This week I discovered a fantastic Firefox plug-in called MeeTimer by Andy Mitchell, which actually helps me be more productive. Well.. I say this week, I have actually had it installed for a while, but have just found the motivation to configure and use it.

How it works is simple, it tracks the amount of time that you spend on individual websites, and allows you to group them by category. So, the company intranet may be classed as work, whereas hours whittled away on Facebook fall under the category of procrastination. All of this data is captured, and is available for your scrutiny. I’m also told that the next version will have lots of new features for slicing and dicing this data - including a quick slick Flex-based dashboard for visually exploring your data.

In addition to simple tracking, MeeTimer takes a pro-active role in making you productive, blacking out pages and adding pop-up’s to links - “Warning! You have already spent 4.4% of your working week poking your friend’s on Facebook, perhaps you should be working?”.

Its really quite cool, and its active deterrents really set it apart from other pieces of software which attempt to track the time spent in-front of the web browser.

For me I think that was the key to its usefulness, as it is far too easy to get carried away either on the likes of Facebook or even on geeky sites such as Ajaxian, which I often visit to keep up with the latest goings on in the JavaScript world. This is definitely a plug in which I will be keeping installed as I attempt to organize my life!

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Some interesting news at the WWDC today - Apple is releasing Safari 3 for Windows XP/Vista, alongside OS X. In fact, you can now download a public beta.

What does this mean? In my opinion this changes everything.

For many years, web developers have focused on supporting a wide variety of browsers, but in practice, this has often been interpreted as supporting Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Firefox. Very few developers go out of the way to support Safari, for the simple fact that it has been limited to the Mac OS platform and it is used by likely only around 3-4% of user’s, however this figure has been growing quite significantly in the past year. (Opera is another story, it accounts for around 0.2% of users and this never seems to change! Opera users also seem used to switching browsers in the event a site doens’t work for them!).

Now, Safari has a chance to get into the mainstream, and this will force developers to pay attention to it. With Mac gaining market share, there was some additional pressure to support Safari, but now that it is becoming cross-platform, this becomes essential.

It also makes it easier for developers - the three major browser rendering engines; Trident (IE), Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari) are now easily available on Windows and Mac OS, leaving no excuse for lack of testing or consideration.

Do I see Safari gaining market share? It is a difficult one to judge - on one hand Firefox has been around for ages, and still see’s only 15-20% usage on your average non-geek commercial website, on the other, Apple have twice as many people downloading iTunes downloads than Firefox on Windows - if they can use this as a launching platform then perhaps there is hope.

If nothing else, it will serve to give Microsoft and the Mozilla platform an incentive to focus on supporting web standards, alleviating any kind of development hell that may await; whilst at the same time, increasing developer awareness and ushering in a compatible, cross-platform, web, which can be enjoyed by anyone - wether the computer be white, brushed metal or beige!

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I saw this article on Yahoo - Microsoft Admits Internet Explorer Mistakes - and it has prompted me to write this post… plus it was getting kinda quiet around here!Aside from mentioning how Internet Explorer 7 will embrace standards and play nice(er), Bill Gates comes out with a lovely quote about how Microsoft is “immersed in the browser as a platform”. This kind of annoyed me slightly because IE7 is still very much a component of Windows rather than a browser in its own right.Yes, it is a separate download, but there are still restrictions on who can run it. My pet peeve is that you need SP2 installed, mainly because it ties in with all the additional security features. For home users its not so big an issue, however for corporate users it is a major annoyance.SP2 introduced lots of features which made it unpopular as a corporate desktop, most notably restrictions on numbers of connections and the new security centre - which does not play nice with some of the computer management/audit packages out there. As a result, a lot of the larger companies have resisted the upgrade. We certainly are still on SP1, as initial upgrades to SP2 had to be rolled back due to its catastrophic effects. For employee’s to install it on a standard build, it becomes a sackable offense.This of couse makes it extremely frustrating from a Web developers perspective as it restricts the testing we can do with this new iteration of the browser. We took the step of setting up a separate testbed, but I’m sure quite a few companies wouldn’t bother. Wether they are caught pants down come release day or not, Microsoft isn’t doing much to help the developer in this area, so far refusing to offer stand-alone versions for earlier versions of XP or Windows 2000.If anyone from Microsoft is reading, you would make a load of corporate Web developers really happy if you released a stand-alone version! (more…)