nonsmokingarea.com

Despite all the (justified) grieve on breaking MacBook(Pro)s & crashing Leopards, this rumoured, ultramobile, flash-based sub-notebook would probably make me pull out my credit-card immediately… all rumours collected at Mahalo.

(Image: Engadget)

• ZSFA — Rails Is A Ghetto -
• Screen shot of email to Steve Jobs at Apple auf Flickr - Fotosharing! -
• Synergy - share mouse&keyboard between several computers (win,mac,linux)
• Nokia Europe - iSync - Download software - Get support and software -
• H323 installation on Debian and Asterisk 1.4 - voip-info.org -

• A VC: Biz Stone on Read/Write Talk -
• MySpace: How To Devalue a Platform in Three Easy Steps - SWiK -
• Going Viral like the Common Cold (Not Always a Good Thing) -
• MMOGCHART.COM -
• GigaOM A First-Hand Look at a Chinese Second Life, HiPiHi « -
• Retro MacOS Theme -

on July 6th-8th, Adobe is hosting iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco, a BarCamp-styled gathering “to develop web-based applications and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event, organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web applications and web sites will be launched to the public.”. more than 120 developers have already signed up, temporarily establishing the most highest iPhone/person-density on the globe there’s also some sweet irony since Adobe is hosting the event while their Flash (Lite)-platform initially won’t be supported by iPhone.

The University of Washington’s Emerging Technology group published a few key-facts and guidelines for web-application developers targetting the upcoming iPhone, including User-Agent-string, javascript-limitations and user-interface conventions. No specific info yet on the Javascript(?)-hooks Safari will offer to make phone-calls or control the integrated Google Maps-client, but a good list of things to keep in mind…

update: since the original page has been taken down by Apple’s request (one really has to wonder why…), here’s the cached document.

the official Linden Blog features the transcript of yesterdays Town Hall talk with Cory Linden, CTO of Linden Labs. obviously, Cory mostly addresses issues regarding the recent open sourcing of the SecondLife client-software, like possible plugin-infrastructures, the installation of CVS and if/when Linden’s server-software is following the client’s path into public. not very much definitive info, but there is a roadmap promised to be released later this quarter.

Arrington predicts the death of DRM. so be it. and quick!

all the hype & gorgeous pics about Apple’s iPhone aside, consider what David Pogue from the NYT - one of very few with actual hands-on experience - is reporting:

Both in the onstage demo and during my hands-on hour, the Web speed was OK—not great, but OK. But all of this used the phone’s built-in Wi-Fi, not Cingular’s notoriously slow Edge network. I couldn’t help wondering how bad the speed will be when you’re connecting over the cellular airwaves.

lets hope Apple adds 3G-support until this sweety is launching in europe (Q4/2007).

Ryan Carson points out that the iPhone is the first mobile platform really suitable for mobile web-apps. I’ld like to add that it really is the first mobile device capable of running AJAX-apps (given that it runs a fairly decent port of Safari, with full Javascript-support). since the phone is based on Mac OS, I’ld also bet that a Flash-plugin isn’t too far away.

sitepen has an interesting post on how offline web-applications implemented with the Dojo Offline Toolkit (DOT) could look & work like. including detailed mock-ups of a - fictional - offline Gmail-prototype. offline webapps could be the next big thing, but DOTs approach (basically installing a local proxy-application) doesn’t seem very intriguing to me.

as anticipated by many customers, Apple quickly released a follow-up to the bemoaned 7.0 release of iTunes. iTunes 7.0.1 (both windows and mac osx) “addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more”. however, feedback on the update indicates that some problems still persist, so I was glad to find this download-link to iTunes 6.0.5 on Apple’s support forums.

iTunes 7 received loads of bad press immediately after last weeks release. especially Windows-users complain about heavily increased CPU- and memory-load, disfunctional download of cover-artwork, problems with certain iPod-models and destroyed installations. this reminds a lot of itTunes 6, which was quite buggy in its inital release as well (lets remember this when iTunes 8 arrives! ;)). while we wait for salvation in the form of a - hopefully not too distant - upgrade, this MacWorld UK-article lists Apple’s official support-documents addressing the issues.

Apple’s ‘Showtime’-event focussed on digital media just ended 2 hours ago, and like with augusts WWDC keynote, I’m not too impressed with the outcome. check TechCrunch for a brief summary or Engadget for an extremley detailed live-blog + hands-on reports with all products.

as expected, iTMS now sells feature-movie downloads for as low as $13 (pre-orders and first-week buyers) and $15 (regular price) - that’s right in the middle of Amazon’s Unbox rates ($8-20). movies are encoded in 640×480 H.264 (nearly DVD-quality), include Dolby Surround, and can of course be put on any video-enabled iPod under the same DRM-restrictions as iTMS tv-shows. while this sounds fine, the downside is that - as of today - the iTMS is starting with a mere 75 movie-titles from several Disney-studios.

Apple supplements the iTMS with iTunes 7 (cosmetic changes on the user-interface, album-artwork and gapless playback - a feature I ranted about some time ago) and several new iPod-models. there’s a new aluminium Nano in four selected colours (remember the mini-days) a tiny, square successor to the Shuffle (very cool) and an upgraded 5.5G iPod (better battery life, lower price, more storage - yawn). still missing: the touchscreen-video-iPod which is rumoured about since…well, anyway.

one more thing - iTV (codename!), a streaming-client connecting to any TV-set is announced for early 2007. through a Frontrow-like interface, iTV will bring your existing iTunes-library to your living-room. iTV won’t include any storage itself, and it’s unclear if it will be able to access media-files on a non-iTunes-fileshare or NAS-device (probably not, and even if, there won’t be any support for your pirated backup-divx ).

according to this Yahoo! Finance-article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was elected to Apple’s board of directors earlier today. after announcing Google Apps, this looks like Google’s second slap in Microsoft’s face within a few days. Steve Jobs on Apple’s latest reinforcement:

“Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”