From June 11 to 15 it’s all about the Mac developer community in San Francisco under the warm sun of California: At the Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference the whole hardware and software developer community is gathering to get and exchange Mac first-hand insights.
The company is running a scholarship program for students developing for the Mac - 500 students will get scholarships to enter the conference for free (a US $ 1,559 $ value). But coming to California has to be arranged by the student him- or herself.
Application deadline is March 19, 2007 - so, if you are a student and want to join the conference, apply now.

Source: development.apple.com

The 27 European telecommunication ministers held a meeting today at the CeBit in Hanover, Germany. They informally agreed on mandatory caps on mobile phone roaming charges within Europe.
Last year, European Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding started the discussion roaming charges being too dear within Europe. But he following volunteer price reductions by some of the mobile operators are not enough in the eyes of the EU telecommunication ministers. Read the rest of this entry »

The German mobile service "Call a Bike" shows, that mobile services do not only need to be virtual. This year the mobile phone based bike-sharing service is rolled out in Stuttgart, the city you probably know as the home of DaimlerChrysler.
The system is quite simple to use: At all major crossings within the city users can rent a bike with a mobile phone call - and return it. The user receives a code via SMS to his or her mobile phone and is able to open the electronic lock of the bike. Returning the bike is as easy as renting it: Just leave it at a major crossing and check out with another phone call and the deactivation code of the electronic lock. The registered user is charged by minute. Read the rest of this entry »

The new Quicktime and iTunes update is available via Software Update. But be careful: Some users has serious problems after the update installation.
This time the update bug catched me, too: After finishing the update of iTunes 7.1 and Quicktime 7.1.5 via Software Update the Finder crashed every 90 seconds and restarted. Restarting the Finder brings all Finder-windows in the foreground - even if you are working in an other program … Steve would say … "Yuck!"
In my case, the StuffIt-Engine of StuffIt Deluxe was the problem - thanks to the glorious bug tracker Robert from the Apple-support discussion forum.
So this means wait, see and hope that Apple will fix that conflict - or update Quicktime, iTunes and StuffIt Deluxe.

Links: Apple-Support discussion forum

The UNIX foundation of Mac OS X and JAVA as a platform independent programming language show their advantages when you search for development tools on the Mac.
You better don’t look back to the times of Mac OS 7, 8 or 9 and the beginning of the web revolution: most of the time you had to deal with stone-age tools as a web developer on the Mac.
But, how can you setup a productive web development environment on the Mac, today? Which software supports the development of server- and database-based web applications? Read the rest of this entry »