Last weeks announcement by Adobe that they will be officially offering cloud support for ColdFusion 9 and also Amazon AMI images is pretty huge (read more). Whilst we're still waiting for further details to emerge I thought I'd post some thoughts. Firstly I really hope that the line "We do plan to support Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) specifically by creating ready-to-use Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)." means that we're going to be able to 'pay per use' for ColdFusion instances and it simply doesn't mean that Adobe are going to create a public AMI which has ColdFusion 9 installed in and we then have to bring our own licenses. What I'm hoping is the case is that Adobe will have followed how IBM have gone with WebSphere, Portal Server etc which is charged by the hour and is a 'paid AMI' available to one and all - and not like the LiveCycle on EC2 offering they have which requires a yearly fee etc and is billed by Adobe not Amazon. One thing that I find a little vague though and I don't think Adobe is unique here, is defining 'cloud'. It's a given that Amazon EC2 is cloud computing - I have no idea what processors my instances are running on though so the new 'cloud instance' license will cover that - and kudos for getting CF Standard in their too guys! What if my IT Department provided the 'instances' for my websites and managed them on a massive virtualised server farm. Granted they may know what processors my instances are running on, but I may not - would this be covered by the new 'cloud' license? This is the grey area, a private virtualised server farm is simply a 'private cloud'. This is the same scenario if I'm providing 'cloud' services What I'm expecting to see is that Adobe will have defined 'cloud' along the lines of a platform service that you do not own but pay a fee to make use of - which would thereby mean that instances running on my own companies hardware would have to licensed by the number of physical processors those instances are permitted to run on and not this new cloud license.

In this weeks Floss the guys interview Steve Coast from OpenStreetMap.org. I'd never heard of OpenStreetMap but it's certainly impressive and does exactly what it says on the tin open source street maps - built as a Wiki (using RoR) to allow users to edit and contribute to maps, including paths, directions, POIs - I've just added some new data on the map around where I live. Looking around my areas they have way more detail than any of the 'big' providers, Google, Yahoo etc. Plus being open source it's licensed under creative commons so if you're in a position where the EULA for Google Maps just isn't going to work for you, eg behind a login, intranet etc then it may be worth checking OpenStreetMap.org out and contributing! The guys also spoke about Mapstraction. This is REALLY interesting. Rather than coding your maps to a specific mapping API, mapstraction provides an API to 11 of the major mapping providers allowing you to switch providers at will! Granted you would need to wait for the mapstraction API to catch up with a providers API but removing lockin to a certain provider can only be a good thing. We have a number of sites implemented with different mapping providers so being able to use a common API would be damn handy!

Right, now that Apple has released 3.0.1 which perhaps was a force of hand after the SMS exploit was revealed let's see what bugs have been fixed in 3.0.1 update. Camera app bug seems to have been fixed - taking a picture now the taken image minimises to the bottom left corner as it should do. The sync bug seems to be fixed too - previously after plugging in my iPhone into not my usual sync'ed MAC would cause the current play position to be reset to when it was last synced with master but now it does seem to retain the position correctly. Update 2nd Sept - It turns out this bug is not fixed!! Apps seem to load faster than on 3.0 rather than the slight pause that existed prior but it does screen that the pause on the black screen still occurs when you reboot the phone. Any other fixes or new bugs introduced found?

I jut got caught out by this one so thought I best post it for posterity. In IIS when configuring a custom error page for say a 404 error you have the option of specifying a URL or a File (via an absolute path) to the friendly error page you wish to display. As obvious as it seems now but if you specify a URL say /errors/404.htm then you will not get a 404 header returned by the webserver instead you get a 200 ok - which in hind sight makes total sense. To get a correct 404 header returned you need to use the file option and browse to the file you wish to display.

So here are details of two bugs I've found so far; In the Camera application in the bottom left corner is (I guess) your latest picture in your Camera Roll except the picture I'm being shown is about 6 pictures ago and not updating. I sync my iPhone to my iMac at home but as is often the case when I arrive at the office my battery is flat so need to charge. Usually I'll have listened to podcasts on the way into way, perhaps finishing some and perhaps part way through another, what I'm finding is that if i plugin to my MacBook to charge then the play position is being lost as well as the play counts on podcasts I may have already listened to so when I return home they are not being auto deleted as having been listened to. Any one else found anything odd so far?

So chances are in the next few days you'll be getting you mits on the iPhone 3.0 software. If you're like me last week's announcement of iPhone 3GS was pretty uninspiring and you're going to stick with the current 3G model (unless of course you've got an iPhone 1.0 that's due for upgrade) personally I'm not due an upgrade until April 2010 which will put me in a nice place for an iPhone 4.0 upgrade next year nor am I upset that o2 aren't offering mid contract upgrades like they did for the release of iPhone 3G. For the majority of none hard core iPhone users they probably won't notice any difference with iPhone 3.0 - it's certainly more evolutionary rather than revolutionary (a term I've borrowed as I've heard it banded about recently). So what's new in the iPhone 3.0 software that as a phone user you're actually going to find useful? Here's some of the stuff I've found so far in no particular order: Cut & Paste Not a feature I've missed but now that I've got it I love it. The implementation is super simple, double tap in text, drag the selection dots around the text you want to clip and then tap either copy or cut. To paste, again double tap and select paste. What could be simpler? It's implemented system wide so none Apple apps can benefit straight away. In Safari you're also able to select blocks of text by holding your finger on the screen and moving it down the screen so a selection box appears (probably around the container elements) allowing you to copy the text. MMS MMS has been added at long last implemented tightly into the existing Message application - provided of course your carrier supports it (eh AT&T?). Once you have iPhone 3.0 software your o2 account will be updated - I received a number of messages saying I had to send a text to activate but didn't bother and a few days after getting 3.0 I received an 'All done. Picture messaging is ready to use' MMS from o2. SMS Forwarding I knew this one was in the software but it was pretty well hidden and not something I really cared about. From the Messaging application enter a conversation thread tap the 'Edit' button and you'll get the ability to select individual messages and choose forward - this just creates a new message with the selected messages as the body. Of course, with the new cut & paste feature you can achieve the same functionality by double tapping the text of a message and choosing copy, creating a new message, double tapping and clicking paste. Shared Contacts Contacts can be shared via email/mms, simply locate a contact and tap 'Share Contact' and select whether to share the contact by either email or MMS - still no bluetooth option here. Calendar A few cosmetic tweaks here and improved Exchange functionality with the ability to create meetings via Active Sync, invitees can be added to events and availability status set. Seems like the Day view has changed to to make it easier to move between days. Autofill Via Settings > Safari, Safari can autofill form fields using your selected contact as well as names and passwords - I presume they mean usernames here, anyhow it's one less thing to be typing. Spotlight aka Search. Accessed by a left to right swipe of the home page or a single press of the bottom button, Spotlight provides search across contacts, audio, podcasts and probably a few more things. In the iPod menu dragging down the screen reveals a search box tucked away at the top to provide search within the application. Tethering The tethering menu is accessed from Settings > General > Network and requires additional subscriptions in order to activate. In the UK o2 (details here) want an extra £14.68 a month out of you for 3Gb and £29.36 for 10Gb of data. They advertise this as also giving you access to 5,000 'The Cloud' wifi hot spots but I'm pretty sure iPhone users already get that. iTunes A new 'Video' tab has been added to allow the purchase of Films (and rent), TV Programmes and Music Videos has been added - bound to be handy just before you board a flight. Via the 'More' tab, options have been added to purchase Audiobooks and content (free?) from iTunes U. App Store Nothing major here, a few cosmetic differences to how you browse screenshots for an application and now the ability to redeem iTunes gift cards and certificates so now there's more than 5 tabs so a 'more' has been added to replace the usual 'Updates' tab. iPod Let's not forget that the iPhone is still an iPod too. Something I've always wanted to see is speed control in podcasts just like in audiobooks and with 3.0 you can now listen to them at half and double speed as well as a 30 second review button which means I can listen to twice as many podcasts in the same amount of time!!! Another frustration with previous software versions was the ability to forward/rewind through audio via the scrubbing bar at the top, if you had 'large' fingers then it was a bit of a fiddle forwarding through those ads (ahem, Leo Laporte!). iPhone 3.0 now allows much more granular control over the playing position. By selecting the current position on the scrubbing bar and pulling your finger further down the screen you can 'scrub' though the audio at high, half, quarter and fine speed by then moving your finger left or right - neat feature Apple! Akin to the iPod nano, the iPhone now gets a 'Shake to Shuffle' option enabled by default, controlled via Settings > iPod. Other random findings Landscape keyboard now in Mail, Messages, Notes & Safari Settings > Messages now let's you control message preview and the repeat alert when text messages arrive so no embarassing messages flashing up on your screen. Settings > Home gives you more options double tapping the home button and which content to include in Spotlight searches. Settings > Mail ability to prevent loading of remote images Settings > Safari Plugins switch (present in v2.0 software too) hmmm what plugins? Voice Memos app - audio recording on the on the go and sync'ed via iTunes. Notes can be sync'ed back to iTunes on desktop (iTunes 8.2) YouTube application now allows you to sign in to your YouTube account to access your videos, subscriptions and playlists. Phone recent screen shows icons to identify which number type you called a contact on, ie mobile, home, office etc Stereo Bluetooth Niggles We're still forced to endure the Yahoo Stocks (but it was 'enhanced' in 3.0- turn phone landscape) and Weather applications - why can't we remove (or at least hide) them Apple? So there you go, there's everything I could spot different in iPhone 3.0 on the surface at least. If you find anything else then drop me a line.

Powered by Rackspace Cloud Hosting Beginning next week Mosso (mosso.com) will be rebranding to 'The Rackspace Cloud' and retiring the 'Mosso' name. We (Monochrome) have now started using MossoRackspace Cloud Servers for a few clients now and are really finding them very good so if you're in the market for scalable, on demand hosting then check them out!

Adobe have now released their next online service to labs named BrowserLab. As the name suggests it allows users to test the appearance of their website cross browsers support on both Windows and Mac OSX. The usual suspects are available to test, Firefox v2 and v3, but only IE6 and IE7 where I'd have hoped to see IE8 but can only assume that will be added at a later date. It's pretty darn simple to use and what's better it's free at the moment - we'll have to wait and see how long that lasts. Dreamweaver CS4 users can get a plugin to allow tests to be performed directly from the product itself. Read more about BrowserLab Try Adobe BrowserLab

When MAC folk want to dip their feet back into the Windows world to remind themselves of all the stuff they really aren't missing then most people will turn to using something like Parallels Desktop or more recently VMWare Fusion. Both are great products, both pretty much do the same thing but both come with a price tag attached. Sun VirtualBox offers pretty much all the same functionality expect it's free! Granted, it can't do some of the more advanced features like boot a bootcamp partition as VMWare Fusion can but for the most part, just running a Windows installation then it's great - it even has a seamless mode so you don't need to run it in chrome. So if you're in the market for running a host OS virtually then take a look at VirtualBox over the other commercial products.

So I've just experienced my first disappointment with OSX and I'm sorry but it's backwards when it comes to copy operations. Let me explain. I checked out the latest codebase for a site from git, I then aquired the latest code patch - the particular site runs MediaWiki and I extracted the zip and copied the contents and pasted it over the top of my checked out code (choosing replace from the dialog) only then to find that my folders that had code in them no longer had code in them. My checked out code had a folder called extensions in which had a number of subfolders/files in, whilst the patch has a vanilla extensions folder with simply a readme file in so after the operation I'm left with an extensions folder with just the readme file in whereas what I was actually expecting was the readme file to appear in the extensions folder along with the existing files. Some digging reveals this is expected behaviour and suggests that I third party tool is used - how can this be? How to folk apply patches to code, sorry but it's backwards!