Yay! I was reading BBC News, and saw that Apple have released a beta of Safari 3 for Mac OS and Windows.

Naturally, I hopped over to the Apple site to download it, and was bleeding from the eyes within minutes.

One thing that I've noticed about Macs, is that whenever I'm using one I feel as though my eyes are about to explode from the pressure of attempting to focus on the seemingly intentional blur effect applied to text. This is probably a personal thing, but I don't want to go back to the bad old days of dodgy CRT monitors that required manual focusing to avoid brain haemorrhage after prolonged exposure. I don't like the default softening effect that Macs apply to everything. Annoyingly, Safari on Windows applies it to all text rendered. Perhaps more annoyingly, there is no way to turn it off, meaning that I'm stuck with a multicoloured haze around characters, and the feeling that everything is in bold type.

Another problem I have is that Safari on Windows looks virtually identical to Safari on a Mac. Might be nice if you spend all day masturbating over Apple's latest product line, but very annoying if you like your UIs to be vaguely consistent. If you really want a Mac, you'll probably buy one anyway. Mac software should look like Mac software, Windows software should look like Windows software, and Linux software should look like whichever of the 101 or so widget sets that the developers decided to use.

Apple aren't the only offender here, but they're more relevant than Sony and the shitty custom apps they bundle with their PCs, or Nero with their increasingly shit "Media Center Solution" or whatever - what happened to Nero Burning Rom? - I couldn't find it on their site a few weeks back, and it looks like they only offer bundles of software that happen to have the ability to burn optical media.

I imagine that Apple try so hard to keep their Windows software looking like Mac software, is to get people used to the look and feel, and convert them to the way of the Mac. I still think that it's bad manners to ignore the look and feel of the system that your software is running on.

Unfortunately, I think Safari for Windows will be relegated to a place alongside Quicktime and iTunes, as software that I'll probably not use unless I have a file or site that won't work in anything else.

A post by Matt made me aware of a page about Productivity and information management features in the latest and exciting installment of Microsoft™'s acclaimed Operating™ System™ - Windows™ Vista™.

Matt picked out a few features that he found particularly compelling, and I've picked out my own.

Internet Explorer

Windows Vista includes major enhancements to Internet Explorer. In addition to the security and privacy features and enhancements, Windows Vista Internet Explorer Beta 1 offers an early glimpse of how Microsoft is redesigning Internet Explorer to make everyday tasks easier—for instance, with tabbed browsing, inline search, and shrink-to-fit printing. It also provides new tools to give you direct access to the information you want with built-in support for Web Feeds (also known as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication). Windows Vista Internet Explorer also delivers a simplified and updated user interface, as well as improvements to the platform for Web developers.

Tabbed browsing, inline search, and shrink-to-fit printing, the ability to read RSS feeds directly in your browser? IE7 is sure to leave Firefox in the dust.

Web improvements

Windows Vista includes some commonly requested improvements that provide a rich and flexible platform for Web developers—for example, transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG), which lets Web designers create compelling overlaid page designs.

Good that Microsoft™ continues its commitment to the latest web standards.

Metro documents

Knowledge workers can securely collaborate by using a new, easy-to-create, XML-based, fixed-format document, code-named "Metro" This format can be created directly from any application, and is simply a page-by-page view of content as it would have been rendered by a printer. Metro documents retain all of the fidelity of the original source material and all the necessary resources such as fonts and images for rendering. In Windows Vista Beta 1, Metro documents do not require you to have the original authoring application to be viewed, but are instead viewable within the included Metro Viewer, which is hosted by Internet Explorer 7 on any Windows Vista computer with the WinFX runtime APIs installed. The Metro viewer can also be hosted by Windows XP computers with Internet Explorer 6, but likewise, WinFX must be installed. While the Metro document format is ideal for sharing content in an application-independent way, it is also an ideal archival format as well. Microsoft is freely licensing Metro, which means that the format can be created and consumed on many different platforms and classes of devices, ensuring that Metro documents will integrate well.

Yet more keen innovation. Imagine, being able to print to a file, and then sharing that file with the people that you work with. With wide cross-platform support, and cunning use of XML, this is sure to catch on.

I think you'll all agree that Open Source can never compete with the powerful development force of Microsoft™