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Most big newspaper organizations have obituaries written in advance for almost every celebrity, whether or not that person is close to death. This is done so that if a celebrity does die unexpectedly, they can rush in, fill in a few details, and publish the obituary within minutes.

Of course, when people are involved, accidents do happen. Yesterday around 4:30PM EST, Bloomberg accidentally published their most recent obituary for Steve Jobs. Presumably, the obituary went live accidentally while the writer did touch-ups.

Steve Jobs, who had been battling pancreatic cancer over the past several years, is not dead yet.

I just recieved an email from Open Tech’s Vice President of online sales and PR that states the following sentence as the sole line in the email:

“Open Tech is For sale. This includes all trade secrets and brand equity. Thank you for tour time.”

For those who have not followed the Open Tech story, they are/were a company that created a line of computers able to install and run Mac OS X.

Apple filed lawsuit after lawsuit trying to drive the small company under. It seems the house that Steve built finally dealt the crushing blow.

Apple’s much anticipated iPhone 2 was released in the US today. As previously reported, the phone is on a 3G network and is half the price of the original iPhone. The iPhone 2 firmware is also available to download from Apple to install on the original iPhone for via the Apps Store. The firmware will.

In related news, Apple’s new MobileMe service went live on July 10th. MobileMe, which replaces .Mac offers email, calendar, and other services.

Today is the first day of the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. With over 5,000 people in attendance, this is one of the largest WWDC’s yet.

The House That Steve Built has some exciting announcements that have been coming seemingly every minute. Among the highlights are for the first half of the day are:

- Not only is iPhone 2.0 in beta with over 4,000 people in the beta program, but that there will be three parts to the SDK: Enterprise, SDK, as well as new features for the end users.

- Several demos from SEGA, Apple, eBay, Pangea Software, MIMVista, among others.

- SEGA shows off a video of Super Monkey Ball, which will be a launch title in the new App Store for $9.99 USD.

- MIMVista shows off a program designed to help medical students study and learn various parts of the body with almost realistic images.

- Steve anounces new iPhone 2.0 features, including contact search, support for Microsoft Office documents, and support for Asian languages. The iPhone is set to be released July 11th.

- Mobile.Me is the replacement for .mac, current .mac subscribers will be automatically updated to the new service. A 60-day trial of Mobile.Me will be included with the iPhone 2.0.

- The new iPhone will be thiner, sexier, include support for a 3G network, Enterprise support, more affordable, available in more countries, and have advanced GPS support.

- Target price for an 8GB iPhone 2.0 will be $199, a savings of $200 over the current price of the iPhone.

- Later in the day, Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard was announced, but would feature no new features, only improvements over older ones.

So we arrived and are waiting in line. The queue is rather long and we’re not sure if we managed to catch a good position for the Keynote. That is, a position that prevents us from having to enter one of the overflow rooms. There’re definately lots of people here. 

One of the lab areas in the lab room still had it’s label coverted. That may be a cue by that there’ll be something new which enforces a new lab in order to understand it.

More news as we continue our approaching the main floor.

So tomorrow our journey to WWDC will begin. We’ll fly from Amsterdam to London, from London to L.A. and from there by car to San Francisco. So it’ll be a rather eventfull journey: An interesting ride from L.A to SF, a (hopefully) equally interesting KeyNote (Please no ‘Worst Keynote Ever’ shirts for sale afterwards, like last year) and lots of informative sessions.

I got a new battery for my 15″ MBP in order to be able to hack away on some projects while on plane, I updated my harddive to 200MB 7200rpm so it is faster and I have more storage for a plethora of data (maybe even a Snow Leopard Install?) and I collected lots of documents to read while on plane too.

I’m really looking forward to it. If you happen to visit WWDC and’d love to meet up, be sure to contact us. Especially if you’re german too, and’d love to meet some other german MacHeads / Cococa Hackers.

TUAW has an interesting piece, where they report about the rumor, that Apple is planning to release an early 10.6 seed at WWDC. The seed is said to contain mostly security and stability features and is slated for release in December. 

Personally, I think that this behaviour could upset quite some people, as it would be just one year after Leopard, and therefore people’d need to shell out the usual $150 once again. Especially if there’re only security and stability features, one could wonder why those wouldn’t be delivered by the standard 10.5.x service pack mechanism.

That’s why I’d guess that, if there’s really 10.6 coming, it will contain some exciting new features. On the one hand I could think about a better iPhone integration - maybe even multitouch-compatibility for Cocoa. On the other hand, and this is where I’m really confident, I guess that resolution independence will make it in. We’ve had resolution independence in Mac OS X since 10.4 now, by means of a hidden preference which could activate it for specific applications, so one could debug applications against it. This feature wasn’t made for the casual user though, as it was buggy and lacked features. With Leopard, however, resolution independence already looked quite good - so I guess an enhanced version, as well as new hardware (think MacBook Pro 150dpi) could very well be in the domain of possibilities.

I’ll be attending WWDC this year, so I’m all in all pretty excited about this.

The WebKit developers just announced SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript engine for Safari (et others). To quote the developers: “SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.”

So instead of building and parsing a syntax-tree, like other Javascript-Engines do, SquirrelFish builds executable bytecode. You can find the new engine in the nightly builds. Good chance to play around with it and see how it performs with Javascript-heavy applications. I just rolled a test against our primary product at work, a big and extensive javascript layout application. One could really “feel” the speed differences.

For the past months, Peter Bright, a former Win32 Programmer, has given a in-depth overview to the perspective of being a developer for Win32 and for Cocoa. Part one in the series described how misfortune and adversity left Apple with a new OS platform free of legacy constraints; part two discussed how Microsoft had failed to do the same, choosing instead to hobble its new OS with way too much legacy baggage. Now in the third part, Peter exposes in detail what Apple has done with its platform to make it so appealing.

The series is a very interesting read, even if you’re not into Cocoa development, as it explains just why Mac OS X offers so many advances to a normal Developer - especially compared to Win32. If you haven’t read the other parts yet, it’d be wise to start at the beginning before you start to read part three.

Following on the fresh release of Mac OS X 10.5.3, version 6 of the iPhone SDK just arrived. Details regarding changes and additions can be found in TUAW’s liveblog. As we already speculated, there seems to be a strong correlation between the new SDK and 10.5.3, as it is a prequisite for installing.