The cooperation with Apple in terms of iPhone and iPod touch also effects the Mac now: Today, Skyhook Wireless released their Loki 2.0 Firefox toolbar for Mac OS X and Windows XP. Now it’s possible to check the own location with Loki – if there are enogh WiFi-hotspots in reach known by Skyhook Wireless.
Quite amazing technology with a JavaScript-SDK for Web developers, too.

Steve Jobs presented a new feature of the iPhone – and also the iPod touch. Especially the iPod touch transforms into a new category of devices by adding location based services: By cooperating with Skyhook Wireless it is possible to get the own location by triangulating the signals from different WiFi-hotspots. The iPhone uses also the well known method by using the cell-ids to find the current location. It’s quite interesting, that it seems that Apple is not cooperating with the mobile network operators to get the location by cell ids and triangulation: They realized this feature by cooperating with Google. When I think of the hurdles to realize mobile Location Based Services (LBS) with the different operators … this is not a bad idea.
We really can be curious, whether the iPhone SDK will be the kickoff of a new era in LBS. Maybe Apple will also provide the iPhone web developers with the LBS-SDK Loki SDK for their web applications – that would really roll up the LBS-scene

Apple just put the Quicktime-Stream of the 2008 keynote online. So enjoy the show!

The hot news from the Macworld Keynote 2008 of Steve Jobs in brief:

• Intro: new Get-a-Mac commercial.
• Leopard Mac OS X 10.5: Steve presents the Leopard success story: until now over 5 Million Macs run on Mac os X 10.5, alias Leopard. No other OS version reached that fast market penetration rate before.
• TimeCapsule: Airport Extreme base station is extended with a server-scale hard drive to a new wireless NAS (Network Attached Storage) system. It’s now called TimeCapsule. It’s the missing piece for TimeMachine, the integrated Backupsolution of Mac OS Leopard. 500 GB USD 299.00. 1 TB USD 499.00.
• iPhone: Until today more than 4 Millionen iPhones have been sold worldwide. Smartphone market shares in the US: 1. RIM (39.0%), 2. Apple (19.5%), 3. Palm (9.8%) … Apple surpasses Palm from the beginning and is second biggest player in that market. The iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit) will be released in February. Softwareupdate for the iPhone with lots of new features … most of them have been posted on rumor sites in the last days. Available today for all existing iPhone users.
• iPod touch: iPod touch Update for USD 20.00 including 5 new apps: Maps, Mail, Stocks, Notes, and Weather
• iTunes Movie Rental: the rumored movie rental is introduced to iTunes. All major film studios joined. Basic rule: 30 days to start watching, 24 hours to finish. US Rental will start today, international rental will start later this year. 2.99$ / 3.99$ for new releases. Movies should be available 30 days after DVD release.
• Apple TV Version 2: The new generation works as a stand alone solution without a computer. The improved Apple TV solution can play DVD and HD quality (with Dolby 5.1 Sourround Sound) movies. In addition it’s possible to consume audio- and video-podcasts as well as Flickr & .Mac photos.
• MacBook Air: The Thinnovation of the day is the MacBook Air, Steve Jobs revealed at the end of the keynote. The thinnest notebook in the world with a 13.3 inch widescreen display, a backlit keyboard and a multitouch trackpad. But Apple cuts off some "od technologies": No optical drive anymore, no Firewire, no Ethernet. It’s a real wireless device – every CEO will get jelious. The 80 GB version with a state of the art hard drive costs USD 1,799.00 – the 64 GB SolidState harddrive is priced at exclusive USD 3,098.00 and is the dream of every CTO … and the nightmare of every CFO.

The PDF-book of Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson has just been updated to Version 2007-5-6. It now covers the newest developments within the Rails development community. Especially the "observer" and "sessions" sections have been updated.
Although I can recommend the paper-version of the book … it’s really great for reading in the park … Dave and David really show with their PDF-version how to make innovative use of electronic books.
All standard e-books I bought before always made me angry afterwards: The rigid Acrobat-DRM treated my like a potential criminal. And the e-books had no extra features compared with the paper version – only the disadvantages of an e-book.
Dave and David used another approach with their second edition of "Agile Web Development with Rails": Mehr …