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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.

I recently recieved a copy of Gridlock Economy by Michael Heller. The premise of the book is that too much ownership hurts more than it helps. The core example given in the book is that of a possible cure for cancer or Alzheimers.

A drug company wants to make and test a drug, but the owners of the 50 components of the drug want insane amounts of money to allow the research to continue. The drug, if successful, would naturally be a tremendous public good and earn the drug company and the patent holders piles of cash.

Heller calls instances such as this “big inches” - named after a Quaker Oats promotion that granted 21 million deeds of one square inch of land in the Yukon to many, many boys, girls, and anyone else who bought a box of their cereal.

When I started reading it, I expected a very “dry” reading, “just the facts.” But Heller’s writing style was more fluid, I loved his anecdotes use of concepts everyone can relate to (such as airline delays).

He goes on to give examples of how some of the gridlock can be unlocked. I do not want to go too much into the brunt of the subject matter, but this book is excellent and you will learn something without realizing it.

I fully recommend this book even if you’re not into economics.

http://www.gridlockeconomy.com

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.

Tomorrow, June 17, 2008, the Mozilla Foundation aims to release Firefox 3 for download.

Nearly one and a half million people around the world have pledged on their website (link below) to download Firefox 3 as part of Mozilla Foundation’s attempt to get into the Guiness Book of World Records for most software downloads in a 24 hour period.

Firefox currently is in the #2 spot as far as Internet browsers go. Over the years it has steadily creeped up on the #1 title holder, Internet Explorer.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

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.

This weekend I dove deep into the iPhone SDK and tried (after some initial tests) to develop a full-scale realworld application from scratch. Since I’m sorta good at Cocoa and Objective-C, it wasn’t too difficult to grasp the concept behind it and build a simple application in little to no time. I spend my friday evening reading the documentation and playing around with some code, and I spend about 4 hours on Saturday to actually write the application I had in mind.
So far my verdict is, that this is an absolutely awesome API for mobile devices. It’s far far ahead of any of the other Development Kits for mobile usage out there (save Android, but that’s actually not really out yet). I really like the concepts behind it, and it allows to do create magnificient applications really quickly. Apart from that, the (free!) development environment with XCode, Debugger and Instruments is superb, too. My main criticism is currently, that I can’t test my application on my real iPhone, since the 2.0 Beta isn’t only available to select developers. However, the Aspen simulator is a valid substitute.
Users who are new to Cocoa and Objective-C could have some problems though, since the current documentation is, let’s call it, “quite buggy”. There were many small difficulties in there which could really hinder a non-experienced user from coming to the oh-so-necessary “success-experience”. I’ll try to adress those that I stumbled upon here:

Play a Sound File:
In order to simply play a sound, one needs to call AudioServicesCreateSystemSoundID (fileURL, soundID). The Documentation notes, that fileURL is a CFURLRef, and soundID is UInt32. There’re two caveats here though: In order to get a CFURL one can use the NSURL class, which is toll-free bridged with CFURLRef, however: In order for the compiler to not warn, one has to cast NSURL to CFURLRef. The other, and far more annoying, problem here is, that this function doesn’t expect UInt32 (as mentioned in the documentation) for the second parameter, but *a pointer* to UInt32. So a real call would look like this:
UInt32 soundId = 1024;
AudioServicesCreateSystemSoundID((CFURLRef)[NSURL fileURLWithPath: @"kick.wav"], &soundId);

Get a value from a UI Element:
The UISlider class for example is really nice and simple to use, as it allows (just like all the other objects) to set a method which will be called, every time someone changes the slider. In this method, one gets the actual Slider-Object as an argument, so one can for example retrieve the current value, or modify the slider.
In order to get the current value of the slider, there exists a so-called “value” property. The difficulty is now to retrieve this value. Since it is a property, retrieving the value cannot be not done via a “getValue” method (as one might expect) but via key/value coding:
[Slider valueForKey:@"value"]
Now, the documentation lists the return value of UISlider.value as float. That’s actually not correct. The value is float, however not a c-float type but a Cocoa NSNumber object with a float value. Once again, this is something which is common in Cocoa, but I guess many new users will still wonder about this.

Set frame for a UI Element:
In order to define, where in your view an UI Element can be placed, one needs to define a “frame” which sets the position and width/height. Most Elements offer a init method, which let the user define such a frame: i.E. [[UILabel alloc] initWithFrame:labelFrame];
However, there’re situations, when one can’t use the initWithFrame method. How do you set the frame then? Quite simple: the frame is a property and can be set with the new . operator:
UILabel *label = [[UILabel alloc] init];
label.frame = CGRectMake(0,0, 60, 24);

I hope I could help some of the early adopters, and will write more soon.

Microsoft released its latest revision of the Windows OS on January 30th, 2007 to great fanfare. Even after a year and a half of beta testing, Windows Vista still suffered a few opening day hiccups.

Right out of the box you can see that once installed, Vista looks a lot like a certain other operating system on the market that features widgets and an extremely user-friendly interface. Indeed, Vista’s AERO interface does look, and feel, like Mac OS X’s Aqua interface. Whereas AERO, which invokes images of “air” has a glass-like presence, Aqua naturally invokes a watery feel to it.

Speaking of AERO, to get the full Vista Experience, including AERO, you have to buy one of the more expensive versions of the OS. Unlike XP, which had two versions, Vista comes in a total of six versions. The versions depend on the market in which the OS is being sold. The Vista Starter Edition will not be sold in the US, but only to so-called “emerging markets.”

In the US, there’s Home Basic, Home Premium, and Vista Ultimate for the normal “home” user. For business, there’s Vista Business and Vista Enterprise. In the European Union, there’s the “N” series of Vista that does not feature Windows Media Player 11 due to certain anti-trust laws in those regions.

The possibility of further anti-trust lawsuits looms closer everyday as several software manufacturers have been pushed by the wayside, as Vista already includes programs similar to, or identical several other offerings.

First and foremost is Windows Defender, an anti-spyware tool. Anti-spyware has long been the domain of companies such as McAfee and Symantec, but now, not only has Microsoft beaten them to the punch, until Symantec released Norton Internet Security suite 7, it was incompatible with Vista due to a scripting error in Internet Explorer 7. Again, Vista comes preinstalled with a firewall, well, there goes Symantec’s offering.

Windows Vista also comes with the capability to burn DVDs right out of the box. Doesn’t Nero does that?

In the end, it seems as though Microsoft is slowly trying to bully software developers out of business.