Peter Norris

Yesterday, Kevin Rose of Digg, along with Daniel Burka, Leah Culver, and Shawn Allen, releases their latest project: Pownce. But what is Pownce? It’s Twitter, IM, and File-sharing all rolled into one great service.

Once you create your account you can add other people as friends. And then, you send messages, files, links, and events to one person, multiple people, or everybody. It brings some of the great features of services like Twitter and combines them with new features that we have yet to see.

Pownce is both a web and desktop application. Pownce make’s use of Adobe’s AIR interface to bring web functionality right to the desktop in a small, well-designed application.

The downside is Pownce is currently invite-only, as it is still only in the early stages of development. I have yet to get an invite and really test it out, but once I do I’ll post my impressions.

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A hacker by the name of Gabriel says he broke into the network at Bloomsbury (the British publisher of the book series) and stole a document containing important plot details of the 7th book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The details were posted online at insecure.org.While it’s always possible that these details are true, chances are they are not and Gabriel just wants to have fun with diehard Harry Potter fans. I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone if these rumors are true, but if you want to know what they say, click here.

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As UOIT’s first undergraduate graduating class receives their degrees, so do 8 students who graduate from Canada’s first masters program in IT Security. UOIT is often referred to as the new MIT of the North.

This program is the first one it’s kind in Canada and one of few word-wide.The MITS program focuses not only on the technical aspect of security, but also on computer law and ethics, cryptography, and secure coding. 8 students graduated from the program this year (the first graduates) and Clemens Martin, one of the professors, said that enrollment is rising and competition is tough as there are more applicants than spaces in the program.   

The itbusiness.ca article can be read here and more information on the MITS program is available here.

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Its now been 2 days since the WWDC keynote and I’ve finally had time to digest the news and I’m ready to talk about my opinions and thoughts. According to Jobs Leopard has 300 new features, 10 of which he presented at WWDC. However, 6 of these features he introduced last year, and so the majority of the keynote was almost exactly the same as last year. The only new features mentioned were a new UI, a new Finder, and Quick Look.  

While I’m liking these new features, these were really the only new announcements regarding Leopard. He did mention some new feature additions to what he talked about last year, but nothing impressive. They also released a beta of Safari for Windows. Despite the fact that there have already been a number of  bugs and security problems, Apple said they wanted to grow Safari’s market share and, because the iPhone uses Safari, help developers make Safari compatible sites. They said Safari on Windows loads sites fast, and while it might do that, the browser itself is feels very slow and chunky.

Speaking of the iPhone, Apple announced a way for developers to make 3rd party apps for the iPhone. If you want to make your own iPhone apps, all you have to do is make a web app. Jobs basically told everybody to make web apps using AJAX and other web2.0 standards. I don’t know how these are iPhone apps, but Apple thinks so. One major problem with this is using the apps when not on WiFi. Your apps are going to be slow and could use up your data plan if it has a limit fast. I have to say this was a disappointing keynote.

There were no hardware announcements and only a couple of new features announced. After the keynote Apple stock fell 3%. This just goes to show how much people have riding on these keynotes and how much people expect from them. Hopefully we will see some new Apple products and news soon. 

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Tomorrow is the opening day of Apple’s annual Wordwide Developers Conference (WWDC) which means that Steve Jobs will be hitting the stage at 10am PST/ 1pm EST to announce Apple’s latest innovations and products to the world. Here are predictions for this year’s keynote.

For Sure

• A look at some of the “top secret” features of Leopard mentioned last year, and hopefully a firm release date some time in October.
• A few more announcements regarding the iPhone and maybe a look at some more specific specs.
• A mention of iLife and iWork ‘07, and their likely dependance on Leopard.
• A long overdue update/rework of .Mac, including the potential for it being based on Google Apps.

Probably(/hopefully)

• New displays that could (possibly)  contain multi-touch support.
• The rumoured new iMac and ultra-portable Macbook.

I doubt it

• The ability to run Vista/XP programs natively without Windows. (I just don’t see it happening)

I wish

• Leopard is available today!
• Movies and TV Shows in the Canadian iTunes store.

Hopefully I will be right in these predictions, but only time will tell. I will definitely be watching the coverage live, wishing I was there.

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Through a series of 3 new TV ads, Apple has announced that the long awaited iPhone will be releases June 29th. Although, remember, this is the American release date. Back at Macworld in January his holiness Jobs said Europe would be getting the iPhone later this year, but so far nothing has been said about Canada. Rogers, the only GSM carrier in Canada, has confirmed they are carrying the iPhone, but no release date or price has been announced. (more…)

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