I’m on my way to WWDC (as I just stated with my post) and we were able to pick our airline so I chose to give Virgin a try since I’ve heard so many good things about it. First I have to say that I’m writing this post and my last too. It’s pretty cool to have an airline with 100% wifi coverage in their fleet. Also, how many airlines can you say that has AC power instead of the DC power most usually have. They also have 2 power outlets per set of 3 seats, where most only have a few in select seats. There “RED” entertainment system is nice for long flights. They have a decent collection of music, though I will say that I usually bring my own, so why do I need there’s. They have live TV, mainly news channels, but include some other more common channels, USA, FX, FOX, ESPN, etc. Their movie collection is small (smaller than I thought) but pricey at $8.00 a movie. Not worth it; I’ll bring my own! You can also order snacks, drinks, food through the system, which makes it pretty handy. The mood lighting is an interesting concept, but I’m not sure I get it. Perhaps after a return trip I’ll have a better understanding of why/what it does to the person as they’re traveling. Stay tuned for my post wrap-up about Virgin America.
So I’m trying to keep awake while I’m on my flight to San Francisco for WWDC this coming week, I thought why not share my predictions about what’s going to be announced. I also figured this would be a good time to update my blog since I have quite a while before we land.
1. Snow Leopard
After looking at the sessions and labs for WWDC this year, I think it’s safe to say we’ll see a release of Snow Leopard. From what I’ve been able to read from the net it looks like it’s nearing RC/Gold status, so I think this will be one that will be talked about to death!
2. iPhone 3.0
As a beginning iPhone developer, I’ve been playing with some of the goodies in the 3.0 SDK since April. I’ve also had the chance to put it on a phone (since beta 2) and have seen it mature and become a stable working update. There’s definitely some features I’d really like to have on a day to day case, so hopefully this comes out at the conference and I’m not having to put the OS Beta on my standard use phone.
3. iPhone 3G v2
I think we will see this announced, but I don’t think it’s shipping until Julyish. One thing Apple did wrong last year was release several products as once which was a disaster (MobileMe, iPhone 2.0 OS, iPhone 3G)!! I think after last years mess, they’ll end up releasing the OS update at the conference, and the new phone in July.
4. iPod Touch v3
This I think they will de a device update on as well and it will be available after the keynote. It will include a new 64GB option. I also think that this will have a camera on it.
5. Minor Hardware Updates
This is something they’ve been doing without waiting for some sort of Press event or Conference, so I’m not sure if this is something we’ll actually see or not.
This pretty much sums up my predictions. I would love to be surprised by the “one more thing” but I’m not sure what this could be. I think the iPhone as a device doesn’t need to be this as pretty much everyone in the modern world are expecting this to come out. Personally I’m still waiting for a tablet or touch netbook. I’d like to see this at least announced next week with a ship date of sometime in July. If by chance this was something that was a reality, I’m sure they’d be sold out by the end of the conference. (I’d be coming home with at least 1)
Stay tuned for my after keynote post and other WWDC posts as the week goes on. I’ve got lots of ideas floating around, so we’ll have to see what’s under NDA and what we can talk about.
If found it a little difficult yesterday to figure out how to get growl notifications working until @colognerunner told me how he got it working. Figured there were others that were having problems, so I make a quick little screencast showing you what I did.
I recently came across Objective Resource for developing iPhone applications that talk with a Rails backed website. According to the site,
ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.
I’ve had a chance to play with it this weekend and have found it to be pretty easy to work with. The developers of Objective Resource have created a pretty good Getting Started Guide you can follow, or you can watch a screencast of it as well. They even offer an example project for you to work with that gives you both the iPhone app (via Xcode) and the Rails app so you can see how everything works together.
One thing the example project does not include is accessing a Rails app that has authentication. Of course I was thinking I was all setup for this, but soon realized that I did not add my Active Resource functions in so that my app would work with XML/JSON requests. Luckily, while I was out in Denver, CO for iPhone Development Training (by Pragmatic Studio) I was able to get my hands on a copy of Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark. I was extremely pleased that Mike graciously gave me the copy he had laying there for free. The particular recipe in the book that helped me was the Authenticate REST Clients. After I rewrote my authentication piece of my Rails app, I was getting data back and into my iPhone app. It was a very good feeling!
I thought I would include the screencast that the Objective Resource developers created. It runs about 6 minutes and is definitely worth a watch if you are looking at using Objective Resource for your next iPhone app backed by a Rails app.
Here’s my attempt at packing tonight before I head over to the airport in the morning. What I did while I was packing was try to put together “packages” so that it would make it easier to pack. I then went from that to packing the packages where they would fit best. I’m still not sure I want to risk taking my Rebel XTI without a protective case of some sort (see what I used in the video. ) So I might end up replacing that with my point and shoot since it saves space. We’ll see though.
I’m getting ready to take a trip out to Denver, CO for the week to go to an iPhone SDK Training class held by Pragmatic Studio and thought it was a perfect time to give Ultralight Packing a try. Andrew Hyde recently wrote about his adventures last month and after reading his story I thought I would give it a try. I’m planning on capturing my adventures with Qik and my iPhone so you can get a feel for what it’s like. Feel free to track that progress on my Qik account. I’ll be posting a video of my packing abilities once I pack up tomorrow. But I thought I’d give you a little insight on what I was planning on taking.
Update: So I’ve made some updates to my list above, you’ll notice them in bold. I’m going to wear a little more than I thought since when I land in Denver the weather is supposed to be around 28F. Of course the remaining days the weather is pushing high 40s, low 50s, so the rest of my clothes should suffice.
I’ve been playing around with Jing Pro since it was released and have to say that it’s pretty impressive. First off I absolutely love that you can produce a H.264 video. It’s a very nice feature! I also like that you can upload to some of the popular video hosting services like YouTube, Viddler, etc. I was hoping there would be some sort of simple editing capabilities in it, maybe “enhance” the audio a bit, or trim off the beginning or end of the video. But at least if you produce with the H.264 you can edit the video in something else. Maybe I’m be make a video showing you some new features of it and what not. We’ll see!
So I made some changes to Twitpress so I’m testing them to see if they work. I’m not sure if I should use this or Twitterfeed. I would like it to be a shortened URL, so either use tinyURL or some other service would be helpful. What does everyone else use?
UPDATE: So I was just doing a search and found Twitter Tools from Alex King that looks to be promising! Guess I’ll have to play around with this idea for a little bit longer. Still curious to know what others use though.
So I was walking back from a different building on campus and though that I’d give Qik a try and see if I could get it to send a message to twitter saying that I was live. Needless to say, it didn’t work. Guess I’ll have to work on Qik this afternoon. Anyways, here’s the video from this afternoon.
I’m on my way to WWDC (as I just stated with my post) and we were able to pick our airline so I chose to give Virgin a try since I’ve heard so many good things about it. First I have to say that I’m writing this post and my last too. It’s pretty cool to have an airline with 100% wifi coverage in their fleet. Also, how many airlines can you say that has AC power instead of the DC power most usually have. They also have 2 power outlets per set of 3 seats, where most only have a few in select seats. 
There “RED” entertainment system is nice for long flights. They have a decent collection of music, though I will say that I usually bring my own, so why do I need there’s. They have live TV, mainly news channels, but include some other more common channels, USA, FX, FOX, ESPN, etc. Their movie collection is small (smaller than I thought) but pricey at $8.00 a movie. Not worth it; I’ll bring my own! You can also order snacks, drinks, food through the system, which makes it pretty handy. The mood lighting is an interesting concept, but I’m not sure I get it. Perhaps after a return trip I’ll have a better understanding of why/what it does to the person as they’re traveling. Stay tuned for my post wrap-up about Virgin America.
I recently came across 
