This is the day: Apple will start their press event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. At 10:00 am PST or 07:00 pm MEZ.

Like the legendary Steve Jobs Keynotes in the past, it is quite a tradition that some journalists blog live from the event … so Apple fans all over the planet can take part on the press conference. Here are the most important liveblogs:

• Jason Snell, Dan Moren & Jonathan Seff, Macworld.com
• Jason Chen for Gizmodo
• Erica Ogg for cnet news
• Joshua Topolsky for engadget
• John Paczkowski for All Things Digital
• Technologizer staff for Technologizer
• Ars staff for Ars Technica
• John Biggs for TechCrunch / CrunchGear
• Brian X. Chen for Gadget Lab at Wired

As soon as the videorecording of the event is online as a Quicktime videostream … there’ll be an update

Apple invited the press to their “Come see our latest creation” event in San Francisco on January 27th. And the computer and e-book industry starts trembling with fear: Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are getting really nervous, because Apple may conquer the emerging market of Active Content.

Apple did not announce that the company will be engaged in the e-book or tablet-market – but the rumors about an “iSlate” or “iPad” are quite persistent. Therefore Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer tried to steal Apple the show at his keynote at the CES in Las Vegas: He just renamed the tablet-PCs on stage as “slate-PCs” … but it’s not about a name.

Kindle Development Kit (picture: Amazon)

Amazon is probably in a better starting position in the battle for market shares in the emerging market of Active Content: They have a lot of experience with content distribution with the Kindle and they are in direct contact with the publishers … but Apple has the ability to rouse the e-book-market from slumber by innovation. They may transfer the pathetic e-books into a new and emerging market: Active Content.

There are a lot of advantages for Apple to tip the scales:

• big and growing iPhone SDK developer community … Amazon has to build up a comparable dev community around the KDK
• well-engineered and sophisticated iPhone SDK … with a full bandwidth of network-, graphic-, data- and sensor-support
• color instead of grayscale screens and computing and graphic power
• touchscreen with gestures
• amazing design
• … and there are probably some innovations we don’t expect

Amazon’s move to open up the Kindle to 3rd party developers and create a platform for Active Content is absolutely right … but can it compete with Apples offering? On January 27th 2010 we’ll know much, much more.

MAMP, a local webserver environment for the Mac, is perfect for testing, developing and designing with WordPress. MAMP comes with a ready to use configuration of Apache, MySQL and PHP in a single folder.
But after installing and configuring a WordPress blog, you may loose the access to the MAMP start page:

Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /MAMP/ on this server.
Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) PHP/5.2.11 DAV/2 Server at localhost Port XXXX

That’s a big issue, as the start page links to the local phpMyAdmin page for MySQL-database configuration. So you cannot admin the database anymore.
I traced down the problem to a wrong placed file: When I configured the WordPress installation via the web-interface, an .htaccess file was placed in the root directory of my harddrive. Quite scary … but a problem which can be fixed easily

As always: no guarantee and on your own risk … especially the Terminal is a wonderful tool … but if you do the wrong thing, you may be in serious trouble!

You normally do not recognize the .htaccess file within the Finder: all filenames starting with a dot are hidden files in a UNIX system … and the Finder does not show those hidden files. But if you use the Terminal, you can look at all the hidden files easily.
So fire up the Terminal app and go to the root directory of your hard drive:

cd /

then looks at all the files in your root directory:

ls -la

If you find a .htaccess there … you probably found your problem. But look inside the file before your rename or delete it:

cat .htaccess

The easiest way to proceed is to rename the htaccess file:

mv .htaccess htaccess-backup

This way the file is shown in the Finder again and does not confuse your MAMP installation. If you know what to do you can delete the renamed file now within the Finder and drag it to the trash

Adobe announced the export capability from Adobe Flash Professional CS5 to built native iPhone apps. This is the next round in the battle for market shares in the field of mobile application platforms.
Adobe tried to position Flash with their shrinked down Flash Light as a global OS independent application development platform for mobile devices. Today more than 800 million mobile devices are Flash Light enabled. It looked like they found the philosopher’s stone – but when you dig deeper, Adobe is facing a lot of issues:

• Those more than 800 million mobile devices have different screen sizes, different buttons or keyboards and some even have a touch screen. That does not help developers to create stunning GUIs on mobiles where every little pixel needs to be arranged.
• Flash is very performance hungry. That’s why they had to shrink it down to Flash Light – but even flash light is struggling with performance issues on many of the 800 million devices.
• Adobe does not provide a application store infrastructure for its developers … maybe one of the biggest issues of all

But on March 6, 2008 an other threat to Flash and Flash Light appeared: Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone SDK which provided a easy way to create third party applications for the iPhone with high mobile performance and the ability to take advantage of most of the sensors – like touchsceen, accelerometer, microphone, camera. And Apple solved one of the biggest hurdles for mobile application developers: They provided an easy application store solution for the developers to sell their apps or distribute them for free. And also the market for these native iPhone applications is quite attractive: There are more than 50 million iPhones and iPod touch devices out there – all of them having the exact same screen size, all of them having a touch sceen, all of them having an accelerometer. Apple attracted a lot of independent developers as well the big names in game industry with their mobile application ecosystem.
Bringing Flash support to the iPhone Safari web browser was blocked by Apple because of those big performance issues. Apple also did not license Flash Light for the iPhone – quite logic because they built up their own developer base and their own mobile app ecosystem.
The only chance Adobe had was to built up an “injection”-strategy and develop their Flash authoring tool into an Objective-C & Cocoa code generator which allows Flash developers to create native iPhone applications by the press of a button. Then the Flash developers can upload their app to the iTunes AppStore and use it as a selling and distribution channel.
This probably wasn’t an easy job and it will be quite interesting to watch Apple’s reaction on this move. It probably will have a massive effect on the AppStore as this will flood the store with new apps: More creativity and more junk.

Louis Gerbarge spotted the technical issues of the Adobe Flash to native iPhone code generation – and takes a look on the performance and private API issues of the beta version of the CS5 solution. His post makes clear that taking the Flash way won’t offer the Flash developers the features and beauty of the uncountable iPhone SDK 3.x APIs.

Some days ago I published a first solution for reactivating printing on OKI-printers from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard … some of you managed it to reactivate the printer by following the instructions – others are still coping with that problem. Also I was disappointed to see that the solution broke again and I wasn’t able to print from Snow Leopard again. That was really annoying – so I spent some time again to find a proper solution. Here it is: Version 2 of how to solve the problem … and as always: no guarantee and on your own risk:

Problem: After updating from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard the installed printer driver for the OKI-postscript driver does not work anymore. Here it’s an OKI MFP C5540 … but it should also work with other models, like the OKI C5450 or C8800. The printer diver was installed under Leopard and worked quite well. After finishing the update to 10.6 you are able to send a print job to the printer, but an error message shows up in the print queue.

Diagnosis: Two bugs may cause the problem: Some of the OKI-printer drivers just disregard case sensitivity in their path names – this wasn’t a problem in former Mac OS X versions – but it is a problem in Snow Leopard. The other bug – which even leads to a malfunction if the path names are right – is some wrong file permissions. And this causes Snow Leopard to hiccup when you try to print on an OKI-Printer.

Solution: The easiest way to solve the problems and get rid of the bugs is following three major steps:

1. Delete the old OKI printer drivers under the folder “/Library/Printers/” … if there are any.
2. Install a new OKI driver. This will also create the folder “/Library/Printers/OKIDATA”. Then install the specific printer driver for your OKI-printer (especially the PPD file).
3. Repair the file permissions.

You only need the OKI printer drivers and you have to put in some Terminal commands. But let’s do it step by step:

• Log into your Mac as an administrator.
• Step 1: Delete the old OKI files and folders:
• Don’t forget to backup your data before you start!
• Navigate to the following folder in the Finder and delete the folder “OKIDATA” or “Okidata” – if there is any.

  Macintosh HD/Library/Printers/

• Within the folder “PPDs” you may find also some OKI files – at my Mac it was “Oki C5540.ppd” – delete also these files.
• Step 2: Re-installation of the OKI printer driver. The installation program of older printer drivers may cause problems when creating the “OKIDATA” folder: They may name this folder “Okidata” and put in an old OKfilterA-file.
• Therefore you should download and install the printer driver for C5550n-MFP of OKI-USA specifically for Leopard users first. Just click on the “Mac OS X.5″ link on the printer driver page of OKIDATA-USA, download the installer.
• Then start the installer and put in your password. The installation program will create the folder “OKIDATA” as needed.
• If the C5550n MFP is not the OKI printer you have, you have to download install also the specific printer driver for your OKI-printer model. I had to choose the C5540n MFP. The installation will not overwrite the folder OKIDATA and only put’s the missing PPDs into the right folders.
• Step 3: Repair folder & file permissions. Open the program “Terminal” – you’ll find it under “Programs/Utilities”.
• Input the following command into the appearing command-line window and finish it with pressing the return-key:

  sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/Printers/OKIDATA

• Now, you’ll be prompted for your password … so put in your password of the admin account and finish the input by pressing the return key again
• Input a second command into the command-line window and finish it with pressing the return-key:

  sudo chmod 775 /Library/Printers/OKIDATA/Filters/OKfilterA

• A little complicated – but it works. Just exit the Terminal program and restart your Mac. Then you can setup your OKI-printer and select the specific OKI-printer driver manually.