loading speed by over 4 times in comparison to Safari 3.
Apple claims Safari 4’s new Nitro JavaScript engine executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Microsoft’s IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. It’s also said to load HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.
Safari 4 also includes a handful of new user interface features, including:
Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;
Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before;
Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks “as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes;”
Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;
Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;
Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;
Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text;
built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and
a new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.
Written on 7th February 2009
6 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Foxmarks, what was once just a Firefox bookmarks sync tool has now been made available to Safari and IE users too. With your bookmarks online and accessible on the most popular browsers on Mac and PC, your bookmarks are finally likely to remain with you for life.
As Lifehacker points out, although bookmarks sync perfectly – there are a few sad exclusions:
No Password Syncing
No syncing bookmarks to your own server
iPhone sync only for Safari’s version of the Mac
Walt Mossberg was first to try the tool and has given a basic but solid overview of the service on All Things D. You can also view a video of the review below.
To install the tool, visit the Foxmarks download page and download either Foxmarks for Firefox, Foxmarks for IE (pc) or Foxmarks for Safari (Mac only).
Lets hope Opera, Chrome and Linux users out there are given similar functionality in the near future.
On a side note, I wonder if Foxmarks now plans to change their name…
“It’s Official” , triumphs the Mozilla blog, “Congratulations to the Mozilla community for reaching this historic milestone”. According to Net Applications, Firefox surpassed 20% worldwide market share. During the week of October 5th, 20 percent of Internet users browsed with the open source browser.
Watch your back Safari
The Firefox browser might steal some market share from Safari, as Apple’s browser will soon lose its greatest advantage for male Mac users. As I mentioned earlier, a friend of mine once told me he uses Safari’s stealth mode for his adult needs. Well, it seems like he can stay within the Firefox environment for that now.
Firefox released a beta version of a Private Browsing feature. Users of Minefield, Mozilla’s test area for new browser innovations, can now activate the “porn mode”. When toggled, it deletes your Web history, user names, passwords, searches, and cookies and bins as soon as you close the window, “effectively making it appear that the session never existed” – writes Josh Lowensohn from Webware.
Written on 22nd October 2008
6 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Safari users who have had the pleasure of using the Inquisitor search plugin will be pleased to know they can now receive the same functionality on Firefox & presumably Flock too. The plugin which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year was originally developed by David Watanabe who also developed Acquisition, XTorrent and the gorgeous RSS reader Newsfire.
The plugin shows you instant search results with an elegant UI “as you type” in your search field in top right corner of the browser. I personally use the search field all the time, which has really left the idea of a browser ‘home page’ as worthless to me now.
Unfortunately, there is one major drawback, the results shown are Yahoo results which aren’t a problem when you’re looking for one particular site but for full search results you’re better off with google. It does also disallow the usage of other search plugins which is definitely something that needs fixing immediately. The good news is that should you not be happy with it, it’s a matter of unticking a box in your settings and waiting until Inquisitr enables google results… :)
To try it out you’ll need to signup/login at Mozilla as the plugin is currently in testing.
Mozilla has just released a new Alpha version of their Firefox browser code named Shiretoko Alpha 1. This version is for developers and testers only and built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform. Expect some bugs and crashes whil giving it a try. Here is a list of new features you will be able to play with in this version:
Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
Text API for the <canvas> element
Support for using border images
Support for JavaScript query selectors
Several improvements to the Smart Location Bar
A new tab switching behavior
You can download Firefox Shiretoko now if you want to live dangerously. If you do please tell us about your experiences in the comments here.
In related browser news it has been published that Apple’s Safari browser is vulnerable to session fixation attacks. Well, aren’t we all…
But seriously, I tried reading the whole explanation and as usual with these vulnerability reports the whole thing sounds rather theoretical. If I understand correctly there is a small chance that someone else can use your user account on a website hosted on a co.uk or co.ch domain IF the site you visited earlier has minimal security. If that worries you enough you might want to consider reading the article and then let us know if WE should switch to (a stable version of) Firefox too. Apparently Internet Explorer, Firefox and Konqueror plugged this hole 4 year ago.
Written on 19th June 2009
113 COMMENTS 
Written on 8th June 2009
Foxmark
Written on 5th November 2008
Safari users who have had the pleasure of using the 
Written on 29th July 2008
Mozilla has 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
