Something rather unexpected happened at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference this morning - a Windows version of the Safari browser was announced, and a beta build was made available for download.

I've spent the last couple of hours using it on my desktop running Vista and here are my initial thoughts and impressions. Comments are welcome.

The Good:

• Speed, speed, speed: As always, Apple has posted lots of numbers for you to chew on, and I was initially skeptical of the claims made. But after repeatedly testing Firefox 2, IE 7 and the Safari 3 beta on a pretty wide variety of sites (including those with 100+ images, heavy Javascript, etc.), I really do feel that Safari is perceivably the fastest of the three. This could be the one thing that could get me to switch browsers, if only it weren't for the other limitations (read on). FYI, I'm on a dual-core Opteron system with 2GB of RAM.
• WebKit for Windows: This is perhaps the best part of having an official version of Safari for Windows. Web developers can now run their work through the WebKit rendering engine even if they don't have access to a Mac. It certainly beats using the old browser screenshot services. :)
• Did I mention it's fast? :P

The Bad:

• Am I still using Windows? If you thought iTunes and QuickTime looked out of place in Windows, wait till you see this thing; it's like Apple ripped Safari out of OS X, added a menu bar to the top, and called it a Windows app. Textboxes, buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes...they all use the bubbly Aqua style. I guess this wouldn't be so bad if it were 2004 and we were all skinning XP to look like OS X, but can we get something more native, please? Probably unlikely, but one can always hope.
• Who turned off ClearType? Somewhat related to the above point, Safari renders fonts differently from every other application on your system. This can be good or bad, depending on your preference, but it's certainly disconcerting at first. I could probably get used to it with time, and the "Light" font smoothing option looks better than the default "Medium" setting to me. Try it.
• Look ma, no borders! This is one of those things that throws me off every time I use OS X, and now Windows users can get a piece of the aggravation too - you can only resize the window using the tiny gripper at the bottom right corner. Who in the world thought this was a good idea anyway?
• It's no Firefox: As with my experiment with IE 7, I miss my extensions. Enough said.

The Ugly:

• Wonky mouse support: I could live with most of the limitations outlined in the previous section if I really, reallyhad to, but this one's a deal breaker, hence the new "ugly" section. The back and forward buttons on my mouse simply don't work in Safari, and the scrolling speed with the mouse wheel is far too sluggish. This singlehandedly makes the whole browsing experience just dreadful. Apple, please get this fixed ASAP. And while you're at it, how about letting us middle-click tabs to close them (as IE and Firefox do), rather than having us aim for the tiny "X" buttons?

So yeah, it's not all bad, but it's not all great either. Many of the shortcomings are forgivable, considering this is the first beta release of an application that they've never released for Windows, but they're certainly enough to prevent me from using it as my primary browser. That said, it has found its place in my web development toolbox, giving me a way to finally test sites in WebKitquickly and easily, so not all is lost. :)

The NY Times reports that Facebook will be launching a new free classifieds feature known as the "Marketplace" sometime tomorrow. Users will be able to choose who can view their listings, just like they can set permissions for their profiles today.

It really makes a lot of sense to introduce such a feature into into a well-established social networking service - it's far more convenient to put up a private classifieds listing on a site that all your friends are already using on an almost daily (even hourly for some!) basis than to get all of them to sign up for a new service just for that purpose, or to individually email all of them. It'll be interesting to observe how well the new feature fares in the coming months. Do you think you'll use it?

On a related note, I must say that I've been impressed with the way Facebook has been shaping up recently. They've been firing on all cylinders, and introduced a slick new design not too long ago. I joined the network back in 2004, then went on a long hiatus for several months, and have recently started using it more often again, especially to reconnect with old friends from Irvine and India.

Related posts: How to get Facebook status updates via IM.

Blogs hosted on WordPress.com have a nice statistics module that integrates into the dashboard. Yesterday, the folks at Automattic released this as a standalone plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs. The developer, Andy Skelton, has more info.

Installing the plugin is really easy - copy the file into the plugins directory, activate it through the dashboard, and enter your WordPress.com API key - a process almost identical to installing Akismet, the excellent comment and trackback spam filtering plugin.

The dashboard page includes most of the statistics that bloggers would be interested in - referrers, top posts, search engine terms, outbound clicks, and incoming links, all laid out in a clean and easy to read format.

One important difference between this plugin and many other stats plugins for WordPress is that the stats aren't stored in your own database. Instead, a snippet of Javascript code collects the necessary information and passes it on to WordPress.com, decreasing the load on your server during high traffic periods. A downside is that you have to login to your WordPress.com dashboard to view the stats; they're not integrated into your hosted WordPress setup's dashboard.

I installed the plugin yesterday and I'm liking it so far. It hasn't slowed down page loading times at all, and the statistics collected are useful and relevant. I'm using it alongside FeedBurner's StandardStats feature, which I've been using for several months and have been pretty happy with. And, of course, I also use AWStats, which ASO enables on all their packages by default. What can I say? I like numbers and pretty graphs. :)

Last week, I sent out Joost invitations to a number of friends and basically to anybody who wanted to try it out. Since then, I've been hearing mixed opinions from people about it, so I thought I'd post my thoughts on the subject.

I was first invited to the private beta back when it was still called The Venice Project, and things have certainly come a long way since then. The quality of the service has improved, the client finally runs in Vista without weird workarounds, and several new "channels" have been added.

Unfortunately, I still think that the quality of the content on the network is lacking, and most other people I've talked to share that opinion. There are a couple of channels that are interesting to watch now and then, but I'd really like to see more mainstream content - shows that people actually watch every week. ABC and NBC, for instance, already allow people to watch popular shows like LOST and Heroes for free on their respective sites. Partnerships between Joost and these networks could be mutually beneficial - the networks would be able to take advantage of Joost's excellent peer-to-peer network to stream content and save on bandwidth, and Joost itself would become significantly more appealing to users if it got a handful of popular shows.

Still, there's a lot to like about Joost. One of the most interesting end-user features for me is the "Channel Chat" widget. Each channel has a separate chatroom where viewers can interact with each other without leaving the full-screen, TV-like Joost interface. Imagine watching an episode of LOST and being able to discuss theories with other viewers in realtime during commercial breaks. I think that would be lots of fun, and would bring a new world of interactivity to television. The infrastructure is already in place, but good content is still missing!

I also like how the video stream resumes from where you left off if you turn off the app and turn it back on later. As Mark from the OSNN forum said, that's how on-demand TV should always have been.

So yeah, I think Joost has a lot of potential, but it won't become something I use on a daily basis unless better content begins to show up.

What are your thoughts?

(Still don't have an invite? Leave a comment here)

Looks like the move from Blogger to WordPress is mostly done. I just have to look for any remaining issues and broken links now. If you come across anything like that, please leave a comment and let me know. :)

Interestingly, even though I had never looked at the WordPress template system until this weekend, I had structured my Blogger template in almost the same way as WordPress does, with separate pieces for the header, footer, content area, sidebars etc. So, migrating my existing template to WordPress was a pretty smooth process. The majority of my time was spent looking over the existing code, line by line, and rewriting it in a cleaner way.

All in all, I'm happy with the way the site is set up now. It's going to make things much easier to manage without remnants of four year old code.