iPhone Developer Summit (www.iphonedevsummit.com) announced today Kevin Hoffman as the Tech Chair of the Conference. The letter from the Tech Chair at the conference Website contained the following message: What's the impact of the iPhone going to be on the delivery of rich content to mobile users? How does Google's new Android differ from the iPhone SDK and iPhone Safari development? When should you use the iPhone SDK versus developing web applications?

There's a couple of things that I like about his sample, and a couple of things that worry me. First, I like the idea that there's an Ajax controller. I hope in the final bits it's simply called Controller and they don't make you distinguish between an Ajax controller and a regular controller - you should be able to pick and choose the functionality you want, and, well, quite frankly, I'm just sick and tired of seeing the word Ajax embedded in code. The Ajax controller should give you, as he demonstrates, the ability to render small bits of HTML. What I dislike about the Ajax nomenclature is that this functionality is useful even outside the realm of Ajax rendering and I think it should be included in the default controller.

Scott Bourne announced the top ten accessories that will make every iPhone owner happy this Holiday. With 1.4 million iPhones out there in the wild, chances are you know someone who owns an iPhone. If that someone is on your holiday gift list, look at this compilation of great gift ideas ranging from $2.95 to $349.95

By 2011 over 16% of worldwide active e-mail mailboxes will be accessed with a wireless push e-mail solution. That, according to a report just out by The Radicati Group - 'Wireless E-mail Market, 2007-2011' - will be the future of the technology made famous by Blackberry. Right now, mind you, the percentage of worldwide active e-mail mailboxes accessed by wireless push e-mail is just 1%.

Burst.com, the company that has for 2 years alleged that Apple's iTunes Music Store, iTunes software, the iPod devices, and Apple's QuickTime Streaming products infringe various of its U.S. Patents, this week settled with Apple in return for a one-time payment of $10M cash, giving Apple a patent license providing the right to use Burst's intellectual property in its own technology and products, without further consideration.

Keynote Competitive Research announced Europe's first performance index for the mobile Web. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index is a weekly performance ranking of 10 popular European mobile sites compiled from more than 26,000 measurements taken on multiple carriers from different geographical locations. Keynote recently announced a U.S. mobile index. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index provides insight into the overall performance and availability of popular mobile sites and can be used by customers to benchmark their mobile site performance against the biggest names in the industry.

Looks like Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz should have waited for his boys to give Google's Android spec the once over before endorsing the thing last week expecting Java to get a 'massive endorsement' out of it. Oh, Java gets a 'massive endorsement' all right; it's just not standard off-the-shelf Java. Android calls for a special Google Java that now has Sun folk nibbling their fingernails and worrying out loud to the press about 'write once, run anywhere' Java ME/MIDP fragmenting.

Google, as promised, put the Android SDK out in early access - along with a $10 million pot for the best apps written for its open Android mobile platform by third-party developers. It said the platform would be open and it's going about proving it. It also needs the buzz - and a killer mobile app - for Android to hit a homerun. The first $5 million will be paid out in $25,000 prizes for the continued development of the 50 most promising entries submitted between January 2 and March 3 2008 to the Android Developer Challenge I.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

VMware has announced VMware Fusion 1.1, a new update to its VMware Fusion desktop virtualization software for Intel-based Macs. VMware Fusion allows Mac users to run Mac OS X, Windows and other PC-based applications on the same Mac. VMware Fusion 1.1 is a free update that is immediately available for all VMware Fusion 1.0 customers.

That leaves Java developers in a bad position. Java developers love the clean Unix-based Mac OS X environment for development. But we have been suffering with an unstable developer-only d ont-run-this-in-productio n release of Java 6 for the past year. Mac OS X is now the getto for Java 6. I love Apple and Java. I wish Sun would do more to get Java on iPhone and Java 6 on Mac OS X.

I want to counter a lot of the press and blog comments stating that the release of the SDK is a reversal or some kind of about face. If anybody had done their homework, they would know that Steve Jobs himself stated that he wanted to create an environment that supported native 3rd party app development, but that they didn't have it 'right' just yet, and that he wanted people to be patient.

Sun's Terrence Barr, technical evangelist for the Java mobile and embedded community, believes Apple's plans to release an SDK for iPhone in early 2008 may result in the open-source phoneME version of Java ME winding up on iPhone.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

So I went to go re-watch Scott Guthrie's video illustrating the new upcoming MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework for ASP.NET when I noticed that the content is in Silverlight. That's fine, MS is trying so hard to push Silverlight as the answer to the world's problems that it's probably a requirement that all new content from MS come out as Silverlight content. Whatever, I can cope.... normally. However... today I couldn't see the content. Why? Because I got a message that looks like this:

This session will explore how to leverage the speed and stability of OS X and the workhorse productivity of Windows in an enterprise production environment, and how to bring both to your team via virtualization. Topics of discussion include: 1) Level of integration between Windows and OS X 2) Deployment and management best practices 3) Hardware & recommended configurations 4) Common use cases

MIR3 has announced the availability of an enterprise notification and command interface for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch (dubbed 'iTouch' by the media) mobile communications platform. These full-featured Web-based management applications from MIR3 run under Apple's mobile Safari browser to enable corporate executives and IT administrators to initiate emergency notifications and remotely manage enterprise notification systems and response teams using Apple iPhone or iTouch mobile devices.

My own personal install of Leopard seems to be having periodic trouble completing a shutdown on the 17' MBP. Annoying? Yes. Worthy of posting something inflammatory such as 'wrong with Leopard's spots'? Doubtful. So, in looking at eWeek's Microsoft Watch's latest article, I leave you with this parting thought: If it walks like a shill, acts like a shill, and smells like a shill....

So it seems as though a few minutes after I wrote this blog entry, Google put forth the announcement about Android, a project named after the company they purchased a while back. Google is essentially spearheading an open source project that is an open SDK for mobile devices that runs on a variant of Linux optimized for mobile devices. This could be good or bad for them - they'll need a critical mass of partners who adopt this platform to provide a large enough ecosystem to attract developers. Devs are freaking busy these days, and none of us have time to learn yet another SDK without some reasonable assurance that someone will actually use the software we're building.

'Our new search capabilities for the iPhone are relevant enhancements that give consumers the full power of mobility and immediate access to REALTOR.com in a manner that fits naturally into their everyday lifestyle,' said DeTuno, senior vice president, product management for REALTOR.com as it was announced that iPhone users from today have instant access to all details, including photos and contact information for the listing agent, with REALTOR.com for the iPhone.

Google made its first public move today to put its brand on the mobile sector, announcing an Open Handset Alliance of 33 partner companies committed to advancing an open source platform called Android. Google's partners, gathered apparently over the last year, include T-Mobile, Motorola, Sprint Nextel, China Mobile, KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Telecom Italia, eBay and Telefonica as well as HTC, Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, TI and Wind River. Obviously Apple, Microsoft and Nokia aren't members.

Do I care just because I am a Google fanboy? Not exactly, although that does amp up my excitement. With an open platform for development for mobiles, plus Google's conquest of Jaiku for its mobile/presence capabilities - I am a big fan of Jyri Engestrom, the founder of Jaiku, a smart and innovative person devoted to the Net's common good - this could be the disruption that turns mobile phones from annoying bricks of bad reception into a platform for apps that can assume constant presence and that know where we are and who our friends are. It could make FaceBook look like CompuServ.

The AppSnapp 'jailbreak' application, released web-wide on Sunday, seems to have struck a chord with iPhone and iPod Touch owners. Claiming 'No hacking required,' the AppSnapp team developed a one-click method, which they cheekily claim also fixes Apple's TIFF bug, 'making your device MORE secure than it was without AppSnapp!'

Google is supposed to be inching closer to unveiling its fabled 'Gphone,' according to the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. The paper says that in the next couple of weeks Google should trot out 'advanced software and services that would allow handset markers to bring Google-powered phone to market by the middle of next year.' Google is supposed to want to deliver stuff like Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and its almighty search to handsets and Gphone's Linux-based widgetry would be completely open to rally third-party developers to write additional - albeit potentially insecure and hackable - services. Ads would follow. The Journal says Google is chasing deals with T-Mobile USA, 3 UK and Orange SA.

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

Readers of TIME's November 5 edition, which will be on on US newsstands tomorrow November 2, will find that the iPhone is TIME Magazine's Invention of the Year 2007. Among the reasons cited are 'It's touchy-feely' and 'It will make other phones better.' The award also recognizes that the iPhone is not just a phone but a platform.

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible for laying out a collection of subviews. You can either manually create the subview collection, or you can set the content array of the NSCollectionView. This is a really powerful option because if you can set the content array, you can also bind it. For this demo, I've bound the content array of the NSCollectionView to an array controller. If you follow along (or if you cheat and just download the code), you'll notice that the NSCollectionView subviews automatically request Core Animation layers. This means that, by default, new items fade in as they are added, but you can change that transition using the animations tab of the inspector.

The first Rich FAQ we are presenting is the long overdue Mobile Ajax FAQ and was created by Ajit Jaokar, Rocco Georgi and Bryan Rieger. We welcome comments and feedback. AJAX is a browser technology that involves the use of existing Web standards and technologies (XML/XHTML, DOM, CSS, JavaScript, XHR - XMLHttpRequest) to create more responsive Web applications that reduce bandwidth usage by avoiding full page refreshes and providing a more 'desktop application-like' user experience. The term AJAX was coined by Jesse James Garrett in his seminal document at Adaptive Path.

I've actually seen a few reports of people having trouble with the upgrade - their computer hangs at the bootup screen for hours on end. Since I didn't 'upgrade' (like a good boy, I reformatted and started over) I didn't experience the hour-long hangs, however, I did experience some delays during boot. The first time I inserted the Leopard disc and it prompted me to click the button to restart, I waited for about 20 minutes at the 'grey screen' waiting for the Apple logo to appear.

Gee whillikers. After hours on Monday Apple, the PC company people love to love, started behaving like Google. While its Q4 conference call was in progress its stock price went up almost $13 to over $187, a personal best, a position it then failed to hold. Even if it pulled in its December gross margin and had doubts Mac could outdo itself, September was a scorcher and December promises to be better still, it said, projecting earnings of a whopping $1.42 a share on revenues of $9.2 billion, better than the $1.30 on $8.7 billion that the Street has been imagining.

There's a really interesting (free) article by Amol Sharma in the Wall Street Journal about Google's expected cellphone software, and whether Google will be able to do the necessary deals with the mobile carriers. In addition to providing core Google apps (search, maps, YouTube, etc.), the rumor is that the Google mobile operating system will be open to developers who want to use the phone's services, such as GPS data.

Do you use Gmail on your iPhone through the browser? By going to m.gmail.com you can get the full Gmail experience including conversation view, search, and more. Best of all, from this week, users can now sync their inbox across devices instantly and automatically: Gmail has launched free IMAP, so that whether you read or write your email on your iPhone or on your desktop, changes you make to Gmail will be seen from anywhere you access your inbox.

According to a report this morning in the Wall Street Journal, and quoting 'people familiar with the situation,' within the next two weeks Google is expected to announce advanced software and services that would allow handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by the middle of next year.

Shares of Apple Inc. earlier this week rose briefly to $188.00 to set a new all-time intraday high and take the market value of Apple past that of both IBM and Intel. At $188 Apple's market cap would be $163.8BN compared to Intel's $156.3BN and IBM's $154.6BN. Apple would come in at third place after Microsoft ($290.3BN) and Google ($206.1BN).

Apple Computer's Steve Jobs just announced that Apple would (finally!) provide an iPhone SDK to 3rd party developers in order to enable them to create native applications for the iPhone (and, incidentally, also for the iPod touch). While the actual SDK won't ship until February 2008, this announcement is a monumental shift in strategy for Apple, who has thus far tried to control the applications available for the iPhone and limit 3rd party developers to Web 2.0 apps running in the Safari browser.

In a missive to the world Wednesday Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the company was working on an SDK that will let third-party applications on the iPhone, ending that particular kafuffle. It will take until February to organize it, he said, because it's supposed to keep viruses, malware and privacy attacks at bay. He suggested Apple may follow Nokia's example of insisting on digital signatures that can be traced back to a known developer.

Of the nearly 1.4 million iPhones sold since it was introduced in June, an estimated 250,000 of them were purchased by people trying to unlock them so that they can use the iPhone on a cell phone carrier other than Apple's dedicated partner, AT&T. This admission came yesterday from Apple executives who were announcing record results for the three months that ended Sept. 29.

The word on the rumor mill is that Mac OS X Leopard will be shipping on October 26th. While this is good news for some people, this is freaking great news for me. Why? Because after the 26th I will finally be able to do blog posts that contain information on Leopard, I'll be able to post code samples in Objective-C 2.0 and distribute the source code to them. So, in just around 10 days, I expect the floodgates to open and all the Cocoa blogs and sites will start dumping tons and tons of ridiculously cool Objective-C 2.0/Xcode 3.0 samples. The only problem for me now is waiting 10 more days!