I’ve been doing a lot of work in Xcode lately, building an application for the iPhone. I officially joined the developer program this past weekend, making it possible to load applications into my phone for testing. I’ve got a few ideas for some applications that I haven’t seen done yet, so hopefully I can get something out there to fill the void.

I have to say, the more I work in Objective-C, the more I like it. Sure, I’m missing a few things like all my comfortable frameworks and such, but there are plenty of other ways to deal with things I’ve coming across. And since the NDA, sites like Stack Overflow have become a great resource for getting answers to issues I come across.

I’m still working on my other projects like MassTransit, this is just something to broaden my knowledge and have fun at the same time. Between developing on the iPhone, doing Java projects at work, and building open-source .NET frameworks at home — I’ve got plenty to keep me busy!

The night before, Dru and Rob came by the house for a little pre-conference warmup (and by warmup, I don’t mean this). Rob went through his presentation on continuous integration one last time while Dru and I worked through our presentation on messaging (and how to do it with MassTransit, of course). The night ended early for me, but Rob and Dru met up with Ben at the hotel and closed the bar (and by closed, I mean walked in at last call and got one beer).

The next morning we all met up and caught up on things since the last gathering. Since the last time we saw Ben, he’d been through a hurricane and granted the MVP Award from Microsoft. We then planned out our day of sessions based on the information currently available to us.

The speaker for the CSS talk was unable to attend, so the four of us convened an open-space session on CSS. The discussion in the fishbowl was good with a lot of interesting topics. Ben gave an on-screen demonstration of CSS from the ground up for those in the room that were new to it, providing context for the audience. CSS is extremely important considering it is the best (only?) way to layout and style websites consistently across browsers. I think everyone brought up how much of a turd IE 6 is when it comes to CSS compatibility.

After lunch, it was time for Dru and I to present our session on message-driven architecture (using MassTransit). You can see the first hour of the session on video here. The crowd really got into it, asked a lot of questions, and hopefully came away with an understanding of asynchronous application design and messaging.

After that session, we sat down with a guy that works for Sun and talked about enterprise application architecture. It was interesting comparing the mature open-source nature of Java to the budding open-source landspace in .NET. After the closing session and prize giveaway, there was a speakers dinner (Rib Crib, good stuff). Once we had eaten, we went to the hotel and did a little code sharing and Dru and Ben went through ASP.NET MVC some more. Then we went over to Dirty’s Tavern for some post-day fun. I was worn out, so I went back to my car and called it a night.

The next day was full of interesting stuff. A nice introduction to ASP.NET MVC by Ben, some extensive coverage of log4net by Dru, and I gave a presentation on iPhone development. Outside of the actual sessions there were a lot of great conversations about development and tools in general. We also recorded Ray Lewallen’s session on Behavior Driven Development, which can be viewed here.

My iPhone development session was purely introductory to show the tools and how they are used to build and deliver applications for the iPhone. The room was absolutely packed and hopefully everyone walked away with some good information. I know at least one guy did, he left two seconds after I said that building iPhone applications requires a Mac!

To wrap it up, the event was a huge success. There were a ton of people there, the vendor room was always alive with activity (likely due to Chris Koenig and his Rock Band setup giving some much needed ADHD relief between sessions). Chris also had a couple of great sessions on Silverlight and the new features in 2.0 that should really improve the use of Silverlight for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

If you are going to be anywhere near the Tulsa area and can manage to slip away from work for a couple of days I highly recommend making an appearance. The breadth of learning opportunities at the unbelievable price ($2/day) make this an incredible way to learn some new skills and sharpen your existing ones.

I will be presenting in two sessions this year. The first session will be on building distributed application using MassTransit (co-hosted by Dru Sellers) and other open-source frameworks for .NET. This is doing to be a deep view on how to build loosely-coupled systems on top of a messaging service (in this case, MSMQ). Advanced topics include asynchronous messaging and sagas (long-lived transactions).

The second session will be an introduction to iPhone development. I’m not a seasoned expert here, but I’m impressed with the platform provided by Apple (Xcode) free of charge for building applications for Mac OS X and the iPhone. This introduction will cover the tools and application structure for building iPhone applications in Objective-C.

If you happen to see me there, feel free to stop me and say hello.

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The MacBook Pro continues to evolve. Post Fusion install I’ve gotten all my development tools installed, including Resharper, TestDriven.NET, TortoiseSVN, and NAnt. So far everything seems to be working great. I’ve yet to install PowerShell (so I can have my NIX command-line goodness for the Windows box). I pulled down the trunk of Castle and got it to build as well. I had to create the Test & Test2 databases on my local instance of SQL Server 2005 in order for all the tests to complete.

It looks like I’ll be giving a presentation on MonoRail at the TulsaTechFest 2007. It will be an introduction to building a web site using MonoRail and Brail. MonoRail is part of the Castle Project and provides a MVC (model-view-controller) framework within ASP.NET. MVC is a solid pattern for building web applications that is a significant improvement over the page-based WebForms model. MonoRail embraces web standards allows applications to be built based on controller logic and helps facilitate the separation of concerns. It’s good stuff, I can’t wait ot talk about it.

Did I mention that I’m old and staying out until 2 AM at a live show is painful the next day? Where is the Tylenol again? Strange that I can stay up until 3 AM playing with a new computer and not feel fried the next day but this was… different.

Oh yeah, Peggle Extreme is part of the pre-order package for TeamFortress2 on Steam. I highly recommend it as a fun diversion! Speaking of TF2, I’m all set for the beta that starts on Monday. I can’t wait to play the game, I hope for some cool in-game video recording (with FRAPS or otherwise) next week. I wonder if voice-chat is built into the game? Things I don’t know — they are plentiful today it seems.

I got my iPhone store credit, $100, fast and easy from Apple. I guess this means a trip to the Apple store is coming soon.

Oh, and today’s post is an experiment in link diarrhea to see how long it takes this post to go up!

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

And speaking of thunder, how about that $200 iPhone price drop? The last remaining 4GB models at the local Apple store were flying off the shelves as people picked up a second unit for a spouse, kid, friend, whatever. A great deal on a great product, congratulations to those who got them. Even $399 is a sweet deal and will likely expand the installed base of people using the iPhone. If you think about it, remember the Motorola RAZR when it first came out? $399, no discounts on Cingular. Within a few months it was down to $199 and now you get them for $69. Price reductions are a fact of life — rather than whine about the $200 “fan-boy” tax, just enjoy the phone. Not that I wouldn’t mind an iTunes store credit or something as a thank you for helping launch/beta-test their product!

As for the new products, unless you live in a hole, you’ve seen them already. The iPod Classic is the old classic iPod with a bigger drive (are we still using moving parts in portable devices?), the iPod Nano got short and fat and video support, the shuffle got some new colors, and the big news was of course the iPod Touch. An iPhone without the phone and e-mail support. It also doesn’t have Google Maps, Weather, Stocks, or a Camera. But it does have WiFi.

Both the Touch and the iPhone are getting the iTunes Mobile Music Store. Now you can drunk-buy songs while out and about. Very cool. No word on whether or not you can download them over EDGE yet or only WiFi, I guess we’ll see. Take that Verizon/Sprint with your phone-only $2 a song crap ass stupid music store of suckage. And as for the Zune, well, at least you’ve got “The Social.”

Oh, and since none of the product was actually in the store last night, I spent a couple of hours with the very helpful Tulsa Apple store staff and the MacBook Pro. The applications are so familiar, so friendly and so easy to use it just makes it harder and harder to wait for Leopard. My only concern at this point is waiting for a just-out-of-the-oven version of OS X compared to a known, updated version that has seen a lot of user testing. I don’t want to have the “Vista” experience all over again with a fresh operating system, but I also don’t want to pay a $129 buy-it-now tax to upgrade to Leopard when it’s all said and done.

Most of the regular technology blogs have given their take of what’s coming tomorrow. These sites base their information on what “insiders” tell them and some creative extrapolation based on these tips. So they have to try and stay somewhat entrenched in reality. Me, not so much.

As a true Apple fanboy (who doesn’t even own a Mac, FYI), I have to put down what I think is going to be announced tomorrow. If I’m wrong, meh, nobody reads this blog anyway so who cares.

Full-Screen Video iPod

A full-screen iPod Video, based on the same platform as my beloved iPhone. Expect the OS of the iPhone, but don’t expect any of the web features. So take away the WiFi, the cellular modem, the Bluetooth, the mail client, the web browser, the other stuff. Expect the other stuff that iPods have always had, including a new line of games that have been tweaked to work with the touchscreen experience. I’m split on HD/Flash at this point. Flash is so cheap, but Apple loves margin. Hard drives break, flash basically doesn’t. But a 16 GB iPod Video seems like a pretty limited replacement for the 5G iPod. So I’m going for a standard 5G thickness unit with a 1.8″ hard disk, probably up to 120 GB at the top end. It’s unfortunate, but they need to keep the storage kings happy.

iPod Nano with Video

A video-capable iPod Nano with a size upgrade is likely. Some new colors are possible, along with new memory sizes including maybe a 16 GB model on the top end for those Apple Lossless freaks like me. Of course, that’s a big maybe. The price points will likely remain the same with the base model now being 4GB (face it, flash is freaking cheap). Video is a given considering their continued push into video on the iTunes Music store.

iPod Shuffle 2GB

The shuffle goes 2GB for the base model. Come on, you can get 2GB flash drives for under $14 on sale, make the move on the shuffle. Some new colors if you like, whatever, I don’t care.

Media Management (iTunes)

iTunes still sucks when it comes to media management. All videos show up together and there is no way to organize a large library. There is also no way to really enable any genre-specific parental controls. What does this mean? Your porn shows up in the same video folder as Barnyard. That ain’t good folks. iTunes, the iPod Video, and the Apple TV need to be upgraded to support advanced media categories for all types of media: music and video. And the tools need to be available to block the kids from even seeing cover art for things they, well, shouldn’t see.

Bluetooth

Apple added Bluetooth as a standard feature to their products long before other manufacturers and have continued to support the standard. There are a few companies making great stereo headsets that support A2DP and AVCP but music players have been slow to add support. Well, this might be the time for that to be added. Perhaps the Nano will gain Bluetooth headphone support, allowing it to be used without any wires during your workout. I know the Motorola S9 would be a good workout set to use while listening to your Nano tucked away in your shorts.

Wireless Products (Airport Extreme, etc.)

Could Apple update the Airport Extreme to support 802.11n? Not likely. The iPhone only supports 802.11g, as will any possible WiFi that might end up in the regular iPod. It sure would be nice to be able to stream your iPod to the Airport Express, but that’s not expected. Battery life would certainly be impacted, so I just don’t really expect it. The iPhone is the networked device, leave the cost low on the other items. Of course, the Zune has wireless so WiFi seems to make sense but only really for the full screen unit. And then you’re talking about the hard disk units (unless they drop drives completely) whose battery life is always an issue. I don’t know, but I don’t expect much here. I’d love to see it, as we’d likely see any new features as an iPhone update on the same day (if not shortly afterwards).

If they do support WiFi, they need to support Last.fm (or some wonderful .mac clone of the service) to allow social sites to pick up on what you’re listening to on your iPod. After all, it’s gotta be social.

Apple TV

Could any product be as neglected as the Apple TV? Without third-party tools like Handbrake and without YouTube content, the Apple TV is a real turd. I own one and it has limited usefulness. Sure, we’ve ripped many of our DVDs into our iTunes library (which is of course a generic folder called Videos) so we can easily throw something on for the kids to watch without digging for the disk. And we can navigate our music library from the home stereo (which with over 8,000 tracks spread over more than 600 CD’s and iTunes downloads can be a real chore since there is no search feature). I’m really hoping for more on the Apple TV, but I doubt it based on what they’ve done so far.

iPhone

They had better add some features to the iPhone. Video coverflow maybe, better Bluetooth support (A2DP perhaps), more widgets, games, ringtones, basically everything that people have been hacking into the phone. Of course, I’m not going to cry if they do nothing.

iTunes Integration with External Media

Okay, it’s obvious that companies are starting to jump ship. NBC, Univeral Music, and other content owners are trying to break from iTunes. But how should Apple respond? Integrate. Just like with iTunes support for podcasts, they took an open format and made it easy to get the content on your iPod. So if other online stores add DRM-free content (Amazon, Universal, others) delivery, I think iTunes should make it very easy to import that media in your iTunes experience. iTunes is all about the iPod/iPhone. It’s all about making it very easy to get content on your Apple hardware. If other sources of content become available (as it was with podcasts, particularly video podcasts) they should quickly make it easy to use that content on the top selling hardware player: the iPod.

That’s all, I’m done ranting. I’m excited about the new products because they likely mean upgrades to products that I already own. Expect a follow-up of my take on what really happens after the announcements tomorrow.

And yes, I’ll likely be at the Tulsa Apple store after work tomorrow checking out the new gear…