After landing at OR Tambo, I headed to where I stay when I’m in Midrand and was surprised to find Pieter Cloete from inikak.co.za at the house.

We had a great discussion about social media and the web in general. It is awesome to be able to talk someone who is as excited about technology and social media as I am.

Pieter is an iPhone guy and puts his one to good use in keeping his various social media profiles up to date and keeping track of all things digital.

If you are looking for a good laugh and some South African humour, check out inikak.co.za.

The new Studio 1558 features, 500Gb 7200RPM HDD, Core i5 CPU, 4GB 1333 Mhz DDR2 and an ATi Radeon HD 4570.

So far battery life is about three hours and the embedded 3G connection seems a lot more stable than that of the 1555.

Right now I have got my eye on the new Dell U2311H as an add on to my workspace.

I have always liked the idea of a notebook with a big external display to be used as my digital canvas and a Dell monitor seems to be the perfect fit…

Microsoft has really come to the party with a higher performance and truly worthwhile business productivity suite.

For quite some time now, I have not been using MS office at all and have been an advocate for Open Office and all things open source, but I have recently grown closer to my proprietary roots and have developed much appreciation for the work and effort that goes into bringing out products like Office 2010.

The new version of the well know business productivity suite, is simply impressive. Office 2010, loads faster, can handle more diverse file types and offers a host of functions and embedded applications, for tasks that one would previously need to perform in external programs.

I have still not managed to pull myself away from using Gmail as my mail management system and I can’t see myself moving back to Outlook anytime soon, unless Gmail and Exchange can communicate with each other directly. Gmail simply offers me the flexibility and scalability I need to manage multiple profiles and access my info instantly from multiple locations on the go.

For business use and from a corporate perspective, I think the new MS Outlook is definitely becoming a player and integrated with MS Exchange 2010, it makes for efficient management of internal work flow and cost effective email.

I am looking forward to playing around with the latest versions of Project and Visio as planning and monitoring seems to take up most of my time these days.

All in all, the new Office 2010, is most definitely worth the spend.

Buzz is new and will probably take a while to stabilise but already it feels as if it will be adopted very quickly and I presume that it will draw more people to the Gmail platform.

I am glad to see the integration with Google Profiles, this is going to make Profiles more relevant and content rich.

If you’re not on Gmail yet the now is the time to open an account. I recommend Gmail to all of my clients as a system to keep track of all of your various mail identities and manage your digital life. Once you’ve got a Gmail account check out all of the other services offered by Google, most of them are also available directly on your mobile phone which is great.

Well, I did a fresh install and it was super fast. I was a bit frustrated with the fact that Dell didn’t send me a copy of the latest drivers. Windows didn’t natively support my integrated 3G, so I could not get online as fast as I would have liked to, thank goodness, Windows 7 had native support for Bluetooth and I could hook up my Sony Ericsson in a matter of minutes and downloaded the required drivers from Dell’s support site.

I have found Windows 7 to be an absolute pleasure to work with and had all of my programs installed and running in less than a day. I find the performance to be substantially better than that of Vista and it requires far less resources. Will make sure that I have got all the required drivers before I do a fresh install again.

If you have got the option to upgrade or you’re buying a new PC, if you’re not getting a Mac or going with Linux or Solaris, get yourself Windows 7 and be sure you’ll be happier than you were with XP or Vista.

IMHO I feel that as a development community we should simply not support IE, but according to W3Schools stats on browsers http://w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp we’re still looking at about 39.3 % of all internet users running IE, so as a Businessman I need to look at things from a WHO IS PAYING perspective and from a ROI perspective, also the purpose of the website or application in question makes a huge difference on which browsers to support. A corporate venture could not afford for 39.3 % of their potential clients simply not being able to navigate and view their site.

Chrome frame will be great if people actually install it, but in reality, end users who have not upgraded from IE6 and who are not using Fire Fox, Opera, Chrome or Safari yet are not likely to install Chrome Frame as they would probably not know how to install flash or Java Runtime either.

I guess at the end of the day to support Chrome Frame, one needs only support Chrome and then add the additional line of code to your pages initialising the Frame if it is installed.

But we will still need to support IE, at least 7 and 8 for those users who are on corporate networks or work for narrow minded organisations that don’t allow Open Source standards based products on their IT infrastructure or who are simply not interested in allowing users to control their own web experience.

Browser support boils down to your web site’s target market, which I see as follows:

1. Corporate Informational/Portfolio/E-commerce Site – Open User Group – Want to sell something, product or service.
   Generally you will need to support more browsers as you are not sure what your potential customer may be using and your site should look good no matter what they are using. For example a shop selling flowers online, is not in control of who visits the site and the end users environment, if a visitor working at a commercial institution browses to the site or finds it in a seach and wants to buy flowers for someone and the site does not support IE then the flower shop will no doubt lose the sale to another site that does support IE. Also anyone searching for information on a product or service, from work where the environment is restricted and are forced to use IE, would not get benefit from a site that does not support IE and would be forced to look for services/information from someone who can provide them access to the information while they are looking for it in the format that they are able to view it.
2. Web Application – Closed User Group
   If you are developing your application for a closed user group or for a company who is going to use it internally and you are able to control what environment they will be using to access the application, then I would say opt to run Chrome or FF, if you are using a lot of JavaScript then go straight for Chrome as V8 is SOOOO fast. We have done some tests on JS interfaces that we use on some of our web apps and Chrome performs extremely better than other browsers. The other option of course is to develop only for IE if the company or client you are developing for would like to use it, on their network, but I would recommend choosing an Open and more regularly updated browsers and basically motivate from a web standards perspective that they should opt to use FF or Chrome.

   Once you have agreed on a browser, focus 100% on making your app work in it and don’t’ worry about other browsers at all. Learn all the browser specific optimisation tricks and features that you can leverage from in the development language that you are using, so that when you do launch the app it will be really fast and look good.

   If you choose, FF or Chrome, I would recommend you consider building an extension/plugin, that runs in the browser, this way you can leverage more client side processing and have faster access to features, by running the some of the features natively from within the browser. Also building plugins for an Open Browser can usually be done using XML or JS so you’re probably already fluent in either of these languages if you are building a web app for a commercial venture.

3. Personal Blog – the world
   Depending on whether you are one to make a stand or not and whether you care if users can see your site in different browsers, I think support the open ones and then redirect IE users to http://abetterbrowser.org/ automatically.

   I haven’t got to that point yet for my own site, but will probably implement that soon, as I think it is good to let people know that their are more browsers out there and you can do so much more with an Open Source one.

When Bing was released I was not super impressed and didn’t like the whole image background and well images in general on a search page.

I have now made a point of testing queries in Google and Bing and am surprised to see the difference in results, Microsoft has come a long way in their search technology and Bing is starting to impress me.

I have set Bing as my default search engine in IE, I guess that they are kind of made for each other so I have paired them up on my system.

I do feel that Bing should clean up it’s interface a bit and that some of it’s features which may be awesome on a really fast uncapped connection, but consume a bit more bandwidth than I am willing to part with on my connection at this stage and may pose a serious impact for corporate users as well as home users on slower connections.

I find that Bing is really good at helping me find info MS related troubleshooting and have spent a lot of time using it to find solutions to vista related issues.

Something else that I really like about Bing is the fact that my website and more of my social profiles come up in the first page of results when searching for my name.

Either Bing knows I am actually just hoping to see my site at the top of their list or they are using totally different ranking methods, which is more than likely the case. Google also has a bigger index and more history of other sites to compare my query against, so results in Google have probably been weighted against a far greater data pool making the order in which results appear more relevant to the web at large and the context in which the search query was submitted.

Will I be switching to IE and Bing on a permanent basis, to that I would have to say no. I’ll be sticking to FireFox and Google for now and keep all my other browser for testing and site evaluation.

I did a lot of research before deciding on what phone I was going to take. I had my mind set on an iPhone for a long time but decided on the Sony based on the cost to benefit ratio.

The phone has proven to be far better than what the reviews and resources said it would be and it has really got a bunch of awesome features.

I really like that I have got a GPS now as well as some of the awesome bluetooth features. The phone can take control of my notebook via bluetooth and I can do basically anything one can do with a mouse with my phone and from a much longer distance, watching DVDs in bed will never be the same again.

The phone has got an crystal clear display and comes with a 8GB memory card. The 8.1MP camera’s flash also doubles as a flash light which is pretty cool, especially when programming late at night and not wanting to bump things over in the house when in search of a late night snack or some coffee.

I have had my Acer for almost five years, and was so used to the speed, that I actually thought it performed quite fast.

I am so stoked with the boot times and with the over all experience of my Dell so far. I have made contact with the Dell Support Centre and they have been very helpful.

I am also not as frustrated with Vista as I thought I would be. I have registered for the Windows 7 which is being rolled out to all users who recently acquired Vista based machines and I can’t wait to see what impact Windows 7 has on performance.

I also appreciate embedded 3G, I have had to slot in and slot out my 3G card for quite some time and the ability to pull out my notebook and simply start working and be able to work without any wire for up to three hours, with my custom configuration is super cool.

Only thing that is bit disappointing is that even though various graphic options are available on the Dell website you cannot up grade graphics as an after market upgrade and RAM is VERY expensive. It will cost about 80% of the cost of a new unit to upgrade my RAM from 4GB to 8GB, so I guess I am going to be stoked with what I have until I custom spec a desktop for myself.

Looking forward to the next three years with my Dell and can’t wait to see what option I can upgrade to when my contract expires.

Google Voice

I recently got an invitation to Google Voice, I’m sad to say that it is not currently supported in South Africa, but the concept is great and I really hope that it becomes available internationally soon. I think this is going to make telecommunication providers think again about their exorbitant cost levels and hopefully spark some innovation on that front.

Google Wave

I have been one of the lucky few to get access to the Google Wave Sandbox. The day my invitation came, I was so excited. Wave is still a bit slow and as it is still in beta, it is a bit buggy, but it is great. Just as Gmail has changed the face of email I think Wave is going to change the face of collaborative working and social communication.

Currently Wave Sandbox users are only able to interact with other Sandbox users, so we’re not really getting the feel of what it is going to be like using it on a daily basis, but get to see just enough to look forward to the public release with eager anticipation.

Chromium

Since the release of Chome, I have switched to the developer channel and have seen Google roll out some really awesome features and serious speed. Chrome is seriously the best way to interact with any Google Powered product and if you haven’t tried it yet then now it is time you do.

Chrome OS

Since the release of the Chrome Browser, I think most of the web community have been waiting for the announcement that Google will be releasing their own OS. I simply cannot wait to get hold of Chrome OS and hope that I can afford a new little netbook to run it on when it is released.

Google is revolutionising the web, the way we use computers and changing the world.