Only the other week Google moved v2 of their Chrome web browser from development to a public release and are steaming ahead with v3. On top of this, Opera released a public preview of v10, across all platforms, with us pleased with the quality of the browser. With Internet Explorer 8 released this year, and Firefox 3.5 expected by the end of Summer, 2009 is becoming a year of the web browser. It's such a competitive market. That's only a good thing for us consumers.

Apple Safari 4 for Windows was released this week at the WWDC, at the same time as the Mac version. Apple claim this is the 'worlds fastest web browser' and it's certainly quick. It supports the latest web standards (including HTML 5), is the first public release final version to pass the ACID3 test and includes a new faster Javascript engine.

Apple Safari 4 for Windows link.

Most of us are giving remote server space as part of our broadband connection, but few of us know how to make use of this free space. One of the wisest ideas would be to use it to store our most important documents, files and to backup our data online. The thought of using an FTP client puts a lot of people off, even though using a remote server is much like plugging a USB drive in to your computer.

ExpanDrive for Mac 2.0.2 is a simple tool that enables you to use a server from within your standard Finder window. You connect to the server and that opens within the Finder window, where you can simply copy files to and from the server, as if it was just a standard USB flash drive.

ExpanDrive link.

You know the scenario, you've tasked someone in the office to handle some work on your behalf, you show them the ropes and ask if they understand. You head out on the road with your laptop and you receive an email saying that they're confused and need your help. Trying to talk them through the details, over the phone, will be impossible and will cost you a fortune on your mobile. Worse, you have a Mac so there's no easy way of connecting to their computer and showing them how to perform the task.

CrossLoop for Mac 1.1 is brand new technology that enables a Mac user to connect to another Mac or PC, across the Internet and control that computer. This means you could be away with your Mac laptop in another territory, log in to their computer and show them how to perform the task on their computer. They can simply follow the mouse, under your control. Of course, CrossLoop enables you to login and control any computer (with end-user authorisation), so you could even use the software to show other users how to perform tasks or use it to fix their computer, for a fee.

CrossLoop for Mac link.

I've asked around, but no-one can give me a clear idea on how you successfully manage to follow more than 300 people through Twitter. Surely you must spend your day sorting the wheat from the chaff (and there's a lot of chaff), just to be able to chat and respond to your friends or colleagues? Still, I suppose if you look like you are following 300 people, it gives the impression you're immensely popular. There must be a better way of managing your incoming and outgoing tweets.

The Nambu Network 1.1.12 is a free tool for your Mac that enables you to follow people from multiple social networking sites, including Twitter and Friendfeed. Indeed, these are the primary two, at the moment. Still, it's well designed and enables you to group together key friends, see who's following you and much more. We're still not clear why it wasn't created in Adobe Air, as many other similar apps are and this enables cross-platform development.

Nambu link.

There are few options for retailers to accept transactions over the Internet. Of course, you can sign up to merchant services through your local bank, then accept credit cards. However, if you are new to the market with no history, your bank may be reluctant to give you merchant services or charge you a restrictive rate, to cover their chargeback costs. Another option is PayPal and anyone can use this service and accept PayPal payments on their website. Problem is that if you receive a lot of PayPal orders, then you don't really want to be logging in to a web browser to access your account.

GaragePay 1.5 is a Mac-based commercial application that enables you to manage your PayPal transactions in a desktop tool - much like an email client. Simply download your PayPal transactions, run a search, print transaction info, refund money and much more.

GaragePay link.

We're told to regularly backup our most important data. In the past, I was always guilty of backing up everything but my most important commercial fonts. However, these are essential for putting together buttons for websites, images for disc interfaces and, of course, for creating commercial literature using specified fonts. Getting hold of the lost fonts is even more problematic. Can you remember the fonts you used and owned? Can you remember where you got hold of those fonts?

Fontcase 1.1 is a commercial font manager for the Mac that enables you to see all your installed fonts within one application. You can quickly compare fonts, grab a symbol from a font collection and much more. However, you can do so much more. For example, using Bonjour, you can share your font collection with other users, so other users within your company could borrow or use fonts from a central repository, rather than have them installed on every machine.

Fontcase link.

In fairness, news and RSS readers have never caught on for us. Personally, I don't see the point. They only give you a brief description of the news story and you have to get your browser out anyhow, to see the rest of the story. It's just as easy to visit the source website in the first place. However, if you're one of those people who likes to read the same news from various sources, then you may not have the time to skim through each site looking for updated information. For this reason, this is why some people prefer to use a news reader.

Times 1.1.1 is a commercial news and RSS reader for the Mac that does news in a different manner. It extracts headlines from various sources and uses a newspaper-layout style to show the news in the application. As you can imagine from a Mac application, it's well designed and easy-to-use, too.

Times link.

With the launch of the new 3rd generation Apple Shuffle, yesterday morning, one of the important system specifications was the inclusion of Apple iTunes 8.1. The new version of media management application has been made available and you can download immediately. The biggest disappointment with the previous iTunes (8.0) was that it can be quite bloated, take a while to open and is less respsonsive than it should be, particularly for Windows users. There are times when we double-click on the iTunes icon on our desktop for it to open a minute later.

Apple iTunes 8.1 is now available and this is a fairly major upgrade. The application has received a speed boost, so it's more responsive than before. New features include support for the 3rd generation Shuffle, as well Genius support for your TV and movies, so you can find similar programmes on the iTunes Store.

Apple iTunes 8.1 link.

Everyone writes note and stores them differently. Each time I head over to London, on business, I tend to sit there for a couple of hours and write notes about the forthcoming meeting, more as a reminder to what needs to be discussed. At the meeting, I tend to write more notes. The other day I was looking back through my old notepad and realised I'd lost track of the notes that I'd written back in 2007 and many of the 'action points' hadn't ever been actioned, for various reasons.

Tree 1.3.1 is a commercial tool for the Mac that enables you to store your notes electronically, using a parent/child approach. Think of a topic, then add various notes within this topic. Move to another and add more child sub-topics. If your notes become extensive, you can simply close the idea tree to get an overview of your thoughts. It's a nice interesting application, but rather expensive - it's $40!

Tree link.

We'll be honest and tell you that we're big fans of Adobe's Fireworks. Indeed, I've been using the application from back in the late 90s and it has proved to be one of the best commercial image editors for producing graphics for the web. Problem is, it's expensive. I daren't look back and figure how much it's cost us in upgrades over the last few years. Advantage is though, we know this program inside out. However, we only use the app to edit images and produce basic content for our site.

Pixelmator 1.4 is a Mac-specific commercial image editor that's designed to get most from your installed graphic card. It's promoted as the world's first GPU-enhanced image editor, which is ideal when you have multiple large images open at the same time. It has all the usual image editing tools you'd expect to find and much more. You'll see Mac-specific features such as Automator support, so you can create automated action, such as quickly resizing images to a specific size.

Pixelmator link.