Timeline: Response Times by Cell Phone Type
Here is a funny little (not so serious) statistic about iPhone users and their response times:
After sending an invitation to about 20 people with the request of responding within 72 hours I kept track of the timestamps when the answers arrived.
Just for the sake of curiosity I separated the answers into two groups: People with iPhones and people with other cell phones.
And here is the result in form of a timeline:
On Vacation (with iPhone)
I just came back from a very nice vacation I spent in New York City.
This city is amazing and there is so much to see and to do. One of the best vacations I've ever done.
Two weeks earlier during packing I thought about leaving my MacBook Pro at home. After all, it is a vacation and I don't want to spent too much time with it. But then I realized that there is almost nothing that would require a notebook during vacation when I take my iPhone with me.
Cool 3rd Party iPhone Apps
Apple recently announced that over 15,000 3rd party iPhone applications are now available at the App Store. With 500,000,000 downloaded iPhone apps within half a year this new way of distributing applications is a huge success. Unfortunately, with so many applications available it is sometimes hard to find the real gems.
Here is a list of iPhone apps I've installed on my device. Maybe you find something useful or maybe you can recommend an app which definitely should be added to that list (please leave a comment).
Getting Started with iPhone Development
This weekend I finally found some time to watch [Bill Dudney](http://bill.dudney.net/roller/bill/)'s screencasts about iPhone development.
The screencast series is called '[Writing your first iPhone Application](http://pragprog.com/screencasts/v-bdiphone/writing-your-first-iphone-application)' and it is an ideal way to get started with iPhone application development.
All you need is a recent version of Xcode and some basic knowledge about Objective-C and Cocoa.
In 2,5 hours Bill shows you how to create a simple but nice recipe application where you can store recipes and its ingredients (sure, it is NOT a full-blown recipe database application but it serves its purpose). You learn a lot about table views, view controllers, navigation controllers and how to store your entered data persistently by using [SQLite](http://sqlite.org/).
I really enjoyed watching it and I'd recommend to write the application in parallel while you are watching it. That way you'll think more about how all the stuff works.
Every episode (five in total) costs $5 but I think it's completely worth the money.
iPhone SDK Beta Out!
Today Apple released a beta version of the iPhone/iPod touch SDK for developers to create their own applications for these devices. The final SDK is about to be released in June this year.
Unfortunately Apple's [ADC website](http://developer.apple.com) seems to be overstrained at the moment with all the developers trying to download the SDK.
Third Party Applications on iPhone and iPod touch
Today, Steve Jobs [announced a native SDK](http://www.apple.com/hotnews/) for their mobile OS X devices (iPhone and iPod touch).
This SDK allows third-party developers to create their own applications running natively on the iPhone and iPod touch.
Apple plans "to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February". Well, that sounds very interesting. 
