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Blog Entries from March 2009

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Internet Explorer 8 Released by Microsoft

Author

Ethan Poole

Date

Mon 23 Mar 2009 at 17:00

Comments

4 comments

Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 8 to the world last Thursday. Even though IE7 still feels rather new in the web development world, due to its rather slow adoption, IE8 is the first major release of the browser since October 2006. IE8 features: Private browsing mode "Accelerators" Web slices Better page zooming Better RSS reader Developer tools Improvements to the rendering engine, security, and performance Microsoft have made a number of fixes and improvements to IE's rendering engine in IE8. Finally, IE8 pass…
Apple Previews iPhone OS 3.0

Author

Ethan Poole

Date

Tue 17 Mar 2009 at 22:52

Comments

7 comments

Apple held a press event at their headquarters in Cupertino earlier today to unveil the iPhone OS's third iteration. The updated iPhone OS actually brings a lot of the functionality that people have been asking for, including copy and paste, MMS, and landscape mode. The only major functionality missing is built-in Flash support, but otherwise the iPhone OS 3.0 is a huge improvement to the iPhone platform. Some of the new features include: Cut, copy, and paste Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) A2DP stereo Bluetooth Landscape vi…
Opera Goes Turbo

Author

Matt Oakes

Date

Fri 13 Mar 2009 at 5:01

Comments

7 comments

About a month ago, Opera announced Opera Turbo. Opera Turbo is a piece of software that runs on the Opera server in between you and the Internet. It compresses website data by as much as 80% and then sends you the results to be displayed in Opera. The technology is already used in Opera Mini, where it can compress a standard web page (with images) down to around 7KB, which loads quite quick, even on a standard mobile connection. Originally it was thought that Opera were only going to licence the technology to third parties, who would then i…
In-depth Comparison of Web Browsers at MaximumPC

Author

Ethan Poole

Date

Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 23:19

Comments

1 comment

There are a lot of web browsers on the market today, with a lot of marketing text and hidden agendas clouding any real evaluation of each browser. Even at Lowter, we heavily lean towards Opera. All of the graphs and speed tests are the worst, with each data set showing almost entirely different results, always skewed towards a particular browser. However, I found a great article on Maximum PC that gives a pretty detailed and fair review of the major browsers on the market. It compares the browsers on the rendering engine, the user interfa…
Re-evaluating Safari 4

Author

Ethan Poole

Date

Mon 9 Mar 2009 at 22:24

A few weeks ago, Matt posted about Apple's announcement of Safari 4 Beta. Now that Safari 4 has been around for a few weeks, it is time to re-evaluate it, without the glimmer that a new piece of software has. After playing around with Safari 4 for a few days, I personally noticed many of its faults quite quickly. Many others did as well, with a multitude of blog posts about Safari 4's issues popping up last week. First and foremost, Safari 4's tabs-on-top implementation is awful. Yes, it looks nice and gives even more screen real-est…
Obama Appoints CIO and FCC Chairman

Author

Ethan Poole

Date

Fri 6 Mar 2009 at 21:37

Comments

1 comment

Yesterday, President Obama officially announced that Vivek Kundra would serve as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the White House. The CIO is "responsible for oversight of federal technology spending" and "oversees enterprise architecture to ensure system interoperability and information sharing and ensure information security and privacy across the federal government". Kundra will work closely with the Chief Technology Officer that Obama has yet to appoint. Kundra is a known open source and cloud-based application supporter. Earlie…
SourceForge.net Adds Support for Git

Author

Ethan Poole

Date

Mon 2 Mar 2009 at 23:04

Comments

4 comments

Late last week SourceForge.net announced support for Git - a distributed revision control system - to complement their existing offerings of SVN and CVS. Git is a free distributed revision control system aimed at speed and efficiency for large code projects. It has some distinct advantages over CVS and SVN, primarily its distributed model over CVS and SVN's server-client model. It was initially designed for the Linux kernel, but is now used by a number of other high-profile projects, including Perl, Wine, VLC, Ruby on Rails, and others. Git…