The world as frankps sees it!
Posts tagged Windows
Mac and UMTS/HSDPA
5Do really want to get mobile with your Mac? Well, appearently it isn’t that easy.
I have bought the first UMTS-card for the office to my boss, and he is a Windows user. He got a small Thinkpad X60 (12″ laptop), and travels to and from work with train. The idea was to buy an UMTS card so that he could work on his daily travels, and it that way spend a little bit less time in the office. Something that has worked out quite nicely for him. He can mount his homearea with Cisco VPN, and in that was also access his user id to start Lotus Notes.
Well, users that are happy with a solution tend to advertise it. So yesterday one of my professor came in and asked for the same solution for his MacBook Pro. My answer was I guess you can have it, but let me try first cause I have never used a Mac with an UMTS card. Our provider, Netcom, has bought licenses for the application launch2net, so it was just for me to call them and get the license code. The application was easy to set up and use, but … under Windows I had no problems using Cisco VPN to access my files on homearea. Cisco VPN for some reason refuses to start on the Mac when using launch2net! And, I was not alone to run in to that problem. Just do a quick search for it, and you will several people complaining in various blogs and forums.
NovaMedia, the company behind launch2net, advertise for VPN Tracker on their pages. First of all, I didn’t get around to test that application as it is high priced (79 €) and that we have site license for Cisco VPN. If not something else, a half decent solution would be using SFTP to the homearea instead with Fugu or Cyberduck.
The solution for launch2net to work with Cisco VPN seems to be to force the PPP connection to always use an MTU of 1356, something that must be changed through Terminal and possibly as a script that runs each time you start launch2net. Not pretty, and not something for the common user. I guess I will try next week and see if I can get it working then.
A word or two to NovaMedia is in it’s place! If you want to target business users with your product, get your product working with the Cisco VPN client. It is the standard itself. I had heard of VPN Tracker, but I have never heard of any companies using it!
Safari for Windows XP and Vista
0At the WWDC Apple today released released Safari for Windows XP and Vista in it’s first public beta, and I just had to try it. After having installed on my Vista machine, I installed some of the plugins reported to work with the browser. Let us sum it up like this, of course I didn’t install JAVA and Real Player plugins!
I noted the speed results that Steve Jobs presented at the developer conference. They were under XP, and I must say that Safari is everything but fast under Vista. It was even slugish on MacOS X 10.4. After having run it for two hours, I find it to be quite so unstable in it’s current state. I have experienced several crashes, and found a few pages that don’t work well, one is for instance Skype. Clicking the Bookmarks button made the browser crash. Well, I guess that’s why Apple is calling it a beta. But what I found great was that Safari 3.o worked well with my WordPress installation, as it now supports visual posting.
I guess Apple will succeed with the browser. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, of course, dominates the Web browser market, although Mozilla Firefox has made significant headway in recent years. Apple will with this move get quite a bit higher market share then their 5 % today for the Safari. But I guess that Microsoft will notice little to that. Internet Explorer 7 is, in the way it is integrated in Vista, the most secure browser for Windows. For me it is probably Firefox that will go out, it is to bloated. But I am most concerned for the Opera browser on the desktop. Will there be a market for the desktop version of the browser when Safari for Windows hits 3.0 (and stable)? I sadly doubt it, and I am pretty sure that Opera Software ASA is the big looser in the browser war. Apple has something that Opera doesn’t have, other cool applications in iTunes and QuickTime, but more importantly the iPods and Apple TV.
