Marvin Lee Dot Net

If you still remember the cool gadget called Polaroid PoGo and something about picking up conversations, Dell might just have something of that interest.

Dell has just released the Wasabi Ultramobile Photo Printer.

It’s selling for RM 529 with a discounted price of RM 190.

It uses the same Zero Ink^TM paper, similar to the one with Polaroid PoGo, but the prices here seems to be dearer.

The PoGo 30-packs (300 sheets) of photo paper cost £10. (Around RM 54) and Dell’s Wasabi Photo Paper – 8 Pack (96 Sheets) [add RM 83.00].

Check out the customization screen with additional charges by clicking the image below:

Gadgets, Hardware, Photography, Technology camera, Dell, Dell promo, Dell Wasabi, PoGo, Polaroid, printer, Zero Ink paper

In 2008, MySpace is still the top of the Social Networking Sites sector in the US. It was not without hint that MySpace is losing out though. The growth in MySpace is lacking but in Facebook it’s just the opposite. Facebook users grow exponentially, doubling almost every year.

Neilson Online’s report in September 2008 listed MySpace.com as the #1 social network with a year on year of 1% growth over Facebook at second place. In the same report, Facebook has a growth of 116%, showing that it can easily be the next social network leader which already happened right now.

According to data from January, Facebook saw 62.4 million unique visitors, beating MySpace and its 60.6 million uniques for the first time in the survey. At the end of 2008, MySpace still held a narrow lead, with 58.4 million unique visitors in December compared to Facebook’s 55.2 million.

A comparison at Alexa in February 2009, saw a global reach of Facebook (three months average) at somewhere at 14% while MySpace is at 5.5%. That’s almost three times of the latter.

Alexa currently ranks Facebook at #5 and MySpace at #8 based on their traffic behind sites like Yahoo, Google, Youtube, Live.com, which are mostly search engines.

It is clearly a victory for Facebook in the fight over the global share of social networks.

Of course, there is no permanent winner, but with the size of Facebook and the investments from millionnaires, billionnaires and large corporations, we can expect the growth to stay on at least for the next few years.

Internet Alexa, Facebook, MySpace, Nielson

Recently Eddy shared a link about an article reporting that developers for iPhone applications are in high demand.
This is due to the surge in numbers of iPhone users and also the applications that are available for sale in the Apple App Store.

Developers who created applications are able to put them into the App Store for free or to list them for a fee. The idea of having an application created and then sells for a small fee for every download is tempting as it could become a meaningful sum if one’s application is viral enough for thousands, if not millions of downloads. 😉
In the US alone, there is an estimated over 2 millions iPhone users in 2008.

Job seekers struggling to land gigs during the economic downturn are going to wish they had iPhone programming skills.
Source: Wired

So, being a developer and waiting for my iPod Touch to arrive, I had intentions to pickup some skills to develop applications on the iPhone. There seems to be a list of comprehensive resources for anyone interested to pickup the platform from Apple’s iPhone Dev Center. Video tutorials, documents, sample codes and reference library are all a mouse-click away at the Dev Center.

However, before I’m able to start my tinkering with the iPhone SDK, I found out that it only runs on Mac OS X Leopard.

iPhone SDK requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X Leopard version 10.5.4 or
later. Xcode 3.1.2 is also available separately for Mac-only development and is
compatible with Intel and PowerPC Macs running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 and later.

Source : iPhone SDK Readme (PDF)

Doomed!

So it doesn’t matter if you’re having Linux or Windows, you’re not able to be an iPhone developer.

Fret not, there are ways to workaround it though. Even for those owning AMD-based machines, there could still be oppurtunities for you.

There seem to be 3 ways to have iPhone SDK to work with without an actual Apple Mac machine.

1) VMWare

2) Dual boot

3) Hackintosh PC

VMWare

With VMWare installed on your host operating machine which can be a Microsoft Windows or Linux of different flavours, then you can install the Mac OS X Leopard as the guest operating system. There is a guide from the insanelymac forum that shows how to install Leopard onto VMware Workstation 6.5.

Dual boot

Dual booting is like installing two operating system and you get to choose which one you want to boot up. An example of dual booting with Windows Vista is provided by nevarDeath and also another step-by-step guide at blogulate.com.

Hackintosh PC

Hackintosh PC is a name for computer created by a project to setup Mac onto a PC. This project is called OSx86. As Apple has move to Intel Processors in 2006, having Mac OS X running on non-Apple hardware is thus possible. To learn how to setup a Hackintosh PC, read this and to install Leopard onto it, read this guide from Lifehacker.com.

Disclaimer: I will not be liable to any loss from the guide above which are not provided by me. Please follow them at your own risk. I have yet to use any of them. 🙂

Although in the technology world, there are a lot of workarounds or hacks, they are still just ‘workarounds’.

If only Apple could provide:
1) SDK on operating systems other than Apple Mac, so that there could be more developers who can venture into iPhone application development
2) Free iPhone developer program which currently charges $99 and $299.

I’m not abandoning the idea of myself creating iPhone apps yet, but as of the current moment it’s just in my “keep-it-first” list.
Any Asians iPhone developer out there?

Ah yes, there’s this 9 year old developer that I know of. 🙂

Hardware, Software, Technology Apple, Apple App Store, iPhone, iPhone Dev Center, Mac, Mac OS X Leopard, SDK