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Apple brought it’s second Apple program to Windows today. The first was iTunes. Now, we have the Safari web browser for Windows. The initial release is in beta of course.

Some good things about the Safari for Windows is that Apple has promised a speedy, speedy version. Apple says that Safari performed an iBench HTML performance suite test twice as fast as IE 7, and also pretty comparable results from the Javascript test.

Visit Apple and download Safari for Windows.

Google is rolling out Google Gears to confront a big speed bump faced by all web based applications – the ability to work without an internet connection.

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Don’t get overly excited now. Google Gears will not just automagically make your web app work offline. To take advantage of the offline features that Google Gears provides, you will have to add or change code in your web app.

There are three core modules provided by Gears:

1. LocalServer for storing and accessing application pages offline.
2. Database for storing and accessing application data on the user’s computer.
3. WorkerPool that helps in performing long-running tasks like code that will synchronize data between your server and the user’s computer.

Be sure to check out the:

• Gears Tutorial to learn the basic concepts.
• Sample Apps where you can also download the source code for the samples in a zip file from the same page.

Google Apps launched last year and is now offering a paid model as many expected.

The paid model is called Google Apps Premier Edition and includes:

• 99.9% uptime guarantee for email
• 10 GB email storage
• Ability to turn off ads
• Shared calendar resources
• Mobile Access
• Administrator control panel
• APIs to integrate with your existing infrastructure
  • Single sign-on
  • User provisioning and management
  • Support for email gateway
• Email migration tools – Limited Release
• Online support resources
• 24/7 assistance, including phone support
• 3rd party applications and services

It costs $50 per user, per year, which isn’t that outrageous. Google is offering a free trial until April 30, 2007. You can go here to sign up.

Update: Just came across this story on FoxNews.com about this.