Want to develop apps for iPhone?
Here is how you can start.

1. You got to have a mac for this. iPhone SDK is only available for Mac OS X platform. No windoze !!!
2. You need to know C and Objective-C languages.
3. Learn the XCode IDE
4. Learn ‘Cocoa’ and ‘Cocoa Touch’ frameworks.

Apple Dev Center contains great amount documentation for a begginer. Apart from apple site following sites are also resourceful.

1. Cocoa Dev Central
2. Get this cool book on Mac OS X developement
3. Resources from Cocoaheads
4. Beginner’s videos for learning Cocoa

Its official now. Vodaphone is brining iPhone to India and it has already started pre-registering customers for it.

Here is the link where you can register for iPhone in india.

Congratulations India on getting iPhone !!!

Why is that Apple has to innovate and world has to copy ?

Apple brought graphical user interface with mouse to the world and windows copied it.

We, kinda had accepted that computers had to look ugly with big monitor and big tower, but  Apple broke the trend way back in 1998 by introducing all-in-one iMac. It took whole industry 10 years to copy that All-in-one style and still couldn’t do it as good as Apple.

Evolution of iMac, the All-in-one computer

Here is the latest version of iMac and rest of the industry trying to copy it.

Then came the iPod and iTunes. Nobody ever thought listening music on MP3 player could be so enjoyable and glamorous.Rest of the industry cant figure out how to just get these things right and leaves apple alone to become No.1 music retailer in US. Microsoft’s copy, Zune is declining in sales. Creatives Zen and many others are trying hard to get small pie of Apple’s iPod share.

Apple is trying to re-invent the TV. Apple TV is going in that direction. Now you can rent movies through your Apple TV and watch them on you big screen TV. As soon as Apple revealed Apple TV, Blockbuster woke up and jumped with Netflix player and Netgear with Netgear DIGITAL ENTERTAINER HD. And both of them look really ugly infron of Apple TV.

Few years ago when networking went wireless, wireless routers came into picture. Everybody accepted that a router has to look ugly with its horn-like antennas. But not Apple.

Apple brought in Airport and it looks gorgeous. Rest of the Industry is still trying hard, to get rid of the horns.

And finally came the iPhone. Before iPhone, there were phones, apart from making calls, you could use them to browse internet, access GPS, watch videos, see and take pictures and listen to music. And nothing really worked well. They were slow. Internet pages looked weird. Music didnt sound well. GPS was there for just names sake. With iPhone, the phone industry leap-frogged 10 years ahead. Now everyone is coming with large, touch screen, virtual keyboard phones. Look at iPhones competitors.

If you are like me, you would probably be using a Mac, Linux and Windows and a website hosting server which in most cases is a Linux. Transferring and using files across these platforms is never an easy task. 

I am listing some of the problems I faced and then solutions for them.

1. If you have dual boot machine where you have windows or linux or mac, you cant mount the drive on which other OS is installed.

2. If you have website where you need to keep modifying files, FTP isn’t a good solutions. Wouldnt it be just  great, to mount the remote drive locally and start working on it directly?

3. If you have two computers, say one windows and one mac, and one hard-disk for data backup, you cant access the same disk simultaneously from both computers.

FTP, WinSCP, SMB and many such solutions were created to solve cross platform file systems access. But still, there isnt a single solution which works across all platform.

Access to NTFS disk and mounting remote disk/folder locally.

1. FUSE project which covers mostly all OS except windows is currently the best solutions available. Its port for Mac OS X called MacFuse when used with SSHFS  allows any Unix based OS to mount locally and when used with NTFS-3G allows to modify any NTFS formatted disks.

Accessing Mac formatted disk on Windows.

2. MacDrive utility on windows allows read write access to any Mac formatted disk (including iPod and iPhone)

Using a hard disk simultaneously.

3. A firewire hard-drive when connected to a bus can be accessed simultaneously from different machines,  provided both machines can understand the file system (such as FAT is recognised by most of the OSs). The other recent solution is to connect such backup drive to wireless router which supports USB Disk and then access it from both machines. AirPort Extreme, a wireless router from Apple does support this functionality. The AirPort creates SMB Share out of this disk and allows it mount on both computers.