Apple announces Safari 4

Apple announces Safari 4

  11:05:00 PM    Science Lover

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Apple announces the launch of the world’s fastest and most innovative browser – Safari 4

Apple announced the public beta of Safari 4, the world’s fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3. Innovative new features that include top sites, for a stunning visual preview of frequently visited pages; full history search, to search through titles, etc, make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable. Mistake

“Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications.”

Safari 4 is built on the world’s most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.

Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies so web-based applications can store information locally without an Internet connection, and is the first browser to support advanced CSS Effects that enable highly polished web graphics using reflections, gradients and precision masks. Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test, which examines how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG web standards that are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.

Safari for Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPod touch are all built on Apple’s WebKit, the world’s fastest and most advanced browser engine. Apple developed WebKit as an open source project to create the world’s best browser engine and to advance the adoption of modern web standards. Recently, WebKit led the introduction of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards and is known for its fast, modern code-base. The industry’s newest browsers are based on WebKit including Google Chrome, the Google Android browser, the Nokia Series 60 browser and Palm webOS.

New features in Safari 4 include:

• Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;

• Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before;

• Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes®;

• Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;

• Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;

• Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;

• Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and text;

• built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and

• a new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.

Pricing and Availability

Safari 4 is a public beta for both Mac OS X and Windows and is available immediately as a free download at www.apple.com/safari.

Safari 4 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard version 10.5.6 and Security Update 2009-001 or Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.11, a minimum 256MB of memory, and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire. Safari 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 4 can be found at www.apple.com/safari

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BBC web downloads set to launch

BBC web downloads set to launch

  1:07:00 PM    Science Lover

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The BBC's on demand TV service, the BBC iPlayer, will launch to the public on 27 July, the corporation has revealed.

UK users will be able to download popular shows over the net seven days after broadcast to watch on their PC.

Later this year, the service will also be available via links from YouTube and could also appear on other websites such as MSN, Bebo, and Facebook.

At launch the application will only work on Windows PCs but a version for the Mac could be available by autumn.

iPlayer
Shows can be watched seven days after transmission
Over time other features will be added to the iPlayer including live streaming of programmes, the BBC Radio Player and "series stacking", which will allow users to download episodes from series retrospectively.

Director General Mark Thompson said: "Forty years ago, in July 1967, BBC Television launched colour TV.

"This July we are going to launch the iPlayer and in our view, the iPlayer is at least as big a redefinition of what TV can be, what radio can be, what broadcasting can be, as what colour television was 40 years ago."

Timely launch

The iPlayer has been in development since 2003 and received final approval from the corporation's governing body, the BBC Trust, in April 2007.

In that time it has been through numerous revisions, many demanded by the Trust and the broadcast and telecoms regulator Ofcom, whilst other broadcasters, such as ITV and Channel 4, have launched their own on-demand services.

"The market badly wanted to make the BBC go through a proper due process," said Ashley Highfield, director of Future Media and technology at the BBC.


BBC iPLAYER
iPlayer will allow viewers to catch up on TV programmes for seven days
Some TV series can be downloaded and stored for 30 days
Viewers will be able to watch shows streamed live over the internet
Users will not be able to download programmes from other broadcasters
Classical recordings and book-readings are excluded from iPlayer

Who else offers TV on-demand?

He added that the long process had been "frustrating" but had ultimately made the iPlayer a "better" proposition.

"Nobody wants to be the first to innovate and the last to implement but I don't think that matters," he said.

"We are right at the beginning of the video over the internet revolution, these are really early days."

At launch users will be able to download programmes seven days after their first transmission and will then have up to 30 days to watch them.

Programmes will include popular series such as Life on Mars; soap operas such as EastEnders and documentaries such as Planet Earth. Initially, 400 hours of programming will be available.

Some sporting events, such as Euro 2008, will be offered through the iPlayer as the service expands.

Mr Highfield said that over a 2MB broadband connection half an hour of programming would take approximately half an hour to download.

Once viewed in entirety, programmes will be automatically deleted.

Critical view

The lifetime of downloads is controlled by a digital rights managements system (DRM) supplied by Microsoft.

Some critics of the iPlayer, notably advocacy group the Open Source Consortium (OSC), has said that programmes should be made available without these digital locks.


SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
iPlayer screengrab
Operating system: Windows XP SP2
Browser: Internet explorer 6.0 or above
Media Player: Windows Media Player 10 or above
Net connection: Broadband

However, Mr Highfield said this was not possible.

"We wouldn't be able to launch the iPlayer at all without digital rights management," he said.

"The rights holders - the people that make the programmes, from Ricky Gervais to the independent producers that account for up to a third of our programming - simply wouldn't have given us the rights to their programmes unless we could demonstrate very robust digital rights management."

The OSC has also criticised the BBC for initially releasing the iPlayer as a Windows-only system and has threatened to make a complaint to the European Commission.

The OSC argues that the system should work on all computer operating systems.

"I am fundamentally committed to universality, to getting the BBC iPlayer to everyone in the UK who pays their licence fee," said Mr Highfield.

"This is the approach we have always taken but we have always started with the platform that reaches the most number of people and then rolled it out from there."

Mr Highfield said that a version for Apple Macs could be available in autumn, with versions for Window's Vista and mobile devices to follow.

Versions for Freeview and cable viewers are also planned with Virgin Media expected to roll out the service later this year.

Deals with other distributors such as MSN, AOL, telegraph.co.uk, Tiscali, Yahoo, MySpace, Blinkx and Bebo were also in the pipeline, whilst a commercial iPlayer for global audiences could launch in 2008 he said.

"Wherever you are on the internet you will come across BBC programmes," said Mr Highfield.

SOURCE : BBC NEWS TECHNOLOGY

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