If you’re brave enough to try this initial release, please let me know if you encounter any bugs, as well as ideas for feature enhancements you might have.  Cheers!

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I downloaded and installed it on my phone. I was nervous, because I forgot my SD card and my internal storage was very low. Amazingly, the download was a little over 500k, and there was enough room on my phone for it to install.

I launched the browser and was pleasantly surprised. It was fast, easy to navigate, and the rendering was phenomenal. I had always thought the download speed on my phone was slow, but I think it was a problem with IE 6, since pages render very quickly on Skyfire.

The only problem I had was when the installer asked if I wanted to install a search widget onto my home screen. I approved, since it sounded handy, however, it totally mangled my theme, so I eventually switched back to my previous theme (easy fix). Beyond that, I think the browser is great!

For the average techie who wants to make the transition to Linux, I’ve found Ubuntu to be fantastic (and it’s free as in beer and speech). It’s a fairly simple and straightforward distribution, and has good community support. I’m also a big fan of Debian (at least on the server), which Ubuntu is based on. On my spare machine, I actually run Kubuntu, which is the KDE version of Ubuntu (which uses Gnome), because I find myself more comfortable with KDE.

I’ve been trying to make the switch from Windows for several years, but there are just a few killer apps that have kept me on Windows. I’ve tried Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Xandros on the desktop. I really like Fedora, but Ubuntu is gaining more and more of my attention. As the article says, it just works (at least as much as can be expected from a modern Linux distro). I’m still light years away from making the switch, and since I’m currently an ASP.NET developer, I may never make the switch (yes, I’m aware of Mono). But it’s a cool distro to play with.

I’m also fond of Win4lin, which allows you to run Windows in a virtual environment on Linux. However, the standard and home versions only run Windows 9x. The Pro version, which allows Windows 2000 and XP costs $70. Not too bad of a price, but it slightly diminishes the value of switching to Linux in the first place. CrossOver Office Standard costs only $40, but it doesn’t give me the flexibility of Win4lin for doing real testing, and I dislike dual-booting.

• Ubuntu carves niche in Linux landscape

That’s when I stumbled across TeamViewer – free, open source, based on VNC, and extremely simple to use and setup (which is nice, so you don’t have to send complex instructions to the remote user). Both clients download a small executable and run it. You are given a connection ID (which looks like an ICQ number). You give the remote user your connection ID and they click connect. Simple as that, and it works through a firewall. It’s a little slow, but it works great for a remote desktop connection through a firewall.

In the end, however, it’s probably better that Adobe purchased it than the likes of Microsoft, since Adobe at least has some support for other platforms. A purchase by Microsoft would almost guarantee the death of any sort of future for Macromedia products on Linux, and stagnating development on the Macintosh line (not to mention Microsoft’s history of “embracing and extending” products into proprietary oblivion).

Many others are worried about the future of ColdFusion and DreamWeaver with Adobe. I don’t use ColdFusion, so I don’t really care, but I think it would bolster the company’s server offerings. Although I don’t use DreamWeaver, I simply hate GoLive (which I lovingly pronounce as if it rhymed with “olive”). Merging DW into GoLive would be a mistake, as it’s probably the most robust WYSIWYG web development tool on the market. Perhaps it would allow Nvu to get more recognition and development time, though.

• Link: Adobe to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion

• Link: Novell to port Evolution to Windows
• Link: Ximian Evolution on Linux Screenshots

• Link: Mozilla Thunderbird
• Save their bandwidth: BitTorrent Download
• Vote for a my feature request: The ability to POST messages to Thunderbird folders

• Mirror List
• MOOX Optimized Builds

• Link to eBay auction