Heading to business school soon

As of august I will be leaving my position as director at my current employer and will be heading to business school. I got admitted to Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School for a full-time international MBA program. Although I will miss Slovakia a bit I am really looking forward to the new environment and all the new challenges I will face there. And tbh it's not about "jump starting my career" or "taking my career to another level" it's about doing something I am really passionate about and changing to a really international environment. So I am resurrecting this blog and am going to use it to post about my experience there and hopefully talk about stuff I learn. Btw I am starting on September 1st, 2010 in Leuven, Belgium.

RIM shows it means business

In the past few days 2 interesting bits of information were released by RIM and Google.

• Google released the Google Apps connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server
• RIM released the Gmail enhanced plugin for Blackberry Internet Service

Now this would normally be cool but well nothing special. But in the past weeks many have wondered whether RIM is capable of keeping up with the competition, especially the iPhone. For me these releases are signs that RIM acknowledges the shortcomings of it’s current platform and is not hiding it’s head in the sand. The fact that Google has released it’s connector for the Blackberry Enterprise Server means that there are enough installations of BES on top of Google Apps already that this combo needs to be taken seriously. The company I work for does in fact run on Google Apps so I am very happy about both of these releases.

One big advantage that RIM has in the fight vs the iPhone and other competitors is it’s push infrastructure. Not only is it quite unique even today but also it’s infrastructure is spread well and built up for the future. The most important thing now for RIM is to consider this not as a locked up proprietary service but to open it up to developers to build great apps on. Although the Blackberry SDK is already out there for some time many argue it is yet to be powerful enough to build serious apps on. The success or failure of the Blackberry platform depends on this as in regards to hardware – the berries themselves were always great devices.

And this brings me to my last point. RIM started a developer blog recently (11/08/2009) which is again an indication of where they are heading. Since it’s start it had 10 post in 10 days each rich with detailed information for developers. These guys mean business.

The most current post is about the new Blackberry 5.0 SDK beta that is now available to developers. If you read through the feature list the key from my perspective is

Push API

(net.rim.blackberry.api.push.*)

Makes using Push APIs even easier and more powerful for developers.

This is exactly what I meant earlier. The best move for RIM now is to empower it’s developer community with the access to the unique features of it’s platform. Apple only recently released it’s push functionality and compared to RIM it has still a long way to go.

In the past weeks I have been considering getting an iPhone 3GS to supplement my Blackberry Bold because I felt the Blackberry platform stagnating. Not anymore. I have high hopes for the Blackberry and I also wish the rumors about the browser upgrades are true. Full Flash/Silverlight capabilities on the Blackberry? iPhone beware!

Testing the new WordPress for Blackberry app

I am writting this post on my Blackberry Bold via the WordPress app for Blackberry (latest beta build). It’s easy to use, very fast and gets the job done. Not sure how the formatting will work and I got no spell-check but anyway…

…Clicking the publish button…

Got the new MacBook Pro

I couldn’t resist and upgraded to the new MacBook Pro (2,66 Ghz, 4GB RAM, NVIDIA 9600GT, built in battery) from my early 2008 MacBook Pro (not unibody). Not that I needed to but after changing jobs and having some tough times in the new one I figured I deserved a present for myself. Anyway the machine is unbelievable – powerful, long lasting battery and a beautiful screen – I like glossy. I know some people hate glossy and actually Apple in yesterday started again to offer the matte screen (50$) but I really like the vibrant feeling the glossy display delivers. Also I installed the Windows 7 RC build on a 50 GB partition and was testing it. Only issue I ran into was that I couldn’t use my headset mic in games. In the Windows desktop it works fine but once I enter the game the mic just doesn’t hear me… Anyway to anyone wondering whether the new MacBook Pros are worth the money – as far as I am concerned – no doubt about it.

Firefox vs Safari

I am a very big fan of Mozilla’s open source browser Firefox. As I mentioned in previous posts and as I maintain on the about page Firefox has been my constant companion and main browser like forever. It has served me well with it’s great addons, speed and great inline search. With it’s latest iteration (3.0) Mozilla introduced some great features – the Awesome Bar, smart bookmarks and the amazing speed enhancements that solved most of the issues I had with version 2. As I am rather new to the Mac (4 Month) I didn’t think I would ever touch Safari – I obviously didn’t use it on Windows although I had it installed. It does not have the extensibility of Firefox and you need to hold down the command key to open a link in a new tab and not in a new browser window (!!). So when I heard Leo Laporte talk about using it himself on the Mac as his main browser I wondered what in the world would make anyone use it? In fact Leo uses the open source browser Webkit that is the core of Apples Safari and it’s single most important feature was supposedly performance. This brought me to consider Safari/Webkit again as I do occasionally experience performance problems with Firefox 3 – it still does sometime eat a lot of memory, slows down or die on me. So recently I started regularly downloading the Webkit nightly builds and using them on my MacBook Pro in tandem with Firefox and I installed the Windows version of Safari on my Thinkpad at work.

On the Mac

With the MacBook Pro the difference in performance is noticeable but not to a degree that would make me completely abandon Firefox. The thing is – Firefox usability features save a lot of time and the addons add functionality that is not available in Webkit/Safari. So although Webkit is generally faster when rendering Javascript heavy applications like Gmail, Firefox compensates by it’s features. I will use both for the foreseeable future on my Mac and I can recommend Safari as a decent main browser to anyone in need of a simple browser.

On the PC

At work I found one massive advantage to Safari as a second browser. Similarly to the Mac experience it is indeed faster then Firefox and I make heavy use of that on the Thinkpad. The thing is that I use a lot of corporate javascript based apps at work and their performance in Safari is astounding. No waiting, just click, click, click and go. I hate waiting for forms to validate or content loading CMS systems and with Safari my pain has been eased. I still use Firefox as the main browser but Safari on Windows has become a part of my daily work computing.

Thoughts

1. Yes I know – we got Google Chrome now – also based on Webkit, lightning fast and also PC only and unstable. Until it’s reliability is on the level of Webkits nightly builds – no thanks.
2. Firefox also has an early 3.1 b1(and 2 actually) build that Mozilla calls Minefield. It has a greatly improved really fast javascript engine so it’s performance exceeds that of Webkit according to benchmarks. Unfortunately it isn’t reliable yet for everyday use and therefore it’s a no-no for me in the same way as Chrome

If you are on a Mac and for some reason want to skip Firefox – Safari is a great browser. Do not fear using it – I don’t.