OK OK, so I admit I'm already running version 1.1.3 of the iPhone firmware. While I think it's fantastic that I now get the ability to add web icons to the home screen, and that the home screen has multiple pages, I usually spend my first few minutes on a new version of the firmware looking for changes in Safari that might impact iPhone web application developers. One that I noticed right away is that Safari is no longer fooled by the 1-pixel scroll trick. In case you're not familiar with this trick, the way it worked is that under previous versions of the iPhone software, if you scrolled the web page slightly, then the address bar would hide itself. iPhone web application developers took advantage of this to make their applications look a little more 'native' by using JavaScript to simulate a user scroll of just one pixel.

Think about this: If I wait a couple weeks until I can lay hands on one in a store before ordering, a shiny new Macbook Air might arrive just in time for the iPhone SDK, giving me the perfect iPhone development machine since the iPhone GUI doesn't require the same amount of screen real estate that Interface Builder 3 requires. My usual rule of thumb is to wait 2 weeks after a Steve Jobs keynote before purchasing anything. That way I can be sure that any residual RDF effects have worn off. We'll see how well I'm holding up two weeks from now :)

I plugged in the iPhone and now I've got several episodes worth of 'The Universe' that I can watch in the palm of my hand while I'm on the train. I'm sure everybody reading this has already realized how cool this ability is, but I'm new to the whole video conversion thing. So with the addition of a fairly cheap piece of software (Popcorn) to the hardware I already own, I was able to add a lot more value to my TiVo recordings. From TiVo to iPhone took me about 40 minutes for an episode, but that's because the TiVo is wireless and the Macbook Pro is admittedly not the fastest at video encoding. Either way, if you have a TiVo and an iPhone, you need to go buy a copy of Popcorn.

A week before MacWorld, where rumors have it unveiling an anorexically thin Flash-based notebook, Apple upgraded its Mac Pro workstation with Intel's brand new 3.2GHz 45nm quad-core Harpertown Xeon chips to create its fastest Mac ever. Eight cores are now standard on the box, which comes with new ATI graphics, a PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that doubles its bandwidth and up to 4TB of internal storage. Apple says it can support eight 30-inch displays at once. It's described as ideal for film and video editors.

Who am I to break with the tradition of spinning wild flights of fancy in the spirit of Apple lovers everywhere and calling them predictions? Just about every site on the net that is even remotely related to technology is now fully caught up in the buzz and hype and has posted their predictions for what fantastically cool new gadget that Apple will produce. In my typical cynical fashion, I have been quoted as saying that Steve Jobs could walk off stage, head to the mens room, come back on stage with the um... net result ... call it an iCrap, and the audience would roar with ecstatic frenzy and worship the new gadget as though it had been brought down from the mountain by Moses himself.

Ever since 1997 when he returned to Apple, Steve Jobs has used Apple's annual Macworld convention to launch his biggest products. Last year, as the whole world now knows, the show saw the unveiling of the iPhone. Now, in an article published this month, WIRED writer Fred Vogelstein has painted a fascinating picture of the background to that historic announcement.

In this session, Chris, lead developer on the RDT (Ruby Development Tools) Project, will review all of the major features of the Aptana IDE - a free, open source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building AJAX applications.

This session will focus on our experience of developing open source-based mobile messaging and sync applications for both of these platforms. It will compare and contrast the platforms in terms of the development methods and tools required, and their strengths and weaknesses from a developer's perspective. The presentation will share lessons learned as well as tips and techniques for developing for both platforms.

Come to this talk and find out how ICEfaces delivers the goods today for development of web-based social computing applications. The open source ICEfaces project pioneered web-based real time collaboration, an essential capability for truly interactive Social Computing, and its server-centric architecture is well-suited to resource-constrained devices such as the iPhone. During this session you will see several live demos of collaborative applications running on the iPhone. You will gain an understanding of ICEfaces' server-centric architecture and understand how it is a natural way to deliver high-powered, but light-weight AJAX capabilities to your mobile applications. You will also learn how to leverage AJAX Push to make your applications truly collaborative, and prepare yourself to deliver on the promises of social computing.

Since the iPhone was first released, early adopters haven't stopped talking about what they think of the device. While the free promotion can be a great marketing tool for wireless carriers, it can be crippling if users have issues with session and network quality. Verizon's Voyager and Nokia's N810 must isolate and prioritize network problems to ensure that customer issues are addressed as quickly as possible. Ensuring that these early adopters have a positive experience is essential for having any chance at the viral adoption the iPhone experienced, along with a low customer churn rate.

This session will provide ADC member developers with the information they need to get started building native iPhone applications. This session covers the basics from how to set up your development environment to building a basic application (not just a simple hello world, but a real, functioning, practical application), to covering debugging and deployment.

Since I purchased my ADC subscription in January, it's coming up on renewal time and I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on the past year from the perspective of a newbie Cocoa programmer. When I showed up to the Leopard Tech Talk in 2007, I felt a little nervous... after all, I showed up and took notes on a Windows Vista machine ;) Everyone there, especially all of Apple's evangelists were very welcoming... they didn't even throw me out when I started asking them for comparisons between Cocoa and WCF and Core Animation and WPF. They even remained gracious when I started talking about Remoting and PNRP ;) Trust me, it takes a lot of patience to be in the same room with me when I'm in 'learning mode'.

As interest in mobile AJAX gathers in the wake of the Apple iPhone release, the ICEfaces open source project is poised to deliver mobile AJAX solutions. This presentation talks about why the server-centric nature of the ICEfaces technology provides inherent advantages in the mobile space. You will get a brief overview of the ICEfaces technology and see how it is applicable to resource-constrained mobile devices. There is also a demonstration of a mobile ICEfaces application running on both the Safari and Opera mobile browsers. Finally, you will learn about some of the emerging best practices for mobile AJAX application design, and get a glimpse of the ICEfaces roadmap for mobile AJAX.

Steve Maryka is CTO at ICEsoft Technologies, and leads the ICEfaces open source project. He has been involved in Java-based AJAX techniques since 2003 - a time before the term 'AJAX' was even coined. Prior to joining ICEsoft, Maryka was co-founder of AudeSi Technologies where he served as VP of Technology and led Java product development for Internet appliances. After AudeSi was acquired by Wind River Systems in 2000, he served as a Principle Technologist there until joining ICEsoft.

Is it easy yet to make AJAX applications that easily go offline? Are developers better off using an AJAX framework, a toolkit or just coding their own AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? How can AJAX apps be made secure? Sessions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City on March 18-20, 2008.

Since the iPhone was first released, early adopters haven't stopped talking about what they think of the device. While the free promotion can be a great marketing tool for wireless carriers, it can be crippling if users have issues with session and network quality. This is the background to the iPhone Developer Summit session 'Early Adopters: The Key to Free Publicity or the Fall of a Technology,' to be given in March by Mark McIlvane, President & COO of Velocent Systems.

The iPhone and Google Android platform are undisputedly transforming the mobile industry by bringing smartphone capabilities to the masses. They are also making for enticing new mobile platforms for developing and deploying new types of mobile apps and services for mass market users. Yet, developing for them is not that easy.

In this session, you'll see first-hand how to use stylesheets and an easy arrangement of divs and spans that will let you make your Web application just like many of the native iPhone applications that come with the phone. You'll see how to do the 'Edge to Edge' and 'Rounded Rectangle' layouts that are the hallmark of native iPhone applications. You'll also see how to use the iPhone's Safari Debug Console to get hints on how to improve your web application as well as point out errors in your HTML and JavaScript. Lastly you'll see how to go from nothing to hosting iPhone/iPod Touch test pages on your Mac laptop in 5 minutes.

The iPhone is transforming the Web as we know it and compelling every Web designer to consider handheld portable devices. This will cover various aspects of iPhone and iPod Touch development. It will include tips and tricks as well as best practices to follow. Williams will also cover how to use an integrated development environment (IDE) for building iPhone and iPod Touch applications and how to use the iUI library to easily build iPhone applications.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Could Apple iPhone become a viable portable gaming solution (like PSP or NDS) one day? If the iPhone does as expected and takes a decent chunk of the growing smartphone market then will malware writers start to give OS X some serious attention as the overall penetration of OS X skyrockets? These are among the dozens of questions to be asked and answered at the iPhone Developer Summit being held in New York City in March - an intensive and content-rich two-day program designed to satisfy the growing hunger among software developers and IT professionals for a broad spectrum of sessions informing developers what kinds of development options and opportunities the iPhone provides.

Perforce Software announced that Ixonos Plc, headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, has chosen Perforce, the Fast Software Configuration Management (SCM) System, to manage software development projects for its leading smartphone customers. Ixonos' telecommunications business unit specializes in the development, verification, maintenance and project management of software applications and information systems for licensees of the Symbian OS and smartphone manufacturers.

This session will provide ADC member developers with the information they need to get started building native iPhone applications. This session covers the basics from how to set up your development environment to building a basic application (not just a simple hello world, but a real, functioning, practical application), to covering debugging and deployment.

In this session, Chris, lead developer on the RDT (Ruby Development Tools) Project, will review all of the major features of the Aptana IDE - a free, open source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building AJAX applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code. With nearly 1 million downloads to date, the Aptana IDE is fast becoming the standard way AJAX developers build their Web 2.0 applications.

The iPhone is transforming the Web as we know it and compelling every Web designer to consider handheld portable devices. This session covers various aspects of iPhone and iPod Touch development. It will include tips and tricks as well as best practices to follow. Williams also covers how to use an integrated development environment (IDE) for building iPhone and iPod Touch applications and how to use the iUI library to easily build iPhone applications - the free, open source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused Aptana IDE.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

CNBC reported on Monday at 'Closing Bell' that Motorola maybe a logical take over target by Dell, HP, or Rim, at $21-22 per share target price. Motorola CEO Ed Zander's chair wasn't even cold yet when the company's CTO Padmasree Warrior, with the company for 23 years, suddenly decided to 'pursue other opportunities' and was out the door. Twenty-four hours later she turned up at Cisco as CTO, reporting to CEO John Chambers, who called her a 'visionary.' Obviously the move has been in the works for a while. The Wall Street Journal says she's into 'seamless mobility,' where multiple devices share the same video, voice and data. It jibes with Cisco's vision.

According to SMobile Systems, the launch of Google Phone platform will be among the most positive transformational moments in mobile communications history by further merging computers with mobile devices. But while millions of people will now be able to 'compute on the run,' those same consumers will be a high-value target for hackers, spammers and others intent on hacking the new phones.

Motorola CEO Ed Zander's chair wasn't even cold yet when the company's CTO Padmasree Warrior, with the company for 23 years, suddenly decided to 'pursue other opportunities' and was out the door. Twenty-four hours later she turned up at Cisco as CTO, reporting to CEO John Chambers, who called her a 'visionary.' Obviously the move has been in the works for a while. The Wall Street Journal says she's into 'seamless mobility,' where multiple devices share the same video, voice and data. It jibes with Cisco's vision.

SAP, in a Salesforce-beware move, has Web 2.0'd its next-generation CRM 2007 kit so it'll work on Apple iPhones and load business contacts, info on prospects and account data. It told Reuters, which was in Boston for the unveiling, that it was responding to demand and that businesspeople prefer the iPhone to the Blackberry, Treo or Microsoft-based devices. The widgetry, which uses a drag-and-drop interface adapted from Google's iGoogle, is due out later this month. SAP will do the hosting. CRM 2007 also runs on more conventional devices like PCs.

Recently infused with strong investments from Intel and Deutsche Telekom, JAJAH today released version 2.0 of its calling application for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. In addition to saving on international calls, users will have an iPhone style dial pad, iPhone address book and full calling functionally with the device, say company co-founders Daniel Mattes and Roman Scharf.

db4objects announced that db4o runs seamlessly on the Android platform, a software stack for mobile devices introduced recently by the Google-backed Open Handset Alliance. The Android stack comes complete with application framework, development environment, tools, debuggers and vital applications for developers to leverage and create applications.

Google has announced the release of a new iPhone application that integrates its multiple services into a single interface, making it easy for iPhone users to find, use and switch between Google search, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, and more. To accomplish this, Google is taking advantage of browser technologies (like AJAX) that made Gmail and Google Maps possible on the desktop.

Since Ed Zander led Sun into the valley of the shadow of death back, what? over five years ago now, it has never recovered. And there's a good chance the same thing may happen to Motorola. With a year left to run on his contract, Zander quit yesterday and clearly not a moment too soon given the events of the last year or so. There are people who would have gladly ridden him out of town on a rail months ago and it's assumed he's resigning now to avoid getting fired. Zander, whose telecom experience consisted of answering the phone, was brought in four years ago to narrow the lead in phones between a first-place Nokia and a second-place Motorola. Motorola is now in third place, losing ground to both Nokia and Samsung, its market share sheered from 20.7% a year ago to 13.1% now.

VS 2008 can also be used to build AJAX-based web apps. It can be used to target multiple versions of software like existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 programs and continue to deploy them on .NET 2.0 machines. .NET Framework 3.5 supports Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It can handle SOA, Web 2.0 and SaaS applications.

The iPhone Dev community, which operates a website dedicated to 'finding additional uses for the iPhone by (legitimately) enabling its potential capabilities,' is considering releasing the source code to the AnySIM iPhone unlocking solution. The project is a community effort, and as such has no official 'leader' but all the core members of the iPhone Dev team are reportedly 'okay' with the idea of open-sourcing AnySIM.

Mitch Randall, the company's founder and Chief Technology Officer, adds that 'With the recent introduction of our first products, we made a step towards eliminating the need for consumers to regularly lug around multiple bulky chargers, adapters and cords for every battery-powered mobile device they carry, or to struggle with congested outlets and power strips.' Randall advises that 'our products offer true environmental benefits. By eliminating the need for each device to use its own wall plug, our products reduce standby electricity drain when devices are not actually plugged in. Our products further minimize the need to dispose of used AC adapters and chargers when consumers upgrade to newer models of mobile devices, as they regularly do.'

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

According to Microsoft's Mac Mojo blog this week, Office 2008 when released will allow PowerPoint presentations to be converted into photos, which in turn can then be transferred to an iPod through Apple's iTunes software. Microsoft plans to ship the Mac version of its new Office productivity suite on January 15, 2008.

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.