So, the iPhone SDK is supposed to be announced sometime soon, and as such I realized that I needed an iPhone in order to experiment with it. :)  My new toy should be arriving soon!  My current phone sucks, so I'm looking forward to the goodness that comes with an iPhone.

Over the last 2-3 weeks it seems as though 90% of the blogs that I'm subscribed to have been talking about the iPhone.  This is me succombing to peer pressure :) 

While I'm not *really* planning on getting one, I couldn't help but stop by the Apple store this evening on my way home from Sam's b-day party, afterall it was right on my way home.  As I strolled into the Apple store I was a little surprised that there wasn't more people inside, afterall this was the iPhone!....surely everyone in Marlton hadn't already gotten one....or had they?  Anyway, after strolling in and playing it cool, I mosied my way on over to the iPhone section of the store.  While the store wasn't crowded, maybe 10-15 people total, every one of them was playing with an iPhone.  In the 5-10 minutes I was in the store I heard at least 100 "wow", "oohhs", "ahhs", and "I want one"'s.  I'm not sure how many of them came from my mouth, but the that's beside the point.  In short, the iPhone is a very sweet device.  The screen is amazing, the experience is better than that offered by any other device I've probably ever gotten to play with.  In the short time I was in the Apple store, I browsed the web, checked out the calculator, did a google maps search, searched for videos on YouTube, browsed photos, looked at how you make calls, but more than anything I just admired the device that Apple has put together.  After leaving the store, I thought about what affect the iPhone might have on my life.  I can see a lot of people buying one, like a really lot.  I wonder how long it'll be before I'm one of those people.

In reading blogs today I was extremely disappointed that I couldn't find any mention of new phones that are coming out soon.  In fact this entire week I haven't seen any mention of anything phone related.  What's a guy like me supposed to do? I need a new phone and nobody is talking about phones.  Whats the deal?

This post from John Lam has prompted me to download the latest beta of VMWare Fusion.  I've had a love hate relationship with Parallels ever since I installed it.  Back when I first got my MacBook Pro I was using BootCamp to run Windows, however, I found I often wanted to switch back and forth between OS X and Windows and rebooting took way too long.  When I heard about Parallels, I was instantly interested and proceeded to download the beta.  After using it for a while I decided to go ahead and purchase it.  Since Parallels supposedly supported booting from a BootCamp partition my plan was to continue using BootCamp so I could go directly into Windows and use it without suffering from the cost of virtualization, but also be able to run it from within OS X for those times when I wanted to use apps from both OS X and Windows at the same time.  Well Parallels ended up completely hosing my BootCamp setup so I needed to start fresh with a new image that wasn't based of BootCamp.  Ever since making this change I've been frustrated when trying to get things done in VS.NET (which is more of less the only Windows app I use anymore at home).  So, I'll be downloading VMWare Fusion in hopes that it resolves many of the issues that I have with Parallels.  It might mean shelling out a little extra cash but considering the "upgrade" for existing Parallels customers is $50 for version 3 it won't be that much of a difference.  I'll let you know how it goes. :)

My primary machine at home is a MacBook Pro.  Overall I really like it as my primary machine.  When I first got my MBP I used it almost exclusively to run Windows XP via BootCamp.  It wasn't until I tried using a beta of Parallels that promised BootCamp support that I ended up switching to Parallels and the wonder that is Coherence mode.  Over the last couple of months I've been doing mostly writing and/or work in TextMate so I've used XP via Parallels very little.  Lately I've had a couple of things come up that have me back in XP with VS.NET and some non book sample sized projects.  I'm finding it quite painful.  Most of my usual keyboard shortcuts don't work (althought I can get some to work by using the fn key), things seem painfully slow lately, and I'm not a happy camper.  I'm trying to figure out if I need to reconfigure my Parallels image, or if its time to switch back to BootCamp.

Let's face it, .NET is meant to rule the world. :)  With that out of the way let's get onto business.  Will someone from Apple please talk to the folks that run the engineering team and get them to dedicate some peeps to work on Cocoa#, or perhaps something completely Apple'ish such as iDotNet.  While Mono has made some great strides on the Linux and Windows sides of the world, it's still severely lacking when it comes to the Mac.  More specifically, Mac GUI's.  As Uncle Mac points out, running GUI applications on the Mac simply doesn't feel right.  Everything is very polished on a Mac, and X11 apps just aren't cutting it.  Since I'm asking for things I want that I have more or less no shot of getting, I might as well add this onto my list right?