Steve Jobs of Apple dropped a bomb at the World Wide Developers Conference by announcing that Apple would be releasing a Windows version of the Apple web browser, Safari.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as faulty and web standards non-compliant as ever, still dominates the market at about 70% with the open source browser Firefox coming it at 15% and Apple’s Safari at 5%. Steve Jobs promised the Windows version of Safari would have twice the performance of Internet Explorer.

As a web developer and designer, this comes as good news as designers worldwide are having to continually design new sites for 2 markets - the smart market that uses browsers like Firefox and Opera and the market that continues to use Internet Explorer. Although Firefox has been making significant gains on market share in the last year or so, and especially after the dismal performance of Internet Explorer 7, any new Windows browser that takes even more market share from Internet Explorer will be welcomed with open arms by the web design community.

A beta version of Safari for Windows can be downloaded from Apple’s website here - http://www.apple.com/safari/

The Internet can be a murky place especially where online business is concerned. Although online transactions are on the increase there is still a lack of confidence amongst consumers in using their credit cards online.

IBM has been working on a web-privacy tool in an attempt to raise consumer confidence. The tool, named ‘Identity Mixer’, encrypts a user’s details, like credit card information, during a transaction so that the middle-man, the online store, does not retain any information hackers would find interesting. The online store passes along the encrypted information to the bank for verification and payment. Once the transaction is complete the encrypted information, known as a ‘credential’, is destroyed. The next time the same consumer buys online a new credential is created.

A great tool, IBM has donated it to the Higgins Project, an open source initiative supported by IBM & Novell.

2 professors from Harvard Business School have made a study of Open Source Software versus the traditional software structure and have found that open source will never take the lead in the software market, primarily due to the fact that software like MS Windows is so well established and also that companies like MS can afford to create pricing structures that are attractive to big companies.

What a shame since OSS has the right spirit driving it - not money but that of making quality software available for all, something MS has yet to learn what with all the bugs that every version of it’s software ships with.

More on this report here… 

Sol & I have recently started using a great, and free(!), online project management system called activeCollab for Cynergise.

Based on php/mysql, it closely follows the more popular Rails-based Basecamp.

Easy to use and very intuitive, we currently have 5 projects on there, with 3 clients/partners, and more going on soon.

It’s already made me more productive as I don’t need to use a notebook or my white-board to list down what I need to get done - it’s all right there accessible from anywhere (well, anywhere there’s an internet connection anyway).

This is open-source so go ahead and try it out - go to http://www.activecollab.com/ to see the feature-set and for download options.