WordCamp Arrives in Hong Kong

WordCamp HK 500x100

On April 5, 2009, WordCamp will arrive in Hong Kong for the first time. The event will be held at the Hong Kong Science & Technology Park.

WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events. At the Hong Kong event, there will be two speakers you will not want to miss, Matt Mullenweg and Hailin Wu, PhD.

Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic and foundering developer of WordPress, and Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com and Akismet.com, which Wu is a developer at.

If you develop WordPress themes and plugins, or simply use WordPress as a blogger, you will not want to miss this great opportunity to hear from the professionals inside WordPress about the platform’s future. While at the event you will also be able to network with fellow WordPress users in Hong Kong. Plus the event is currently FREE, so register now before you miss your chance.

iPhone Firmware 3.0 Announcement Summary

iPhone Firmware 3.0

Numerous improvements to the iPhone SDK was announced. This included enablement of peer-to-peer connectivity no prior pairing required so two iPhone can talk to each other without prior setup, Streaming audio and video over HTTP, Data detectors, built in VoIP API, and more. Push notification finally arrives for developers to add to their applications.

The hotly rumored and confirmed by Kevin Rose’s source last week, Cut Copy & Paste was demoed at the event. During the demo, Apple’s Scott Forstall, SVP iPhone Software, also included multiple selection of photos in the Photo app for sending them in an email.

Landscape mode keyboard will now be available in all Apple applications and will be available to developers to enable in their own application.

Finally, no more Jailbreaking to get the ability to delete or forward individual SMS messages. These features are now built into the new Messaging application. Audio files and contact cards can be sent via the new Messaging application.

There is a cross application search feature to search in the Mail, Contacts, Calendar and Notes applications, it is OS X Spotlight feature for the iPhone. If a result is not found among the local application, it will hit the server for possible results.

Finally, you do not have to worry about loosing your Notes stored on your iPhone, the new iPhone software will synchronize the Notes content with the Mac and Windows computer via iTunes.

Auto login for WiFi hotspots is built-in. So will this see the end to Devicescape’s “Easy Wi-Fi” and 3rd party application like “Seremgeti”?

Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) is now available in the new iPhone software but still does not include the other Bluetooth services in the Bluetooth standard.

For the end-users we will have to wait until this Summer. As this new firmware and SDK is only available in beta form to developers in the iPhone Developers Program. The upgrade will be free to iPhone 3G owners. Again iPod Touch users will have to pay USD9.95 for the firmware 3.0 upgrade.