Joff Williams

I was happily browsing the Apple UK store, when I had a thought: “What’s the student discount on Apple products?”, so out of curiosity I browsed to the apple store for education and clicked on the ‘Select your university’ link.

I should probably mention at this point that I’m on a train, browsing in Firefox on my Mac.

When they cleverly spotted that indeed I’m not browsing from my university network, I was directed to the following error page:

Now, correct me if I’m wrong but that is a HTTP error generated by a Microsoft server.
I realise that this has been served from a totally different domain, but I thought the irony was brilliant.

A new OS based on Ubuntu (Linux) is in the early stages of development. It’s called gOS and offers a range of built in Google applications.
The screenshots have striking similarities to Mac OS X.
So can this reasonably be penned as an operating system, or is it simply Ubuntu, bundled with preinstalled Google Apps?
If nothing else, it shows the increasing reach of Google into the desktop market and with Google partnering with MySpace and Bebo under the ‘OpenSocial’ alliance, the Google empire continues to expand.

Having dominated the mp3 player market, Apple are now stepping up their fight in the browser wars.

Steve Jobs made the announcement yesterday at the Worldwide Developers Conference that Apple has released a public Beta of Safari on Windows. You can view the keynote speech on the Apple website.

Apple claims that Safari runs faster than IE, Firefox and Opera. Having recently upgraded to a mac, I can verify that it runs faster than Firefox. What is good news for developers is that Safari is a browser that pays close attention to web standards, passing the Acid 2 test. Since Microsoft didn’t bother fixing all of the rendering bugs in IE7, if only a few windows users switch then this is a step in the right direction.

The question is, why will people switch? Most home users of the internet are happy enough with their pre-installed copy of Internet Explorer. I suspect that if the iPhone takes off in the UK the advanced features of Safari on the iPhone (such as pinch-zoom) will intrigue Windows users enough to tryout Safari on their desktop.

** UPDATE **
Whoops! It looks like there are still some bugs to be fixed.