I recently started a new job, and I’ve been pretty busy with that, which is why I haven’t blogged much lately. Not only that, but last week I went on vacation to get a little R&R. The world hasn’t been standing still while I was, though, and there’s a couple of things that are worth writing about…

Opera 9.5

The company that just doesn’t want to give up - even though they’ve been making browsers since the early days and still just have less than 2% market share - Opera Software, released version 9.5 this week. Having used the 9.5 beta for a while now, I’ve been used to all the new features for a while… All, except the new skin. Johan Borg, Consumer Engineering VP, revealed the new skin a little over two weeks ago. So far I like it, but as long as it’s not intrusive and simple, I don’t really care … The web pages is what takes up most of the screen anyway.

The feature list is worth a look. My favourites are Speed Dial and Opera Link, the latter mostly because I managed the department that is responsible for the server side part of it (Hi Anton, Esteban and Kay!). Speed Dial is a good example of a very simple feature, that gives a lot of value. I’m definetly hooked.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Not exactly sure when they did it, but Apple has released some details about the next release of OS X, Snow Leopard. They don’t list a lot of new and revolutionary improvements, but there seems to be focus on reducing footprint and improving support for 64-bit and multicore CPUs.

Great news for Microsoft Exchange users, though … This release will include out-of-the-box support in Mail, iCal and Addressbook for Microsoft Exchange 2007! Finally we can get rid of Entourage. I’m sure this is all greek to people who don’t use OS X in the Enterprise, but to us who do this is awesome.

Snow Leopard is set to be released in about a year (!), so I’m sure they’ll get time to add more features. Let’s hope it’s better received than Vista.

I’m sure a lot more stuff has happened, but that’s what I have so far after a few minutes of catching up on my feeds. ;)