For those of us lucky enough to have iPhones or iPod touch devices, Apple just released the 10.5.3 update which includes a little gem.

You can now sync your contacts, via Address Book, with Yahoo, Google, Exchange and .Mac. Google and Yahoo are new to the party with 10.5.3. It’s only a matter of time before this extends to Calendar events considering Apple’s work in that area.

It’s nice to see this sort of thing, especially considering that Apple was the reason we stopped further development of SyncBridge back in late 2006. Sure - we handed the market to others who have made some money out of it but, realistically, it was hard to get excited by ‘calendars’ and Apple’s movements in that space came at just the right time for us.

This server has been running under beta mode for several months and 2 days ago I took the plunge to update it. We are now running the full Leopard Server 10.5.2. While I was at it I took the opportunity to update WordPress to the latest version and now all is working happily.

Also new with this version I’m trying out backing up the Server with Apples Time Machine and so far it seems to be doing its job.

Will be adding more Virtual Hosts on here soon using Apples wiki and blog posts. Will keep you updated.

Looking at the WWDC, World Wide Developers Conference, section on Apples website you’ll see the logo to the left of this blog post. This, according to MacWorld.com, is the first time that the conference, which is held every year, has actually sold out. I know a number of people have been holding out for a bit and may be so disappointed.

I, on the other hand, am so glad that I managed to get my ticket just shortly after they were released. I have to admit that I’m really looking forward to this, though it seems that if you want to get in and see the Steve Jobs Keynote, you will need to be there queueing from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. I’ll try my best.

I usually try and give a few comments on each of the new iPhone software development kits that are released and was putting something together for the fourth version when all of a sudden they released a new one.

The fourth version fixed a large number of bugs within the development kit and made it a lot more stable and even added a proper Interface Builder for the iPhone, but this new, beta 5 version, cements that even more and then some. It may even be getting close to an actual release candidate.

You now use OpenGL | ES on the iPhone simulator and it works a treat. The main thing to remember is that the simulator runs a lot faster than the actual device. I don’t know why they couldn’t have throttled the speed to match more closely the actual device.

I’ve been running the new version 5 for around a week now and haven’t found any real problems with it. It handles certain things differently than before and you end up having to go through everything re-coding your work just to get it working again, but this is, as they say, still a beta version.

BarcampBelfast 2008 is planned for Saturday 21st June, 9am - 5pm. Last year I had other commitments and couldn’t make it but I intend to turn up this year. Mac-Sys did sponsor it last year and will be doing so again. I think we need more of these events.

There’s already a set of speakers lined up but they’re looking out for more if you’re interested. I would like to speak on something but fear that my areas of knowledge are sufficiently shallow that there’d be nothing I could really teach anyone, especially when faced with the people speaking there.

The subjects do tend to be tech-heavy but that’s the problem. The subjects I know well enough to talk about (or could brush up on) would be of little relevance to the audience (unless people really want to know about OSPF or MLTs…I know I don’t!) and I’m sure no-one wants to hear about my epic failure at becoming a programmer (it’s code night tonight in Bangor, oh yes…)

Make the effort to turn up.