Great news for all developers out there! Appcelerator Titanium 0.7 is here and this time better than any other time. 0.7 version offers great new features including Facebook Connect Integration for the iPhone, the ability to dynamically set control values and much more.

For those wondering what Appcelerator Titanium (Mobile) is:

Titanium Mobile offers you a way to create native mobile applications using your favorite web technologies, like HTML and Javascript. You get access to all native features, like geo-location, local filesystem and database access, and multi-touch and accelerometer controls, but without having to write a single line of native code. And because it’s cross-platform, your single codebase will work for both the iPhone and Android Phones.

Here are some highlights included in the latest version of Appcelerator Titanium.

• Composite Views (mobile): display exactly what you want, where you want it by dividing up a single iPhone or Android view into multiple views.
• More UI controls (mobile): scrollable views and native pickers give you more UI options. Combine with composite views to create an app that is uniquely yours.
• Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter integration: tap into over 300 APIs enabled by Yahoo Query Language (YQL) or build the next great social networking app powered by native Facebook or Twitter integration.
  
• PHP Support (desktop): If you’re looking to hit backend services using PHP, Titanium Desktop now fully supports this language alongside Javascript, Python, Ruby, HTML, and CSS.
• Debugging Enhancements: several improvements made to aid in your debug and QA efforts.

There are some major changes in Google Docs. To begin with, the left navigation panel transformed itself to a much better one. Things now are more organized, optimized and, you may as well say, more social. Better sharing options (incl. shared folders) and multiple file upload are two of the most important highlights in the updated Google Docs.

To share a group of items, all you have to do is put them all into a folder and share the folder. As you’d expect, if you add an item to a shared folder, it will automatically be shared and if you add someone to an existing shared folder, they will instantly get access to all of the folder’s content.

You can learn more about shared folders here. Except for the shared folders and the multiple file upload features there have been a few major interface updates which you will definitely notice when first entering Google Docs. Anyhow, the truth is Google Docs is getting more and more serious and I love this.

Finally, you can just jump to docs.google.com and explore by yourself.

Interesting news for all the Open-Source guys and gals. The Linux Foundation now provides new Individual Membership. About 3 months ago the Linux Foundation launched a branded credit card featuring tux. Now its time for new, exclusive perks for Individual Members.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced new, exclusive benefits for individual members, including employee purchase pricing from Dell, HP and Lenovo, and the opportunity to secure a Linux.com email address for life.

With an annual fee of $99 you can now get a @linux.com email address and secure it for lifetime with $150 more. There are three types of membership including Individual, Student and an Individual with a lifetime @linux.com email address. You can see here more details about each type of membership.

It is not any Snow Leopard that can do it. :P

Apple ‘s latest version of Mac OS X brought amongst many new and amazing features a new and extremely harmful bug. The bug is complete loss of all data in user’s home directory. For the bug to occur a user must log in as guest and then log out and log in as normal user.

Many users have been reporting the bug since September, but only yesterday Apple acknowledged it.

We are aware of the issue, which occurs only in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix.

The only solution currently available is if you have Time Machine enabled, via witch you can restore your files, otherwise, good bye my precious data.

Unfortunately this appears to be only one of the many annoying bugs that have been introduced to Snow Leopard. Let ‘s hope that most of the issues will be fixed in the next updates.

Amit Manjhi, a Google Web Toolkit developer announced two days ago the availability of the first milestone build for GWT 2.0. You can download it here but keep in mind that this is an early view, which means lots of bugs and stability issues. According to the announcement, many things are changing in GWT 2 that might otherwise be confusing without explanation. Some of the functionalities that are coming to GWT 2 include:

• In-Browser Development Mode: Prior to 2.0, GWT hosted mode provided a special-purpose “hosted browser” to debug your GWT code. In 2.0, the web page being debugged is viewed within a regular-old browser.
• Code Splitting: Developer-guided code splitting allows you to chunk your GWT code into multiple fragments for faster startup
• Declarative User Interface: GWT’s UiBinder now allows you to create user interfaces mostly declaratively.
• Bundling of resources (ClientBundle): GWT has shipped with ImageBundles since GWT v1.4, giving developers automatic spriting of images.
• Using HtmlUnit for running GWT tests: GWT 2.0 no longer uses SWT or the old mozilla code (on linux) to run GWT tests. Instead, it uses HtmlUnit as the built-in browser.

As always, remember that GWT milestone builds like this are use-at-your-own-risk and we don’t recommend it for production use.

– Amit Manjhi, on behalf of the Google Web Toolkit team

It’s feels like yesterday when I first tried the Gentoo linux distribution. It blew my mind. There are numerous things that make Gentoo linux one of a kind. One of them is definitely scalability/configurability. In fact, I have never used any other linux distribution that is by default that much scalable and configurable. It actually makes you feel like you can do anything you want! Of course, you can’t talk about Gentoo without mentioning performance issues. Gentoo is like performance’s synonym or something.

Gentoo is a free operating system based on either Linux or FreeBSD that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

Gentoo Linux was initially created by Daniel Robbins as the Enoch Linux distribution which changed to Gentoo Linux almost immediately. Gentoo now celebrates its 10th birthday, releasing a special edition LiveDVD available for download in two flavors, a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64-only version. The LiveDVD features packages like:

• System packages include: Linux Kernel 2.6.30 (with gentoo patches), Accessibility Support with Speakup 3.1.3, BASH 4.0, GLIBC 2.9, GCC 4.3.2. Binutils 2.18, Python 2.6.2, Perl 5.8.8, and more.
• Desktop Environments and window managers include: KDE 4.3.1, GNOME 2.26.3, Xfce 4.6.1, Enlightenment 0.16.8.15, Openbox 3.4.7.2, Fluxbox 1.1.1, TWM 1.0.4, and more.
• Office, graphics, and productivity applications include: OpenOffice 3.1.1, G/Vim 7.2.182, Abiword 2.6.4, GNUCash 2.2.9, Scribus 1.3.3.11, GIMP 2.6.4, Inkscape 0.46, Blender 2.49a, XSane 0.996, and much more.
• Web browsers include: Mozilla Firefox (Minefield) 3.5.3, Arora 0.7.11, Opera 10.0, Epiphany 2.26.3, Galeon 2.0.4, Seamonkey 1.1.17, and other favorites.
• Communication tools include: Pidgin 2.5.9, Quassel 0.5, Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.23, Claws Mail 3.7.2, Ekiga 2.0.12, Qtwitter 0.7.1, irssi 0.8.13, and many more.
• Multimedia applications include: Amarok 2.1.1, MPlayer 1.0_rc4, DvdAuthor 0.6.14, LAME 3.98.2, FFMPEG 0.5_p19928, GNOME-MPlayer 0.9.7, SMPlayer 0.6.6, and several others.

Additionally, there is some new artwork from Ben Stedman, and Gentoo Developer Alex Legler.

So, Happy Tenth Birthday, Gentoo!

Mobile development is on its way to the top 10 in-demand jobs in the next few years, in my humble opinion, and we will definitely see more and more developers (or not) entering the mobile development arena. In other words, the word “mobile” you might say it’s an integral part of the near future. So, as we are getting closer to that hyped era of mobile achievements, many questions (technological, economical and ethical) will rise.

As far as the development part is concerned, it will get better, simpler and certainly more exciting. A few days ago I found this (appmakr.com) that can turn your RSS, XML and HTML into native mobile apps on iPhone and Android. This means you don’t have to learn Objective C or Java in order to develop iPhone and Android apps.

AppMakr.com is a rapid mobile development environment offered as a web service, and created by PointAbout, Inc. that allows you to rapidly build native iPhone, iPod Touch and Android applications using content you already publish to the web, such as RSS feeds, XML feeds, and HTML content such as WAP pages.

There are already some apps out there, made with appmakr.com that you may know (like Burger King, 1st Mariner Bank and Futbol Ya)

I also came across with this book found at labs.oreilly.com titled “Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript” written by Jonathan Stark. It’s a complete guide that helps you build iPhone apps without having to learn Cocoa’s Objective-C programming language, using lots of detailed examples, step-by-step instructions, and hands-on exercises. It is splitted into the following parts:

Although these web apps cannot access the hardware (speakers, GPS, accelerometer, camera, etc.), I am very curious about how will (web) developers take advantage of these “frameworks”.

It’s been a a few days now since Google decided to change a little bit their Mobile homepage. The Google logo and the search textfield along with the Google Search button, which were placed in the middle of the screen, moved up to the top of the page. Thus living more white space all the way down to the bottom of the screen where other links are shown, like iGoogle, Settings and Help. In addition in case you did not notice your gmail address’ (you have to log in to see this) font weight is no longer bold but normal. I guess Google is experimenting with mobile user experience. To be honest, I like this layout more. I haven’t seen much difference until now but it certainly gives you the feeling of a bigger mobile screen. What do you think?

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