I am all along a Window user and have been doing web development on Windows for years. When I started work, all the guys in the engineering team are using Mac, so I thought I go with the flow and begin doing web development on a Mac. The experience was excellent, just need some time to get used to. After intensively using Mac for more than a month, I am proud to say, I am not going back to a Windows PC. My next computer shall be a Mac. I am hoping the 27″ iMac gets refreshed next year and it I am going to get that. Even Valve is bringing Steam to Mac. With Blizzard games able to run on Mac and Razer supporting it mice with Mac drivers. There is no reason for me to use a Windows PC anymore. If there is really a need (like testing website in IE), I will just use VMWare to run Windows 7.

Here are some software I use to do web development on Mac:

IDE: Coda (USD$99) by Panic
SVN: Versions (EURO€39) by Sofa & Pico
MYSQL: Sequel Pro (Free)
FTP: Flow (USD$25) by Extend Mac
localhost: MAMP (Free)

Windows 7 has officially been launch in Singapore at midnight on 22nd October 2009. The launch was collaborated between Microsoft Singapore and Challenger Funan. The first person in the queue started queuing at 3.30pm and only at 7pm they started giving out the queue number. At about 10.30pm, there was about 140+ people in the queue, but I think it eventually went up to 200 before midnight.

The first 177 customers gets to buy Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Edition at SGD$77 (RRP: SGD$219). After that, a limited number of customers can purchase it at SGD$147 during the launch event.

Full Install Prices

• Windows 7 Home Premium – SGD$359
• Windows 7 Professional – SGD$529
• Windows 7 Ultimate – SGD$549

Upgrade Prices

• Windows 7 Home Premium – SGD$219
• Windows 7 Professional – SGD$359
• Windows 7 Ultimate – SGD$379

OEM Prices (Full Install)

• Windows 7 Home Premium – SGD$190
• Windows 7 Professional – SGD$255
• Windows 7 Ultimate – SGD$350

I have been using Windows 7 for quite sometime since it was available in my school’s MSDN AA on 14th August 2009. I am very satisfied with it, definitely an improvement over the failed Windows Vista or the long running Windows XP.

*UPDATE* Updated post with Windows 7 OEM prices from Fuwell.

Source: DK and VR Zone

Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard is now available. You can get it at the Apple Singapore Store for SGD$48. Pre-ordered mine on the 26th August 2009 and received it yesterday, 28th August 2009, at about 10am, couriered by DHL.

One advantage living close to DHL’s Keppel’s Distribution Center is that my house will always be the first stop which means I always get it at 10am. Tested and proven by me many times. I even asked the courier guy from DHL and he says that my house will always be the first stop when they plan the route.

Box

Box Opened

Front View

Back View

Opened

Contents

Disc

Shall do a fresh install on my MacBook Pro over the weekends. I always like fresh install when it comes to OS.

Got this off my mailbox from Windows newsletter, Windows 7 has finally RTMed and it should hit our shelves on 22nd October 2009.

Announcing: Release to Manufacturing
It’s almost here! We’re very happy to tell you that we’ve hit the last big milestone on the way to Windows 7: Release to Manufacturing. We’re packaging copies and manufacturers are putting it on new PCs. On October 22, you’ll be able to get the final shipping product. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done; you helped make this an operating system we’re all going to enjoy.

The Windows 7 RC will be available for download until 20th August 2009. After that, you won’t be able to get the download, but if you have the software, you can still install the RC and get a key if you need one. The keys will be available till March 2010.

Was invited to the Cybercrime Uncovered event by Symantec at Pan Pacific Hotel. I managed to reach there on time as it is near my work place, surprise to see Wilfrid there as well, been quite some time since I saw it and he has change his phone to Nokia N97!

Sorry man, I have forgotten to bring my camera and my iPhone 3GS is not up for the job due to the lack of optical zoom. I shall wait for Wilfrid for his photos.

I was very impressed with the presentation, the whole of introduction part of how Symantec was borned and the evolution of threats and how Symantec solved the issue were in a single Flash file instead of powerpoint slides. The animation was very smooth and the graphics were very nice and not some images from Google. Even the presentation was done by 2 person and each of them will take turn to speak a sentence and that makes it sounds very lively. This is the best visual presentation I have seen. I can judge from the graphics to the animation of the flash, lots of work and effort had been spent on it.

They also show us some of the internal tools that they used to track worms/viruses as well as some QA tools to check the memory usage and the installation time of every internal build of the Norton 2010 products. Those internal tools are web based and done in flash as well. Impressed x2.

Norton AntiVirus 2010 Beta and Norton Internet Security 2010 Beta have been released and the main feature of these Norton 2010 products is codename “Quorum”. It is a reputation-based threat detection that identifies good/trusted applications of known origins with known publishers and other common attributes and allow them to be installed onto your PC. At the same time, it detects bad/harmful applications which have typically never been seen before, have an unknown publisher or hold other shady attributes and prevent them from installing onto your PC.

These reputations are gathered from Symantec’s users all around the world in an opt-in program. When you have downloaded the application from the Internet, let say, Firefox Setup 3.5.exe, and execute it, Symantec will query the reputation of the application and various attributes like how many people have installed this application, when the application first appeared as well as whether it is trustable from the cloud. In return, Symantec will inform the user whether to go ahead and install the downloaded application or delete the application from the PC. Pretty neat.

The final version of Norton 2010 products should be out somewhere in October 2009, do keep a lookout for it.

*UPDATE* Check out Wilfrid’s blog post on the event as well.

Google announces Google Chrome OS! But it would not be out till the 2nd half of next year. Looks like it will give Microsoft a run for its money for its Windows 7 Starter Edition targeting at netbooks.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Read: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use.

What’s New In Firefox 3.5?

Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages.
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing.
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

For more details, check out the Firefox 3.5 Release Notes.

Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features
Check out Lifehacker’s post on Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features. I have listed the points in below, for more details check out the site.

• Video superpowers with HTML 5
• Geo-location
• TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
• Color profiles that pop
• Private browsing mode
• Smarter session restore
• Keyword AwesomeBar filters
• Tab tearing
• Forget this site
• Undo closed window

Download: Get Firefox 3.5 now!

Copy and pasted from PHP 5.3.0 Release Announcement.

The PHP development team is proud to announce the immediate release of PHP 5.3.0. This release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features and bug fixes.

The key features of PHP 5.3.0 include:

• Support for namespaces
• Late static binding
• Lambda Functions and Closures
• Syntax additions: NOWDOC, ternary short cut “?:” and jump label (limited goto), __callStatic()
• Under the hood performance improvements
• Optional garbage collection for cyclic references
• Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql
• Improved Windows support including VC9 and experimental X64 binaries as well as portability to other supported platforms
• More consistent float rounding
• Deprecation notices are now handled via E_DEPRECATED (part of E_ALL) instead of the E_STRICT error level
• Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)
• New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant
• Over 140 bug fixes and improvements to PHP, in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date

This release also drops several extensions and unifies the usage of internal APIs. Users should be aware of the following known backwards compatibility breaks:

• Parameter parsing API unification will cause some functions to behave more
  or less strict when it comes to type juggling
• Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ext/msql, ext/pspell (see ext/enchant), ext/sybase (see ext/sybase_ct)
• Moved the following extensions to PECL: ext/ming, ext/fbsql, ext/ncurses, ext/fdf
• Removed zend.ze1_compatibility_mode

For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.0.

For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.0, see the ChangeLog.

YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener has been released by Ozh and I. I have been running YOURLS on lc.sg and Ozh is running it on ozh.in.

What is YOURLS?

YOURLS is a small set of PHP scripts that will allow you to run your own URL shortening service (a la TinyURL). You can make it private or public, you can pick custom keyword URLs, it comes with its own API. You will love it.

There’s a WordPress plugin available for YOURLS, making integration with your blog a snap: create short URLs and tweet them automagically as you publish blog posts.

Check out Ozh blog post on the announcement, Introducing YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) and its WordPress Plugin Companion.

YOURLS comes with a WordPress Plugin as well and this plugin is developed by Ozh.

YOURLS WordPress Plugin

This plugin, YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter, is the bridge between YOURLS, Twitter and your blog: when you publish a post or a page, it will use your own YOURLS install, either hosted on the same webserver, or another server, to create a short URL for your post and send it to your Twitter account. The plugin also works with public popular services such as TinyURL, tr.im, is.gd or bit.ly.

Check out Ozh blog post on the WordPress plugin, YOURLS: WordPress To Twitter (a Short URL Plugin).

You can follow us on Twitter as well, Ozh and gamerz.

Official Site: YOURLS: Your Own URL Shortener

Not in any particular order and it is sorted by price.

1. TweetDeck – Free
2. Facebook – Free
3. WordPress – Free
4. Skype – Free
5. Currency – Free
6. iGV – Free
7. SG Buses – Free
8. Wikipanion – Free
9. SG 4D – Free
10. Carpark@SG – Free
11. Tap Tap Revenge – Free
12. BeejiveIM – $9.99
13. FTP On The Go – $6.99
14. Byline – $4.99
15. Bejeweled 2 – $2.99
16. Web Tools – $1.99
17. SG ERP – $1.99
18. Bytes – $0.99
19. TVGuide@SG – $0.99
20. A Level – $0.99