According to Macrumors, the iPhone SDK will be announced on March 6th.

“Please join us to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK and some exciting new enterprise features,” Apple said in an invitation sent to reporters.

Are we to assume Apple has licensed ActiveSync?

Are we going to see a demo of SAP’s iPhone client?

What about Sling? iChat? iPlayer? Over-the-air Calendar syncing? Push email? PDF Reader? File Manager? Skype?

Okay, tonight I sent out a document to a few friends. 1.6 MB sent out to my email server. Whoosh. Some of my friends have very limited mailboxes from their ISP. Some only 30 MB, some as high as 50 MB. Very few are unlimited. I used to be worried about emailing out attachments because no-one likes waiting for attachments to download.

But the message I sent didn’t just go to my email server. The email was sent, but the attachment was sent to my file server. This meant the document didn’t actually leave my network. In it’s place, there was a URL to my file server. The 1.6 MB didn’t go anywhere near my mail server and it only left the file server when the recipients clicked on the URL. As the file server was on my LAN, the transfer was quick and seamless.

For me, my file server is public so the files were sent out of my network eventually. If you’re part of an internal team and would never send attachments externally, then this would mean you could more easily secure your files as they never leave the network!

Anyway. I’m now addicted to Rickshaw.

Rickshaw began life as an idea to help some of Mac-Sys’s customers who were in need of a method of sending large attachments. Sadly the local broadband and email providers put hard limits on the amount you can send in a single email. This made life very difficult for some. The original name of the app was going to be “UnfURL” which, as you can tell, is incredibly unwieldy and would only really reach out to geeks like me. And what the heck would the icon be like?

Yes, this is a solution built to resolve a problem. How to send email attachments without clogging up email servers.

The consensus wasn't to go live with the new site straight away after all but to create a better impression on the public by waiting on the final design and within no time at all Jordan had worked his graphical magic and delivered the goods.

I was supplied with a .psd mockup and got busy with Photoshop. I hadn't used this app in a while and it took some time to relearn how to use it but I managed to cut things up and proceeded to get stuck into the CSS.

Again I had to revisit some skills I hadn’t used since I started my current day job and when I looked at my first iteration in Internet Explorer I nearly cried.

Areas of difficulty I had were mainly concerned with how different browsers implement the box model and I also had to jump through some hoops to get opacity working but the end result is a consistent look across Firefox 2.0.x on Windows & Mac, Safari 3.0.x on Mac and IE 6.0.x on Windows. I haven't had a chance to test it with IE 7 but I imagine it is as broken as it's younger sibling

I've already been working on the release process so there's just a few minor tweaks to go and the new site will be available in production.

Pop on over to eirepreneur:

Gareth Coen and colleague Diane Roberts were inspired by the Enterprise Ireland bash during Paddy’s Valley to offer a similar event here in Ireland. Gareth, based in Silicon Valley, and Diane, based in Dublin, recently started a consultancy firm with the goal of helping bridge the gap between Valley and Irish tech start-ups.

If you want to know more, and save money, read on.

I remain sceptical about this approach, still likening it to trying to make Ireland into Hollywood by shipping a couple of casting agents over here but if you’re in charge of a tech startup and you’re running the kind of tech that would benefit greatly from a step onto the first rung of the ladder then you should register immediately using the secret code provided and enjoy.

Wil Shipley is planning to start something new.

Golden Braeburn is an attempt by Wil to change the way that Mac ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) work. In essence, you get screwed by shopping cart hosting companies, you get screwed by merchant account holders, you get screwed by card processing companies, you get screwed when you try to build your own shopping cart and trying to keep current.

In essence, you get screwed.

So, Golden Braeburn is about unscrewing you.

Cool. Let’s see what happens.

[I so have to create a company with an breed of Apple in the name. I’m such a fanboy.]

NiMUG are having another meeting!.

They’re also looking for some Professional Mac users who might want to show off a demo of what they do with their Macs. Or why they use the tools they do.

Anyone fancy a few minutes of free advertising?

Jens Alfke’s latest blog post rambles about a couple of things but finishes on something that I really empathised with:

Apple engineer: …and the layout needs to take into account ligatures and contextual forms, where adjacent letters change glyphs depending on neighboring characters, or even merge into a single glyph.

Sun engineer: C’mon, is this important? How many people need advanced typographic features like that, anyway?

Apple engineer: [after a pause] Well, there are over 900 million of them in India alone, and another 200 million or so in the Arabic world.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been bashing my head off a brick wall for, well, years. Motivating people to not do ‘half-a-job’ is actually hard.

Yesterday I almost had a stand up argument with a guy in my team in $BIG_COMPANY on the definition of ‘complete documentation’. I want documentation that can be read and understood by novices and managers. He wants it to be opaque enough so that you require understanding in order to work with it. In the end we sat down and he demonstrated it to me and I tried it. Within about 5 minutes we hit the first stumbling block in his documentation. He asked if I had the database interfaces set up. I replied “The what, the who and the where?”. So we need to add a piece about database interfaces. Then we needed to add another piece about how to log into the server. Then how to run an update. Then how to publish the updates. Then how to check the updates have been completed. In all, the additional bits were more than twice the original document and spawned two more wiki pages. In the end he agreed with me, the documentation was half done but the journey was a lot harder than it should have been.

Writing technical documentation is not an art. Writing it for non-technical users in order to help them learn is not an art. It just requires removing assumptions.

When building my second office in Mac-Sys, we had a square room to modify and the original assumption was to put a single wall, parallel to one of the other walls, in. By questioning the assumptions (that a single wall, parallel to another wall was the only way to go) we put in a ’shaped’ wall which provided us with nearly 50% more wall space in a room where wall space was a premium (for shelving, storage, desks, etc).

If you’re in a job you don’t like and your choices are (or seem to be)
a. leave
b. suffer
Then you really should be looking for c.. I can’t tell you what c. is for you but when I was in Nortel it was as a simple as bringing in a laptop to work with me and increasing my productivity (and reducing my frustration with Windows NT). There may be ways you can change your work day in order to improve your work life. Would working part time from home make a difference? Would time-shifting your work day by an hour help? (I much prefer working from 07:30-16:00 as it removes a LOT of traffic from my commute).

Remove your assumptions and consider new ways.

There is always a c.