I am involved with the Jacksonville Developers User Group, and I am helping plan the upcoming jaxcodecamp. I have herd from some of the members planning the Code Camp that there is some interest in a COCOA Special Interest Group. COCOA makes up the set of APIs that are used to program the Mac OS X and the iPhone.
Let me know if you are interested in the a COCOA SIG if you live in the Jacksonville area.
Like many other web developers on the Mac, I use Parallels desktop 3.0 on the Mac. I go back and forth between Boot Camp and Parallels depending on what I am testing.
I ran the most recent Windows update on my version of Vista while I was in Boot Camp. Now when I try to start Vista in Boot Camp, I get a Genuine Advantage error, and Vista will not continue to start. I have to restart in Boot Camp, and re-enter the serial number. I am running Vista Enterprise which allows virtualization.
Adobe has released the ColdFusion 8 updater 1. This contains some hot-fixes, but the real news is that Adobe has released 64 bit version for Windows, Linux and Mac OS 10.5.
Previously the only 64 bit version of ColdFusion ran on Solaris only. If you have been running any server software on 64 bit hardware, you have probably seen improvements in permormance and memory usage.
For Mac OS X users, the installer will now work with 10.5. All of my Macs are now using 64 bit hardware with Mac OS X 10.5. 10.5 also comes pre-installed with Apache 2.2
I am taking a class on Microsoft SharePoint architecture this week. I learned today in the class that the next version of SharePoint will be 64 bit only. If you are going to be buying new server hardware, get 64 bit hardware.
Not only does SharePoint run better on 64 bit hardware, so does MS SQL Server and ColdFusion. You can also take advantage of much more RAM. I believe that 32 bit hardware is limited to a maximum of 2-4 GBs. 64 bit hardware can go up to 256 Terabytes in theory.
Just read this on Slashdot. I guess Flash will not be coming to the iPhone.
I got home last night and installed the latest iPhone update, version 1.1.3. This update includes a new version of the Google Maps with a location aware feature. This uses triangulation from Cell towers to find your position on the map. This works well enough that I am planning using this instead of getting hand held GPS.
One of the other cool features is the ability to reorganize icons on the home screen and even create additional screens.
On the downside, the Uconnect feature still does not work with the bluetooth in the iPhone. I was hoping Apple would fix this, but it still fails to complete the calls.
My software update feature on my older Mac showed that I had downloaded Java release 6 for Mac OS X 10.4. I got really exited until I read the release notes;
It looks like this is a series of security updates. Before Leopard was released Apple had a prerelease version of Java SE 6 on their developer site, which they took down earlier in the year. I had hoped that Apple would release Java SE 6 with Mac OS 10.5, but I was let down when it was released to find it only had Java SE 5.
Apple is known for its secrecy when it comes to releasing new products. I can understand that when it comes to certain products and software. The problem comes when you are trying to develop for a platform. Developers have to have SDKs, APIs and the other tools so they can start to develop for the platform before it is released.
Right now the silence coming from Cupertino is deafening. Apple should come out and say if they are going to continue to develop Java on the Mac so developers can start planning what technology they need to use in their future products.
I have liked Java because I could write applications that can run on any platform, whether it was Linux, Mac or Windows. If Apple is not going to develop Java on the Mac anymore, Sun needs to start developing future versions for the Mac like they do for Windows.
In the mean time I am going to start taking a harder look at Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight as alternatives.
It was ten years ago when Michael Dell answered a question about what Apple should do at an expo in Orlando with this comment;
This Fortune CNN Money article shows the difference in stock valuations between Apple and Dell. Apple is now worth more than twice then what Dell is worth as a company.
I recently purchased Adobe Creative Suite 3 for my Mac G5 tower. When I bought the suite I did not realize that it required a minimum of 1 Gigabyte of RAM to install. I only had 512 MB that came with the Mac when I bought it, so I decided to buy some more RAM.
This is where my nightmare started.
I recently purchased a MacBook Pro a couple of months ago. I installed Boot Camp and purchased Parallels so I could run Windows in VM on a Mac. I have been running XP, but my company was interested in how well Vista would run on the Mac.
I bought an iPhone. I said I was not going to do it. The selling factor for has been the browser. The browser is Safari which is based on webkit, the same HTML rendering engine Adobe is using for Air. I browsed an Ajax application I built, and it worked perfectly on the iPhone.
