Software Made Simple

My 2-year subscription ended with Verizon in April, so I’ve been looking around to see if I should consider switching carriers.  We’ve had Verizon Wireless for many years now and have been pretty happy with them (especially the coverage, which is really quite good).

I was never in the market for an iPhone (or any smartphone, really), since I just don’t rely on my phone as much as others do.  However, I was tempted by the Palm Treo 680 deal at AT&T, where you essentially get it for $100 after rebates.  But the extra data plans made the monthly cost more than I wanted.

In the end, I ended up sticking with Verizon.  I renewed for another 2 years and got a new phone: the Samsung SCH-u740 (in black).  It’s a pretty neat EVDO phone that opens like a flip phone but can also open sideways, which I like for using the Mobile Web service, which is fast when using EVDO.  It’s also very thin and light.  It has bluetooth, but it cannot be used to sync with a Mac.  I haven’t yet tried to see if I can get it to sync to Windows.  Strangely, the battery died on me after very little use (it had been fully charged), so I need to find out if I left it on or did something wrong.

Of course, I did go to the AT&T store to check out the iPhone, though.  It was much smaller than I expected based on the pictures I’ve seen.  And it was amazingly easy to use.  So easy to use that my 5-year old daughter was able to use to it take pictures, play music and make a call without any assistance from me.  She certainly couldn’t do that with my new phone.  But all those cool features were not worth the cost to me.

The browser wars are alive and well, at least on OS X. I don’t think there’s much of a war on Windows or Linux. With Windows, it’s really between Internet Explorer and Firefox with a little Opera mixed in. I doubt Safari will make much inroads beyond Mac users that also use Windows. On Linux, it’s really just Firefox, but I suppose Opera is another alternative.But, on Mac OS X there’s a whole bunch of browsers to choose from.

Safari 3.0.2

With the 3.0 beta, Apple is hoping to increase Safari market share even more. I have to say, there seem to be very few features to warrant an entirely new version, however. And it certainly doesn’t seem any faster to me than any other browser.Safari has been my main browser for a long time, the main reason being that I liked its built-in RSS reader.

OmniWeb 5.54

I first bought OmniWeb back in 2001 when it was the only good browser for OS X. Now there are plenty of others but I find myself using OmniWeb a lot. It has some great features and is really fast. I really like the tabs on the side and the ability to set site-specific properties like font size (for those sites that start with a too-small font). It is based on a later WebKit engine than Safari 2 uses, but an older one than Safari 3 uses. All in all it is a great OS X browser.A “Sneaky Peak” peak of OmniWeb 5.6 just came out, which works better with quite a few more sites (including editing WordPress blogs).

Camino 1.5

I never really used this much until the recent 1.5 update. Now it has earned a place on my dock. Since it uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, I pretty much am using it now in place of Firefox for sites that don’t render properly with WebKit, such as Google Apps and WordPress.

Firefox 2.0.0.4

I use this almost exclusively on Windows, and I was using it a bit on OS X until Camino 1.5 was released. Now I hardly ever start it. Firefox is great if you’re into all its plugins, but I’m not so it isn’t.

Shiira 2.1

I keep this around just for fun. The 1.2 version wasn’t bad, the the 2.0 version is a buggy, incomplete mess. I just noticed that 2.1 was released, so I might give that a try.

Opera 9.21

Seems like a nice, fast browser, but I really have no reason to use it over any other browser. I haven’t found any site that doesn’t work with either WebKit/Gecko so it sits unused for me.

So, who wins?

As I mentioned above, the main reason I had been sticking with Safari all this time is because of the RSS reader. Well, I’m sticking with Safari no more. I recently moved all my RSS feeds over to Google Reader. Now I can access my feeds quickly and easily from any browser.And with this change I have now made OmniWeb my default browser. On my dock are now just two browsers: OmniWeb and Camino. Of course, I’m keeping the others around, just so I can keep up on things!