Apple Safari 3 (Now on Windows!)

Apple's standard compliant safari browser version 3 has entered into public beta. According to Apple, it is 2 times faster than Internet Explorer.

Web Developers which has been bound by Windows (like me) has reasons to cheer as now it is possible to test websites in Safari without the need to break my piggy bank to buy a Mac.

I would love a Mac but no financial funding to do so. Thus the news on Safari on Windows is highly welcomed.

By bringing Safari to Windows, Apple should have given Microsoft a jab to bring Internet Explorer even more standard compliant than now. Safari, based on the WebKit open source project, which is a standard compliant web rendering engine.

In my view, Internet Explorer, though more standards aware, still has a long way to go. Some developers (like me) still have to resort to using JavaScript workarounds (for example, Dean Edwards IE7 script) to get IE to behave and understand CSS which follows closely to standards.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

Adobe® has officially renamed the Apollo runtime.

Now named Adobe® AIR™, the beta runtime is now available to public. Go to http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html to download it.

Read more about it on Adobe Labs or my previous blog post.

Cheers

Google Gears

Google is now on the path to making its Web-based apps available offline.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. For now, it consists components called LocalServer, Database and WorkerPool.

Only the Google Reader will be made for offline use for now. However, as time goes on, other useful applications such as Docs and Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail will be put for offline use.
With the talk about a Google Presentation Software (see my previous post), the bringing of these applications offline could post a serious competition to Microsoft in the future.

For interested developers, take a look at Google Gears Developer Website: http://code.google.com/apis/gears/index.html

Google Gears (Beta) can be found at: http://tools.google.com/gears/

Microsoft Surface

I guess many of you may have heard about it already.

Well for a closer view on it, Microsoft has a website for it at:
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/