If you aren’t following iPad news, AT&T’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, has promised that AT&T could handle any demand on the network by the iPad. However, he’s now stating that the iPad will be a Wi-Fi driven product and that he doesn’t expect to see any type of strain to AT&T’s network.

What I found intriguing about this was that while I was looking into this, I also came across a poll taken by ReadWriteWeb that asked readers what version of the iPad was going to get. To me it appears that perhaps Randall is correct. Out of 894 people that took the survey (at the time I took the image) the top one is the 16GB Wi-Fi version. Now I could speculate about how most people that are going to buy an iPad are probably going to go on the low end because they aren’t sure if the iPad is going to be that big of a hit, or because they think that something else is going to announced soon. Of course there is the other idea that the iPad is only going to be purchased by the tech community.

Either way between AT&T’s CEO and that poll it is right in line with where I’m sitting. I plan on getting a 16GB iPad Wi-Fi version because everywhere I see myself using it. My main thought logic is that I will be using it between work and home. Going to look at it as my “kindle” and a note taking device as I have a netbook that acts as that now.

I’ve been waiting for a new bundle from MacHeist and was excited this last week to see that they were building up to release one soon. Well they’ve released it today! It’s surprising that it is only a nanoBundle, which usually around this time of year it’s a full bundle, but maybe they are moving it to a later date this year.

The apps? Well we’ve got 7 apps available, MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout, Flow, Tales of Monkey Island, and RapidWeaver. First off, I think this is kind of a weak bundle. Maybe it’s because after looking at the apps I either have no use for them or I’ve already bought them. For instance I bought RipIt back in December as I was in search of a new dvd ripper app. The only other app I see myself using is Clips which is a clipboard replacement app.

So the rest of the apps? Well you’ve got your personal journal type app, a transfer app, a game, a cover art finder, and a web site creation app. While the web site creation app, RapidWeaver, sounds like it might help me, its more of an iWeb type app which isn’t going to help me.

Overall, I think it’s a good package if you don’t have some of the apps, or if you are in need of one of the apps as the entire package is $19.95 which by looking at the apps you can see that you buy the app you need and get the rest for free. So if you haven’t bought any of these apps yet, make sure you get over to MacHeist and buy them quickly before it’s too late.

So I’ve been thinking about what I want to write about here, and while I love looking at technology, gadgets, tips/tricks, etc. I’m finding myself having a harder time writing about those topics which is why I think I don’t keep up at writing on my blog. Maybe it’s because by the time I get done working my full time job (at a software company) and doing work on the side (building iPhone and web apps) I feel that my world revolves around computers. Shouldn’t someone’s life contain more?

It’s been awhile since I’ve wrote to write. My grammar isn’t what it used to be; I feel as though my writing is that of a 9th grader, so I’m hoping that this exercise will help improve my writing and add to other things I’ll mention in the upcoming months.

After giving it a lot of thought, I’ve decided that I’m going to start writing about policy issues in Michigan. While I’ll be the first to say, I’ve only had a mild interest in politics, I’ve been away from Michigan for a year and a half, and have only been able to keep interest from afar. I plan to take a look at the issues facing this state and how they affect the everyday working (and nonworking) people of this state.

Michigan has been my home since as long as I can remember and I’ve had a great grandfather sit in the state house of representatives, a family where entrepreneurship is breed into our blood, and all while living in a small town where the “cool” thing to do on a friday night is to go to the bowling alley. I’ve lived in Lansing, moved to the District of Columbia, and have found that what I can call home is Owosso.

Stay tuned for what else I decide to write about. Perhaps you may be surprised by a thing or two.

First off, I’ve been horrible at keeping this updated. If you’ve been following me via my social media outlets (twitter, facebook, etc.) you know what’s been going on these past 6 months.

I wanted to take a few moments to let you know what I’ve been doing the past 6 months and let you know what I’ve got in store in the upcoming months.

Last time I wrote here, I was headed out to WWDC 2009. It was a blast! Lots of fun exciting stuff, meet some new friends, and started to think of some great ideas that are now getting into full swing.

Skipping ahead to October, I made a decision to move back to Michigan for reasons I won’t mention. It was a difficult decision but one I felt I had to make. I met a lot of great friends while I was in DC and miss it a lot. I hope to make it back down there very soon! Most people would ask why someone would move back to Michigan, but I was lucky enough to get a job with a previous employer, TechSmith. So it made everything a little easier.

Anyways, I decided I am going to work a little harder at my 2010 resolutions and figured I’d start out with a post here.

• Create a Screencast 1 per week
• Get at least 12 new clients
• Post at least once per month (I said 3/week last year and it didn’t work out, so I’ll start small)
• Go camping w/friends (didn’t do this last year)
• Budget
• Continue to grow my business

Well I think that pretty much sums up my resolutions for the year. Stay tuned to see how well I progress with these.

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.

If any of you happened to miss Family Guy last night, there was quite the funny mention about the Zune failure.

If you would like to watch it, check it out on hulu. You can also watch it below.

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.

Getting Started with Objective Resource from Josh Vickery on Vimeo.

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.