I received this email a few minutes ago:

Dear Registered iPhone Developer,

Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.

It seems to me if they were only opening it up to select people, they should have held off on the signup form until they were actually ready for people to sign up. I guess they have to wait to get our $99.

Update:
It sounds like it was either first-come or random. I guess we fail for now.

You probably all are aware that Apple released the iPhone SDK a couple of days ago.

We’ve played around with it and definitely intend on developing for it. Ryan and I are getting iPod Touches, and Jon already has his iPhone.

Sadly, we can’t say too much about the SDK itself, because the whole thing is under NDA. That’s right, even though anyone can download it and use it, nobody is allowed to talk about it.

Oh well, lawyers are such silly things.

Windows and I don’t have a very friendly relationship. Over the course of a year, I might reinstall my copy of Windows XP SP 2 half a dozen times because, inevitably, some .dll, .sys, or .act file has managed to ruin it for everyone by going and getting corrupted. This has happened so many times that I now have to call Microsoft every time I want to activate Windows (twice for each install, since I also use VMWare) and listen to a bot read off a thousand-digit number in groups of five.

The most recent argument between Windows and me happened on Tuesday; an annoying freeze led to a nightmarish six hour battle. Sadly, Windows emerged the victor by dying completely and thoroughly. Time for a reinstall, which means tracking down all of the .dll, .sys, and .act files that I need…

As you may know, Boot Camp comes with drivers to increase compatibility with Apple hardware. During the betas, they were stored in a disk image inside the application bundle; in Leopard, the drivers are stored on the Leopard install DVD. The DVD is a hybrid disc, meaning it has partitions for both Windows and Mac OS X. By default, OS X will only mount the HFS+ partition (containing the installer), and Windows will only mount the ISO 9660 partition (containing the Boot Camp drivers).

So if you don’t have your install disc and no writable DVD-DL is within arm’s reach, is it possible to get OS X to mount the ISO 9660 partition from the ADC disk image and copy the drivers to a thumb drive? Indeed it is.

(As an aside, you can view the partition map of the disk image by running hdiutil pmap2 leopard_9a581_userdvd.dmg)

If we use hdiutil to attach the image as a block device, it’s possible to get the ISO 9660 part to mount by using the cd9660.util program.

$ hdiutil attach leopard_9a581_userdvd.dmg -nomount
expected   CRC32 $0108CBDC
/dev/disk3          	Apple_partition_scheme
/dev/disk3s1        	Apple_partition_map
/dev/disk3s2        	Apple_Driver_ATAPI
/dev/disk3s3        	Apple_HFS
$ mkdir /Volumes/Drivers
$ /System/Library/Filesystems/cd9660.fs/cd9660.util -m disk3 /Volumes/Drivers

And when you’re done:

$ umount /Volumes/Drivers
$ rm -Rf /Volumes/Drivers

That’s all for today. If you need me, I’ll be on the phone with Microsoft…

On the first, I posted some unfounded rumors about QuickTime updates during MacWorld. As promised, now that the keynote is over I’ll analyze how accurate my predictions are. (Since I’m trying to build a good track record, I will conveniently itemize those predictions in such a way that it looks like I did better than I really did.)

1. New version of QuickTime
   Yes! After the keynote, QuickTime 7.4 was released via Software Update.
2. Free QuickTime Pro
   No! The Apple Store still lists the upgrade at $29.99.
3. Free MPEG-2 Component
   No! It retains a $19.99 price tag.
4. VC-1 Support
   Sort of! While QuickTime itself did not gain VC-1, this was apparently introduced in the Leopard DVDPlayback framework. Run strings -3 /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/DVDPlayback | grep “VC1″ for some evidence of this.
5. Acquisition of Telestream
   No! Well, at least there have been no announcements of this nature.
6. 64-bit Compatible QuickTime APIs
   Sort of! Apparently I need to brush up on my QuickTime APIs. Apple has been doing this with QTKit, which offers 64-bit wrappers to 32-bit QuickTime functions. I’ll count this one against me for ignorance.
7. 64-bit QuickTime for Windows
   Yes! iTunes 7.6 now supports Windows Vista 64-bit, according to the requirements, and properly supports syncing with iPhones.
8. Keynote’s Overall Digital Media Theme
   Yes! The MacBook Air, AppleTV updates, and iTMS movie rentals were all part of this theme.

So there we have it! I got 3.5/8 predictions correct which gives me a higher prediction accuracy than ThinkSecret will have all year.

Ever since switching to Leopard, Mail.app sometimes doesn’t update folders with new messages, even if the messages added to those folders are a result of rules in Mail.app. I searched, and found partial solutions to my liking, but here’s what I settled on.

In Script Editor, save this script somewhere:

on run
  tell application "System Events"
    if exists (application processes whose name is "Mail") then
      tell application "Mail"
        set everyIMAPAccount to every imap account
        repeat with eachIMAPAccount in everyIMAPAccount
          tell eachIMAPAccount
            synchronize with eachIMAPAccount
          end tell
        end repeat
      end tell
    end if
  end tell
end run

Next, add a new rule to Mail.app that has the condition “Any Message,” and the action “Run Applescript” using this AppleScript. All this script does is automatically run “Synchronize” on each account any time a new message is found. This ensures that all folders are kept up to date.

I’ve been using this solution for a week now, and it’s been a godsend.

Edit:

See comments for a much simpler script.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a hidden preference pane that ships with Leopard, Archives.prefPane.

As an anonymous reader pointed out this afternoon, the post made an unexpected shift when I put up a screenshot of DiskImages.prefPane and continued to discuss it rather than Archives.prefPane. Apparently I was more than a little absent-minded — even the file name of the image is “archiveprefpane.png”!

I’ve corrected the old post, so I’ll leave you with the assurance that I’ll pay closer attention next time!

Kyle, TX: CalendarKit provides an API for REALbasic-made applications to interact with a user’s calendars by providing fast, native integration with calendar software. It currently integrates with iCal 3 on Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” and is the only supported way of manipulating .ics calendars on the new operating system.

A free demo of CalendarKit is available at:
http://alacatialabs.com/products/calendarkit

Licenses for CalendarKit cost $50 per developer, and source licenses are available.

About Alacatia Labs, Inc:
Alacatia Labs, Inc. was incorporated in the summer of 2007. We strive to operate it like a research facility rather than a monolithic corporation; in this sense, we seek to experiment and develop new technologies rather than make a buck. We’re enthusiastic about the work we do and are confident that this enthusiasm will show through our unique products.

For more information about Alacatia Labs, Inc, please visit:
http://www.alacatialabs.com/

The source code for Darwin 9 (Leopard’s core) was made available this morning. Note that not all packages are up yet, including the Objective-C runtime and CoreFoundation.

Darwin 9 source code

For the most part, I like Leopard’s new look. Once upgraded to the GM release, the new dock style shocked me, but now it looks and feels great.

One bug report I filed with Apple didn’t get changed for the final release. iCal uses vertical stripes. Check it out:

It just looks awkward and out of place. I expect that one of these days the report will be closed as “Behaves as Designed.”

It’s sad: that’s how my report about the abominable PDF pop-down push-button in the print dialogs was treated. UI Inconsistencies annoy me

If you were to run find / -iname *.prefPane on your freshly installed copy of Leopard, you might notice this show up in the results:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Archive Utility.app/Contents/Resources/Archives.prefPane

Installing this preference pane allows you to change settings relating to archive creation and expansion handled by Archive Utility (formerly BOMArchiveHelper).

This joins the other known hidden prefPane introduced in 10.4, DiskImages.prefPane (hat tip to Mac OS X Hints for beating me to the punch by a year and a half).