Webkit, Apple’s open source engine for Safari and many other browsers, has recently found a bug in the ACID3 test.  ACID3 is the newest web standards test certified in part by the W3.  After the bug was fixed in the ACID3 test, Webkit suddenly got a perfect score of 100/100.  When I retried Firefox/Gekko, I was kind of surprised that the score actually went down one point to 67/100 (Last time I tested it, it had a 68/100).  Opera’s newest engine, then scored a 100/100 as well along with Webkit.  Although this version of Opera is not released yet, and should be in a week or so.

It seems to me that Apple is finely becoming a worthy competitor to IE, Firefox, and Opera.  At this point Mozilla has a lot of work to do to catch up,  Webkit is still the only publicly released engine with HTML5.  As with IE, it’s no competition at this point, it’s most important feature is updating Windows for now.

Last week’s review is here.

The Applications reviewed this week

1. Pixelmator
2. OmniGraffle
3. Money
4. Racer
5. Battle for Wesnoth

Pixelmator:
This is an interesting program I picked up.  It has an interface very similar to Photoshop, but it’s not quite like Photoshop.  It’s covered in hundreds of features and advance editing tools.  One big bonus for this application compared to Adobe’s Photoshop, is the fact that this program is a native Cocoa app, while Photoshop is Carbon.  For those who don’t know about Cocoa or Carbon, it means that Pixelmator is much faster, more efficient, and less bug prone. Saying this I do have to point out a few problems I’ve encountered.  The first one is the image browser,  I have yet to ever get this working.  Every time I open it it freezes not just the application, but the whole system, making me have to do a hard shutdown.  It is also very limiting when trying to create an image from scratch, rather than tweaking one.   Overall it’s a fairly nice alternative to Photoshop.

Latest Version: 1.1.3; 4 March, 2008
Price: $59, shareware
Developer:  Pixelmator Team Ltd.

• Type: Image Editor
• Efficiency: 4/5
• Features: 3/5
• Graphics: 3/5
• Stability: 4/5
• Ease of Use: 4/5
• Modern Mac Look: 5/5
• Price: 4/5

Total: 27/35;  77%

OmniGraffle:
If you need a graphical representation or diagramming software, this is about the best program I’ve used whether on the Mac or PC.  It has many different categories for the job you need done.  It even contains pre-made graphics to design a user interface sketch (if your making an application).  In fact there are so many features and assets within this program that at times it can be a little hard to navigate through to find what you were looking for.  After a while though it becomes second-nature and a great full-featured application.

• Latest Version: 5.0; 5 March, 2008
• Price: $99(Standard) and $199(Pro)
• Developer:  OmniGroup

1. Type: Diagraming Software
2. Efficiency: 4/5
3. Features: 5/5
4. Graphics: 3/5
5. Stability: 5/5
6. Ease of Use: 3/5
7. Modern Mac Look: 5/5
8. Price: 5/5

Total: 30/35;  86%

Money:
This is a little nifty program for people that like to organize their personal finances.  This application is like a database that keeps track of spending and even your bank accounts.  It has a very intuitive feature that actually will connect to your bank account and update automatically with it.  I have found this program to be extremely simplistic, so it’s not for advance usage, but it is fairly nice.  In truth I think the price is a little high, I believe it should be donate ware or maybe $14.99.

• Latest Version: 5.0; 5 March, 2008
• Price: $99(Standard) and $39.99(Pro)
• Developer:  jumsoft

• Type: Diagraming Software
• Efficiency: 4/5
• Features: 2/5
• Stability: 5/5
• Ease of Use: 5/5
• Modern Mac Look: 5/5
• Price: 2/5

Total: 23/30;  76%

Racer:
This is a pretty nice racing game.  It’s a multi-platform online game which uses the mouse to accelerate and turn the cars.    For a free game it has really nice graphics, and great game play,  Saying this, it is very very easy to drive and doesn’t completely follow real physics.   Along with this, just a tab from another car will send you spinning like crazy.

• Latest Version: 0.5.4.3; 6 March, 2008
• Price: Free
• Developer:  Ruud van Gaal

• Type: Racing Game
• Efficiency: 2/5
• Features: 3/5
• Graphics: 3/5
• Stability: 4/5
• Ease of Use: 5/5
• Modern Mac Look: N/A(Opengl Based)

Total: 18/25;  72%

Battle For Wesnoth:
A very addictive game.  It’s similar to Civilization or Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, with a turn based RPG style simulation.  The theme in this game is fantasy as you build up your army of warriors.  There are many different sagas with in it and a lot of replay value.  The graphics aren’t the best, but I love the music.

• Latest Version: 1.4; 8 March, 2008
• Price: Free
• Developer:  The Battle for Wesnoth development team

• Type: Turn Based Strategy Game(fantasy themed)
• Efficiency: 3/5
• Features: 4/5
• Graphics: 2/5
• Audio: 3/5
• Stability: 5/5
• Ease of Use: 4/5
• Modern Mac Look: N/A(Opengl Based)

Total: 21/30;  70%

Just to caution, this post might not be very well written. I just wrote what came out of my head.

I’ve been developing with web technologies for a few years now. I started in the bleak times of what is now considered Web 1.0. If you don’t remember Web 1.0, it was the time when web pages were read only. When there was very little interactions at all, just static pages. Those were the days of HTML. HTML did everything from the structure of the page to the style and the graphical look.

Today, we live in a world of Web 2.0. In this concept, using HTML to create the actual look of a page is obsolete. We only use HTML to add the skeleton to the page, then we use something called styles, either through Javascript DOMs or a CSS file to make the graphical look of the page. Web 2.0 is also about communities and making the internet more dynamic.

Lately there has been talk about Web 3.0, something about databases and other random assets. To tell you the truth I’m trying to build a system that is separate from the normal idea of web development. You see, places like Youtube or Google have really shown the power of a technology called AJAX and the advancements of javascript, php, and rss. I’m currently working on a system that utilizes Javascript, php, rss, and other technologies with the technique of AJAX to create not only a dynamic website, but to give it a more physical feel and experience. Another words, I want it to be similar to a desktop based system, but designed specifically for web browsers. Just to clarify, this is not a WebOS, or web operating system,I’m making a web application platform(A little different).

Along with this, I want to make a very clean simplistic design, I don’t like a lot of clutter on webpages, just like I don’t want my desktop to be cluttered. Some examples of websites which are cluttered with junk are: yahoo.com, msn.com, cnn.com, and myspace.com. This “clutter” might work with some seasoned users, but new users might become very confused, and other users might not like a bunch of junk on a webpage that they never even look at.

Yahoo should learn from Google. Don’t through everything up on the homepage, have a few needed or important items, keep it clean, and keep it simplistic. If a user wants a function of some sort on the homepage, let them add it themselves, that way what they want is on the homepage and what they don’t want isn’t. That’s one of the big reasons for iGoogle.

Now to get back to web development languages like HTML, CSS, Javascript, and so forth. Making a basic generic website is easy, and actually it’s more than just easy. Today, not only are there very powerful web designing programs on the market, but there are free code snippets and libraries everywhere online. If you want your own blog, for instance, just download wordpress and add it to your site. It’s that easy to make any generic website.

Now if you want to make a unique website, that’s a different story. It’s rare to find a unique place on the web these days. From places like MySpace to Twitter, they all look the same to me. All I see is an evolution of the web, but I don’t want to see an evolution. What i want to see is a revolution. What I mean is, I don’t want the web to get better, I want it to change. For example, Microsoft Windows is a platform that has been around since 1985. MIcrosoft has made big changes with Windows, going from Windows 1.1 to Windows 3, then 95 to 2000. I’ve seen many leaps with it, but the truth is Windows has always been Windows. In truth, Windows has never gone away from what it once was. I’ve actually seen programs from Windows 1.1 running in Windows XP. You see Windows isn’t revolutionizing itself, it’s evolving because it’s the same Windows but with a few upgrades. To create a revolution, Microsoft would have to throw away Windows entirely and start from scratch. Microsoft said Windows Vista would be a whole new operating system from the ground up, but in truth it’s the same old Windows.. Now to show you an example of a revolution, Apple’s Mac OS X. Mac OS X is not an evolved form of Mac OS 9. The reason is, it’s different from the ground up. It has a different Kernel, a different application layer, and it even has a completely different origin of development.

Web 2.0 was never a revolution, it was only an evolution from Web 1.0, and it appears Web 3.0 is the same. I am truly sick of this; I’m moving away from the generic ways of web development. Right now I’m using Javascript, a language that barely supports object-oriented programming, to create a pure object oriented language. With this I hope to create a very dynamic web environment that people can easily understand, navigate, and even add to. I wish I could say more than this, but I really can’t on a public blog. At this point I feel like I might have already said to much.

In the end, I hope developers of internet browsers will start supporting the set standards of w3 a lot more, and I hope the standards expand. I personally hate how scripting languages work with each other like HTML and CSS, I believe someone should come up with a more advance object oriented system as a web standard. Even Javascript feels outdated compared to something like Objective-C.

At this point, the web platform I’m developing, code named Pyro, will NOT work with Internet Explorer. I want to keep my code as clean as possible with as little hacking and slashing as I can do. Web developers might know what I mean by hacking and slashing, ff not: it has to do with browser compatibility. No two browser are the same. This means I want to follow the standards almost all the way down the list. Internet Explorer does very little to follow standards at this point, so it will probably not work. It seems IE 8 will be web standards compliant, but all I can do is hope.

Here’s a Video of Steve Ballmer, giving his views on the iPhone:

Today the iPhone is starting to pop up in businesses and corporations.  Through a survey it also appears to have the highest satisfaction score as a business phone.  Apple has show cased it’s SDK road map and to start off, it explained what it’s doing for enterprises.  Here’s a list of new corporate features:

1. Push Email
2. Push Calender
3. Push Contacts
4. Global Address list
5. Cisco IPsec VPN
6. WPA2/802.1x
7. Remote Wipe

Even better, Apple has now integrated Microsoft Exchange server into the iPhone with something called Activesync.  The room exploded with Applause and cheer when this was announced.

Today the iPhone claims 28% of the smartphone Market, with RIM’s Blackberry at about 40%.

Now me personally, I don’t have either an HD DVD or Blu-ray player, and I don’t plan on ever getting one. Now that HD DVD is dead, all that’s left is Blu-ray — but wait, could there be another competitor on the horizon? Many people have been talking after the death of HD DVD, some saying Blu-ray is not in the clear yet and in fact might not have much of a victory at all. It appears that all these people are pointing at Apple. Apple, the one already covered in blood from the death of many digital download stores and/or media players.

Companies below either closed shop entirely, or discontinued a product:

Yahoo!, Virgin, MTV’s Urge, AOL, MSN, BenQ, Rio, Dell, iRiver, Thomson, Olympus, BuyMusic.com, TowerRecords, Sony’s Connect, Google Video, and Wal-mart.

Now Apple is a company that has created many industry standards; it’s considered by many as the “trend setter.” It’s made the mouse a standard (1981), USB a standard (1998), developed FireWire as a standard (1995, 2000), optical mice a standard (2000), super drives a standard (1988, 2001), the modern laptop design a standard (1991), 16+ million colors (24 bit) on screen a standard (1987), Wi-Fi a standard (1999), etc., etc., etc.

So what I’m getting at is Apple is trying to set a new standard. Steve Jobs has pointed this out many times directly and indirectly. He has pointed out the decline of optical disks and the increase of digital downloads. He shared his vision in which everything could be downloaded digitally. You see Apple wants to get rid of the concept of physical storage devices like the optical disk (not SSD or HDD, of course). Knowing Apple, I could seriously see the fading of optical disks in just a few years, and I could also see Blu-ray not lasting very long.

When Apple makes a change, it takes six months to as much as 10 years, but soon the industry follows its lead.

As BYTE Magazine said back in December, 1994 (link):

“Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to describe the history of the computer industry as a massive effort to keep up with Apple.”

“It’s no coincidence that every new version of Windows looks more and more like the Mac.”

“In 1984, critics derided the Mac for its appliance-like simplicity, but it went on to pioneer or popularize almost every innovation in personal computing: the GUI, desktop publishing, built-in networking, plug and play, integrated multimedia, API-based software development, visual programming, hypertext, 24-bit color, the global clipboard, undo, voice control, built-in color calibration, dynamic memory allocation, SCSI, and even 3 1/2-inch floppy drives.”

“Apple’s R&D lab, located in Cupertino, California, is the inspirational R&D center for the entire industry.”

“Apple is pushing ahead with some exciting new technology, and the industry would be much poorer without Apple’s technical leadership.”- this one has to do with the fact that Apple was dying at the time.

I could get more quotes, but I think this one source says it all. Apple is one of the biggest innovators in the industry and when it does something, whether it gets noticed or not, the industry shifts in its direction. So I really can’t see Blu-ray as a standard for very long. Congrats Blu-ray, on the victory, but your life will be short. Apple’s behind you, ready to strike.

Back on July 31 of 2007, Apple said it had sold three billion songs, making it number 1 on the Web as a music download retailer. This also made Apple the third largest music retailer as a whole, surpassing Amazon and Target. Today Apple has sold more than four billion songs and is now the number 2 music retailer in the world, only behind Wal-mart. It is, of course, still number 1 on the Web.

What this shows is that iTunes is not just gaining ground, but is gaining ground faster over time, slowing down to a nice pace. Originally it took iTunes three years to reach one billion songs (from 2003-2006). Then it took only 11 months to gain another billion songs. Again, the third billion took a mere five months. Finally the last billion, getting up to four billion, took roughly six months. So iTunes shows that iTunes should be gaining around two billion songs sold per year.

This data does not count the movies, TV shows, podcasts, or games that are downloaded through iTunes.

I have just tested the newest build of WebKit from February 22. I was astounded by the score I got in ACID3. I tested Safari 3.1 a few weeks ago and got a 66 score, with Firefox at 60. Now with the latest build of WebKit, it jumped from 66 to a whopping 87!

If anyone knows about the ACID tests, you’d know 87/100 is pretty darn good, and at this point from my testing that’s the best score so far, with second place at 67/100 (the latest Firefox build).

Internet Explorer is still at the lowest with only 12/100.

Here’s the ACID3 link.

Now before I begin, just to clarify, because I see this mistake many times. Astrology and Astronomy are completely different subjects, Astrology is a false science that uses patterns in the sky to tell your future.

For a long time now, I’ve been telling people that the market share graphs and surveys are false; it seems very few believed me. The reason I said that had to do with the fact of how market share information was gathered. You see, a company like Net Applications has a snippet of code that is put into hundreds of Web sites. The code can tell what computer the visitors are on, and then send that information back to Net Applications.

The bad thing about these types of invisible surveys has to do with the Web sites themselves. From what I’ve learned most of Net Application’s Web sites are on e-commerce sites. At this time there are still many e-commerce sites devoted to Internet Explorer and/or Microsoft. One of which was Wal-mart’s online music store (which is gone now). You see Net Applications doesn’t list the Web sites its code is on, so you don’t know if any Web site is biased toward an OS or works better on a specific browser, or tends to get more of a specific OS because of what they sell.

Well now today I’ve found proof of how unreliable this method is. I found another Web site, which I trust a lot more than New Applications, called w3schools.com (W3 is the consortium that creates the open Internet standards).

Here’s a comparison:

So as you can see, there are some big differences, and actually W3 and Net Applications can’t seem to agree on any of the browsers. Firefox for instance seems to have more than twice the market share on W3’s side compared to Net Application’s.

This statement above can reflect on another similar market share Net Application does — the one that everyone seems to base their facts upon: The Operating System Marketshare. This has the same results as above. W3 actually says that Linux has a market share that is over five times the amount Net Applications says (3.6 > 0.67). So what does this say about Vista? Well, let’s look at Apple’s share. Net Applications says there are roughly 8% of computer users on Macs. Steve Jobs commented a while back that there are 23 million Mac OS X users. Estimating, I believe it is close to 26 million today. So what does that say? In total it appears that there are only about 320 computer users in the entire world. 320! that’s impossible — that’s less than 100 million over the population of the United States, so what about the rest of the world? I remember Microsoft claiming that there are close to a billion computer users out there, but then where did they go? I then did the same thing with W3’s information and got double the users at around 650 million. So who’s right? Are they both wrong? Who knows?

So once again, do listen about who has a larger market share, it’s all just a pseudoscience.

• W3 Browser Statistics

• Net Applications Browser Statistics

When the Apple TV first came out, I thought it was an okay set-top box. Over the first few months I saw nothing but good reviews, yet at the same time very few people were buying them. I do have to comment though, Apple TV so far has had the best results, selling about 800,000 units in 10 months, and that’s with very little advertising.

I personally have not been one that has bought one yet. I can’t find anything appealing enough about it to shell out $229 (was $299) for it. The new features in Apple TV take 2 have added some appeal. I can now watch or listen to podcasts on it, and I can rent movies.

The only problem with renting movies on it, is the fact that I’m one of the few people Steve Jobs didn’t count at Macworld when he said that most people only watch a film once. I normally watch a movie many times over again. So I really could careless about the renting part of the Apple TV.

Then there’s the new flickr feature. I’ll just come out clean and say, I don’t have an account there and I only go to Flickr when one of my friends gives me a link to it. I don’t know why, but I’m just not interested in it, just like how I don’t care about MySpace. The closest thing to Flickr I go to is YouTube, and that’s about videos not photos.

Now I recently posted an article about a new patent for the Apple TV that lets you watch broadcasted TV as well as live iChat with friends. This I would like very much. Now what I really want from Apple TV is the ability to use a wireless keyboard and/ or mouse, to have Safari built-in, and some form of IRC system to go along with iChat. I would also like a news feature that allows me to view current news, preferably video cast, but text is fine, and weather.

Finally there is one great Web site that should have been added to Apple TV, that being Blip.tv. What a great source of independent shows and clips, that would fit perfectly next to the YouTube channel.

Until Apple TV gets an iChat, Safari, and something like Blip.tv channels, I doubt I’ll get one. Maybe someday it’ll add something I like, but so far there isn’t much appeal at this point for me.

I was informed today, sadly, Netscape — or should I say AOL — has given up on its Web browser After 12 long years, Navigator has passed on, and by 2008, support will be removed from it. AOL commented:

“AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported Web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reigns fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.”

Personally I will never move to Firefox. On OS X, Firefox is really only Safari with memory leaks. Netscape was my second favorite browser, and now it is finally gone. AOL in my opinion is a greedy company that doesn’t seem to understand the market. All you have to look at is its ISP business, which it is closing soon as well.

-Thanks to Kteck for telling me.