Couple new websites here that are worth noting:

1. GoIndie - http://www.goindie.com - cool new site about indie living, eating, travelling and DIY food stuffs.

2. CloudPointe - http://www.cloudxy.com - a cool new site for sharing documents online, and it lets you embed everything in your own website.

3. My home page! Yikes, I've never done one before. So here it is... I used a cool site called wix.com to built it. Of course I customized everything. http://www.schwabe.net

cheers

Well the day has come. I have an iphone 4. It has been jailbroken, and unlocked for t-mobile and other carriers. I even trimmed my old-school full size t-mobile sim card to fit in as a "micro sim." Overall, the process was not bad at all, although I did manage to play with some settings that messed up my network and had to restore from the firmware once -- such a newbie move, i know... This time around its nice and healthy :)

Want to know what else my little pocket workhorse has? Flash player. Thats right. A nifty little port of the flash 10.1 for android has been hacked to run on iphone (ipad too). Its called "frash" and was an app to click and install right from cydia. Can't get any easier than that. Chew on that Apple.

So far, I am very pleased with the new phone. It performs great, multitasking works surprisingly well, and even my bits of flash content work right in mobile safari. Whatever credibility Steve Jobs had left about his war on Flash, and Flash not running well on iphone hardware blah blah is all gone. The public answered and brought it anyway. Its not polished (yet), but thats only because theres just a handful of hackers releasing the software that people want while the big software companies sit in their seats of power scowling, pointing fingers and blaming each other for not meeting the consumer's needs.

Why was flash such a big deal anyway? It don't NEED it to live, but on occasion I really WANT it. The last thing any techno gadget poweruser wants to be told is "you can't do what you want." Besides, how can anybody ignore technology in use by 90+% of the web? Steve Jobs can apparently, but nobody knows why. I don't understand why you don't just give customers what they want? Well anyway, I'm just happy knowing that when I need or even just want it, I've got it.

Way to go flash, you finally made it home to my little iphone :)

(that little unintentional rhyme is no crime, just an added bonus for the rest of us)

Is anybody else sick of all the scammers out there trying to rip people off for jailbreaking iphones ?

We've obviously received some great news lately, what with the recent legal win for jailbreaking (The Library of Congress found that jailbreaking your apple device is legal). We also got the first jailbreak application for iphone 4 on August 1 thanks to the iPhone Dev Team.

What has amazed me however, is all the fake people trying to capitalize on these things. There are not just one, two or even five websites trying to get people to pay them for "exclusive" jailbreak software, but more like a hundred. It goes deep, with lame websites and fake twitter accounts of people flooding the internet with all sorts of false information. Its sickening the lengths people will go to a) screw other people, and b) steal other people's software and ideas. They are just lazy looking to make a buck off somebody else's hard work. What a shame.

So for those of you out there looking to jailbreak your phone, remember that the software to do it is FREE. Never pay anybody for the software to jailbreak. Now, if you are not technically savvy, get a friend to do it, or find somebody cheap on craigslist to do it while you wait, and only pay if they do it right.

For those out there not well versed in the jailbreaking terminology, here is a quick guide:

An iPhone is NOT ACTIVATED if it shows the "connect to itunes" screen and won't let you do anything but an emergency call. Once you ACTIVATE the phone, you can use apps, wifi, etc.

An iPhone is JAILBROKEN if it has had special software installed which allows you, the user, to install software packages from non-apple sources. The most common application to look for is called "Cydia" which is a different kind of "App Store" for jailbroken software. For other phones (like Android phones), this process is called "rooting" a phone. Its pretty much the same thing as jailbreaking.

Finally, most phones are LOCKED to a certain cell phone provider. For iPhone in the US, that means your iphone is locked for use with ATT only. Once your phone is UNLOCKED, then you can put in a sim card from any GSM phone provider. In the US, that means T-Mobile, and maybe some others. Many people that travel internationally do this, because you can drop in a sim card from a phone company in another country and it will work.

So to summarize, any iphone must be activated before you can do anything useful with it. An iphone CAN be activated without being jailbroken or unlocked. Likewise an iphone can be jailbroken without being unlocked, and of course they can have all three.

The pressure is building up on Apple. They have stated their case about how they will only support html5 on their IOS platform (ipad and iphone). Their mis-information about how all other technologies hurt the internet has had surprising impact given its pure foolishness.

The best technologies the industry has seen (and the strongest companies) have always had a plan for ushering in new technology while being backwards compatible with the old. This serves many purposes -- it eases people into new technology, while supporting the old, and it generally gives longevity to infrastructure which is pretty important given the pace at which technology changes.

Apple's viewpoint is very narrow minded. They have said in not so many words: "eventually in the future, we think we will all be doing it this way, so lets just pretend it is already the future, and only use that technology, anything else won't work anymore." Whether you like browser plugins or not, and whether you think they are a part of the future or not, they are a HUGE part of the internet today, and not supporting them isn't visionary -- its stupid. Apple needs to wake up from their rebellious ways, and become a team player. Their self imposed "better than thou" position in the industry will only take them so far, and will eventually cause people to start hating them. It is already starting, with iphone users defecting to use Android phones. Why? because Android is *actually* an open platform. Apple says IOS is "open", but that is just a complete lie. They are pretty far from open. The only way an ipad or iphone is "open" is if it is jailbroken.

The very fact that "jail breaking" tools exist for ipad and iphone show that Apple's devices are not open, and that the technology community isn't satisfied with Apple's tight restrictions. The mentality in this community is: if we spend a couple hundred dollars of our hard earned money on a device like iphone, then let us use it however we want. Don't make it a premium price, and then handcuff us.

Here is where consumer need and industry compatibility intersect and a spark is created. I've whined about not having flash on iphone for a long time. Apple says "we want 100% control over how and what you see" and the underground community has reacted by jailbreaking.

What makes this even more exciting is that the iphone 4 is more powerful than previous models (although not quite up to snuff when compared to the new Android phones). It is slick and easy to use, and will make people happy if it does what we want. The underground community has once again responded, and made a commitment to hack flash to work on the iphone. You heard it right -- in fact the same people who made this commitment, have apparently already gotten it to work on ipad!

I am sure this will infuriate Steve Jobs, but I honestly don't care. It is obvious that all his rules and closed mindedness are focused on bringing in more money to Apple, and NOT giving end users the core features that they want. Maybe breaking this major rule of his will make him wake up, and support it legitimately once the world proves to him that his views (and accusations) on Flash are just purely fantasy.

So for me, I'll stick with iphone instead of switching to Android. The real reason is not b/c I am "sold" on Apple's device, but because I know Flash is coming :)

Packt Publishing put up an article I wrote about getting started with Facebook application development using CFML. This was based on a presentation I did at NCDevCon last month. Take a look, let me know if it helped ya...

http://www.packtpub.com/article/facebook-application-development-with-coldfusion-railo

I'm considering writing another article about using the new Facebook Social Plugins and the new Graph API since it is a bit different from the old RESTful API that most developers have been using.