This morning, at 5:00 am New Zealand time, the main event of the Worldwide Developers Conference took place. This is when Steve Jobs, Apple CEO presents his Keynote. I set my alarm for 4:00 am so I could get up and have plenty of time to do stuff before the keynote, but I ended up sleeping through it and getting up at 5:10 am. At this point, I quickly hopped out of bed to get my laptop and I brought it into bed with me and loaded up many sites so I could see the live happenings, with pictures, of the keynote event.

The whole internet knew what the main parts of the keynote were going to be about, the 3G iPhone, and 3rd Party Applications, as well as the possibility of OS X 10.6. And they were pretty much spot on. It started with a little bit about the next version of OS X but then they moved on and talked a lot about 3rd party applications coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch. At this stage, I was happy I didn’t get up earlier or else I would have been waiting a long time for nothing. I didn’t miss much and there was not much to it. Some developers showed off their apps and games that will be coming to the App Store when it launches.

Towards the end of the keynote, this is when the moment everyone was waiting for came, the announcement of the 3G iPhone. It is basically the same as the original iPhone. The new features are the 3G capabilities, GPS, plastic backing, flushed headphone jack, thinner edges and better battery life. And the price $199 and $299 USD for the 8 and 16 GB versions. This is with a 2-year contract with AT&T. The phone is going to be launching in 22 countries, including Australia and New Zealand on July 11th.

I want this device a lot! And after I watch the video version of the keynote, I am going to want to 100 times more. Reading about it and looking as some pictures of it makes me excited but hearing about it from the Steve Jobs and seeing it on video is going to increase the hype for me by an infinite amount. The only issue I had, was that I was not prepared to get this phone on a contract with Vodafone, but later on in a press release, they announced that it would be available on prepaid and contract plans.

Now this phone is going to be quite expensive in New Zealand. To get an idea of the price it will cost, double the US price and add about 25% on to it, which would make the iPhone cost probably around $500 to $650 NZD, and I assume that is with a 2 year contract with Vodafone. The prepaid version, I would say yu are looking about about $1,000 and $1,200. That is way too much! I am not willing to pay anywhere near that amount, especially for a cellphone I will hardly use as a cellphone.

Since that is the case, I would be better off with an iPod Touch. Although I would really love an iPhone because I don’t carry around a cellphone and an iPod + iPhone would be the idea device and pocket companion for me. At this stage, I would be happy to obtain a original iPhone. I don’t particularly need the 3G and GPS features so a simple iPhone would still be more than ideal for me. I might think about looking for a second hand iPhone but I still like the idea of having the iPhone 3G. We will see how this plays out.

Last week, I got accepted into the Live Mesh Tech Preview (also known as Beta.) I had only heard a little bit about it from various websites and podcasts and it sounded and looked like an interesting service. Live Mesh is basically cloud storage, with basically all the same functionality as Dropbox except with a bit more added.

When you download the client, which is around 2MB in size, the installation starts in the background. This took quite a while to install, and even other people I know have commented on that. There is no progress indicator or anything so you are expected to sit back and wait for it to just do its thing. The only reason I can think of for the lengthy installation time is that it probably downloads the actually application off the internet, similar to how the other Windows Live services do it. I really dislike this and would prefer to download the actual install file manually. This was the only issue I had with Mesh, everything else is pretty much positive.

You are again greeted with a new folder on your computer, except here it goes in your User directory. This is basically where you will get access to everything in your Live Mesh. When you create a new folder, it goes in there and any files synchronized between your computer and the cloud are put here. Another interesting thing is that any folders outside here that you wish to synchronize, their shortcut will appear in the directory. This is good as it makes it easy to manage what is going on in the Live Desktop and other computers that are synchronized.

Synchronization with folders is quite fast, with information on progress of the upload and download. If you only synchronize one file, it happens so fast you wouldn’t even notice it going on in the background. You get 5GB storage which is plenty of space for backing up Documents and a few other files. Its not ideal for video or loads of images, but if you had those types of files, you probably wouldn’t want to back them up online anyway (unless you have a fat pipe.) You can synchronize between your computer, the Live Desktop, and other computer. This is great because it means that your Documents folder can be synchronized between multiple computers, and the cloud.

The Live Desktop is the way you access your files and folders on the web. Once you log on, you are greeted with a very straight forward user interface. The thing that makes it so straight forward, is the fact it looks like a very basic Windows desktop, with folders on the desktop that are folders you have synced to the Live Desktop. Clicking the folder will open a window that looks and operates very similar to Windows Explorer does. From here you can view items in the folders as well as make changes, make new folders and upload.

I also tried the image viewer. As I clicked on a picture in Firefox, I was in for a rude awakening, you need Silverlight 2 to use the photo browser, and at this stage, you cannot get SL2 for Firefox. I understand this is in beta so its not much of an issue and shouldn’t be for too long. In Internet Explorer however, it looked and worked pretty well, it had the thumbnails at the top, and you could see the image and use the familiar forward, backwards and play buttons to go through the pictures and start and stop a slideshow. I did find it to be a little slow to load a bunch of relatively small images, but that could have been due to a number of factors.

There are a whole heap of options that are not available yet and at this stage it is Windows only, but they do plan for a Mac client for synchronization. I was very happy with this service and it was done really well. If it is this good at the beta stage, its going to be one hell of a service when it is out of beta and open to the public. There are a few things that I have missed do talk about such as syncing to two machines and remote desktop and such, but at this stage, I have yet to play around with that. You can hear about those from other people, when I cover this again when it is out of beta with more features and functionality, or you can go and try them yourself. I would highly recommend this service to every Windows user out there because it is that great.

Last month, I was playing around with a service called Dropbox. The name of the site pretty much tells you what it basically is, a service that allows you to drop files into a folder on your computer and it syncs it up onto the cloud (the internet) for access there.

When you first install the application, it puts a folder in your Documents directory called My Dropbox. This is where all your files go to get synced with the server, and it is also where files that get put into your Dropbox get downloaded to. When uploading files to the web, I found it to be quite slow, and when I say slow, I mean that my connection can handle a fair bit more. The other issue I had here was that the program wasn’t very good at telling me the progress of my upload, as well as the speed it was going. It was very inaccurate and most of the time, looked as if it had stalled.

You also have a public folder which is a folder that you can publicly share the files in, as long as you give the link to the people you want to share with. You can also share other folders too. You can view and download files using a web browser by logging on to your Dropbox account and you have access to all your files from there. You can also share folders with other Dropbox users. There you have a common folder and it appears on both peoples Dropbox’s and when anyone adds a file to it, it will automatically sync with the other people.

My only real grip was with the uploading of files to the Dropbox. There are still many ways in which this service can grow. The storage is limited to 2GB per user, and depending on how many files you have, and how much you want synced to the internet, this could be a huge limitation for some people. The service could also improve with backup. At the moment, it is only good at backing up individual files, and even then, there are services out there that do it a lot better.

There are many features that I have missed mentioning and overall, Dropbox is an amazing service. It does what it does reasonably well. I am really looking forward at seeing what they do to improve this service and make it a real competitor in the online storage/sync/backup space. If you would like to try it out, I have 9 invitations, and you can get one by commenting below. If you haven’t already, please do try out this great service.

I had been using Minefield since Alpha 8 which was quite a long time ago. My Firefox profile has been used by Firefox 2 since I last reinstalled Windows on my computer and it had bee used by multiple Alpha and Beta builds (lots of nightlies) and during all the updates, my profile had become a mess and full of information from various versions of Firefox/Minefield. When Firefox 3 RC1 came out, I decided that it was time to start my profile again, except I will save my load of bookmarks I have collected over the years.

The process of backing up my Bookmarks was really simple. Using the new Places manager, exporting the database was simple. I needed a way of getting the saved passwords so I had them on record incase I didn’t know a password and didn’t want to get that information emailed to me. I managed to find a cunning way of backing up and accessing them if needed. After that, I went into the application data folder and renamed my profile. I didn’t delete it straight away in case something when horribly wrong and I wanted to turn back.

This is where the first problem arose. I couldn’t open Firefox because it kept telling me it was still open and in use. It clearly wasn’t due to it not showing in the process manager. I renamed the profile back to its original name and Firefox opened fine. I renamed it back and again Firefox had trouble. What I needed to do was open Firefox with the profile manager so I could create a new profile from scratch. Peppery found it and told me over IM how to do it. It was relatively simple.

With a new profile, I felt lost. This wasn’t my browser! My browser has extensions and acts differently to this. I first went and downloaded a couple of extensions that I needed. After all that, I then went and changed some of the setting in the add-ons and in the program options. Now all I needed was my bookmarks, and my tabs. Restoring my bookmarks was just as simple and fast as exporting them. In a click or two, my bookmarks were all back, and from there, I could restore all my tabs.

Logging into all my sites was going to be a challenge. Because all my passwords were gone, I had to rely on my memory, and my cheat sheet, to assist me with logging on to websites and saving the passwords so I no longer have to remember, not that I have to remember, all my passwords. From this, I am reminded about one of the best features of Firefox 3, the simple password remember bar. It is a godsend compared to the old save password dialog box.

The only real problem I had with this is the address bar. In my old profile, I had 90 days of history and that really made the new address bar work great. It still works good with only bookmarks, but the thing that makes it a wonder, is the addition of history. The feature is definitely not as rich without it, and having no history made it quite useless. Although after a few weeks, it started to become useful again.

I do believe that a clean out was good, and I noticed a significant amount of speed improvements, but that was more likely due to it not having 90 days of history holding it back, and many unused extensions disabled. Even though I did lose history which was slightly annoying, I am very happy I did it and would consider doing it with the released of Firefox 4. I really love Firefox 3 and a clean out did wonders!