Update: This event has sold out.

Registration is now open for the World Wide Developers Conference, being held June 11-15 in San Francisco. The event, open to  paid members of Apple's developer programs, sold out last year in just a few hours. This year's conference is set up in tracks: Essentials, which will examine iOS and OS X platforms, including Mountain Lion, the AppKit Cocoa framework and the iPad Retina display; App Services and StoreKit for generating revenue from apps; Tools, with a heavy dose of Xcode; Graphics Media and Games; Safari and the Web, including HTML, CSS and JavaScirpt; and the Core OS -- Unix. Tickets are $1,599, and Apple is offering scholarships for the conference to students who are creating "some really cool apps." Students must submit their apps by May 2.

Apple CEO Tim Cook faced a curious problem a few weeks ago when he met with Apple’s board of directors.

He didn’t face the problems that other CEOs dread. He didn’t have to apologize for the company’s stock price – the price has continued to rise beyond expectations. He didn’t have to explain away ill-conceived products, because Apple’s products continue to appeal to loads of customers. He didn’t have to make excuses about falling profits, because the company continues to set new records for revenues and profits.

No, Cook faced a different problem. He had to explain that the company had too much money in the bank. How much is too much? About $98 billion. As Cook noted, it was more than the company needed.

Apple could have done anything with that money. They could have given some to charity – the Gates Foundation does good work, and would surely be willing to accept a large check despite the historic enmity between the two companies. Or Apple could have started its own foundation with its own set of goals.

The company could have decided that charity begins at home, and used a portion of its huge hoard to raise wages and improve working conditions at the Chinese factories where its products are made. (To be fair, Apple has indeed insisted on better treatment for workers who assemble its products. But with a hundred billion bucks in the bank, it could have gone further.)

Apple could have used the money to support increased access to technology in public schools. To fuel research or fund promising high-tech start-ups. The company could have endowed seats in the computer-science departments of 100 universities without making much of a dent in its pile of greenbacks.

But no. Cook announced that it would do two things with the superfund. First, it would issue dividends to Apple stockholders – in essence, letting them cash in on the value of their stock without selling it. The money would be a gift from the corporation to its stockholders. Second, it would implement a stock buyback program, even though the stock is trading at record high prices. Again, this move would benefit no one but shareholders.

Given Apple’s track record of innovation, these action seem woefully unimaginative. And they do nothing to advance Apple’s reputation as a vision-driven enterprise. The company that dared potential customers to dream big is dreaming awfully small these days.

What do you think Apple should have done with the money?

Web recommendation: If you can’t get people to pay attention to a very important point, then say something outrageous. Did Richard Clarke mean it, or was he indulging in hyperbole?

J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He notes that his career in high-tech publishing started exactly 29 years ago today.

Apple is regaining a place of central importance in the technology world that it hasn't held since the 1970s.

For decades, it was easy to dismiss Apple as a niche vendor of overpriced boutique systems – nice systems, but not mainstream, and certainly not viable targets for most development projects. But that view is obsolete. Apple's dominance of mobile platforms, and its ability to leverage that dominance across the laptop and desktop markets, make the company a formidable force in our field. And, increasingly, a magnet for development efforts.

Here's what's new at Apple:

2011 iOS sales surpass 28 years of cumulative Mac sales. A Finnish market analyst named Horace Dediu, who blogs at asymco.com, plucked some statistics from a presentation made by Apple CEO Tim Cook at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco last week. The really interesting conclusion is that Apple sold more iOS-based devices in 2011 than it sold Macintosh computers, ever. It's an astonishing accomplishment, and I think it's something developers should be thinking carefully about. You can read the transcript of Cook's presentation here and Dediu's short analysis – which includes a killer chart – here.

iOS apps are quietly acquiring and storing user data. Apple is the latest company to get stung by this sort of problem. It turns out that a bunch of the most popular apps in Apples App Store upload user data – including the user's entire contact list – to the software vendors' servers. The vendors hang on to this information indefinitely. The public outcry has been intense, and members of Congress are questioning Apple about the apps. This kind of bad behavior is already prohibited by Apple policy. iOS apps are supposed to notify users that their data will be uploaded and ask for permission. But vendors have not always observed the policy. Apple says it will address this issue, but no one really knows what that means. It could issue a statement to the development community, it could police the App Store more strictly, or it could modify APIs to require that permissions are acquired (and that data is encrypted before transmission). There's a pretty good article about this at Ars Technica.

OS X Mountain Lion will include iOS features. Apple is readying the next version of its OS X operating system for the Mac. Like all recent releases, it is based on the NextStep OS Apple acquired when it bought Steve Jobs's Next Computing and restored Jobs to Apple's top job. But the new version of the OS will apparently include a bundle of programs ported from iOS, including Messages, Notes, Reminders, Game Center, Notification Center, Spare Sheets, OS-wide Twitter integration, and AirPlay Mirroring. Many of the apps will allow synching between OS X and iOS devices. Registered Mac developers can download Mountain Lion now.

Mountain Lion's Gatekeeper feature generates controversy. Apple has built a controversial feature into the new version of OS X. Gatekeeper is a “security feature” that, in its default configuration, prevents users from installing apps unless the apps come from Apple's App Store or a certified OS X developer. Users who wish to install other applications – those written by members of the IT department, say – must override Gatekeeper's default settings. It's one more way Apple is trying to isolate and maintain control over its users.

New iPad(s) to be introduced in early March. Rumor-mongers – including the Wall Street Journal – are predicting that Apple will introduce at least one new iPad in the coming weeks. The consensus is that the iPad 3 will have LTE support for 4G connectivity. Apple may also introduce a lower-priced version of the iPad with an eight-inch screen, perhaps to steal sales away from Amazon's Kindle Fire.

A labor rights activist group will audit Apple's manufacturing facilities in China. As you know from my previous posts, Apple is receiving lots of criticism for low pay, bad working conditions, and terrible living standards at the Chinese companies that manufacture, assemble, and package its hardware. (The same companies also work for other high-tech firms, but Apple has taken the brunt of the criticism because its connections with the Chinese firms have been widely publicized.) The most widely known of the Chinese companies is called Foxconn. Apple responded to the criticism by asking the Fair Labor Association to conduct an audit of its Chinese partners. Meanwhile, Foxconn has raised its workers' hourly wages, which were already high by Chinese standards. The Fair Labor Association's CEO has conducted a preliminary visit to Foxconn, and told reporters, “We're finding tons of issues.”

New CEO changes Apple culture in at least one tangible way. Under Steve Jobs, Apple was notoriously stingy when it came to charitable giving. Tim Cook appears to be changing that. One of the new CEO's first actions was to establish a matching program for employees' charitable donations, under which Apple will match employees' donations dollar-for-dollar up to $10,000 per year. In a recent companywide address, Cook detailed corporate level giving, including $50 to Stanford's hospitals and another $50 million to Project RED.

There's plenty more news. Apple has posted a new getting started guide for iOS on its Web site for developers, the iOS Developer Library. And every day brings more news regarding patent lawsuits, both those directed toward Apple and those initiated by Apple and directed toward others. The iPad is legally banned in some Asian locales because judges have ruled that the name infringes on a Hong Kong company's trademark, but it appears that Apple jumped through all the right hoops when it acquired the trademark a few years ago. And much much more.

Keep hacking.

Web recommendation: Long before the Agile Manifesto was written, Mark Twain was advocating Agile principles – or so say the troublemakers at Agile Scout, a site that mixes occasional humor with serious news about Agile development. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He has been studying the field of business intelligence and has come to think this technology has real promise.

Jacob “Jack” Goldman, who left Ford Motor Co. to launch Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, died on December 20, 2011 at age 90.

A physicist by training, Goldman taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and MIT before leaving academia for industry. As director of Ford's Scientific Research Laboratory, he succeeded by recruiting top talent and giving them free rein to innovate. He maintained that tradition at Xerox, where he served as chief scientist, chief technical officer, and senior vice president for research and development. Goldman established two of the company's R&D centers: the Xerox Research Center of Canada and Xerox PARC.

It is not hyperbole to say that researchers at PARC created the modern computing world. Among their inventions are the personal computer, the laser printer, the graphical user interface, Ethernet, bitmap graphics, the WYSIWYG text editor, the Smalltalk language and IDE, and the notion of ubiquitous computing.

People say that Xerox PARC did the research that made Apple and Microsoft successful, and in a sense that is true. Apple's pre-Macintosh GUI-based system, the Lisa, was heavily influenced by Xerox PARC work. In fact, Xerox earned the right to purchase 100,000 shares of pre-IPO Apple stock by giving Apple engineers three days' access to PARC. It was during those three days that the Lisa – and ultimately the Macintosh – were born. Microsoft's Bill Gates was also a visitor to PARC. Microsoft tech visionaries Larry Tessler, Charles Simonyi, and others were recruited from PARC.

PARC – it's a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox now, and no longer called Xerox PARC – continues to do important research on cutting-edge topics in computer science.

Web recommendation: Irresistible. 'Nuff said. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. At the moment, he doesn't own a suit.

Frankly, we really think this whole affair is just silly. It's lawyers fighting lawyers, and not a drop of innovation or experimentation will come from any of it. It's just lawyers. All lawyers. No software developers will profit. No application designers will see a benefit from any of this. In fact, most folks involved in even a tangential way will find this ruling makes more work for them.

HTC, for example, is reworking its phones to circumvent the patent in question. There were four patents in total mentioned in the suit, but only one was found to be infringed by HTC. That patent? A patent on allowing phones to recognize a phone number.

Utter insanity. Ludicrous. This is a capability that a simple caller ID box can perform, and has been able to perform since the early 90's. In fact, you can buy home phones with this capability built in, but we don't see Apple suing any of those companies.

Software patent infringement cases are only brought by companies that have run out of innovations. It's as simple as that. With Steve Jobs dead, and its hottest new technology entirely gained from acquisition, these lawsuits around the globe could be seen as a death knell for Apple. Are they out of ideas? If you talk to their lawyers, they'd say Apple invented everything, and has many more ideas to come. Perhaps next year, Apple will patent a method for dialing a phone with only the thumb. Or how about a patent on allowing a cellular phone to make cellular phone calls? That'd be a good one too.

Seriously, this is just ridiculous and out of hand. Software patents are no more useful than a patent on a slogan. Copyright is sufficient to protect software from infringement. patents just ruin the entire space for everyone involved. No good can come of any of these lawsuits. Unless you're a lawyer, in which case these law suits will probably help you put in a second pool. Aren't we all so happy we can help those starving lawyers out?

Last week, while we were all recovering from turkey-induced narcolepsy, the LLVM team released version 3.0. There's a lot going on in this compiler and tool collection, so I'll let the change-log speak for itself. You can read the full release notes here. Pasted from here:

LLVM 3.0 includes several major changes and big features:

• llvm-gcc is no longer supported, and not included in the release. We recommend switching to Clang or DragonEgg.
• The linear scan register allocator has been replaced with a new "greedy" register allocator, enabling live range splitting and many other optimizations that lead to better code quality. Please see its blog post or its talk at the Developer Meeting for more information.
• LLVM IR now includes full support for atomics memory operations intended to support the C++'11 and C'1x memory models. This includes atomic load and store, compare and exchange, and read/modify/write instructions as well as a full set of memory ordering constraints. Please see the Atomics Guide for more information.
• The LLVM IR exception handling representation has been redesigned and reimplemented, making it more elegant, fixing a huge number of bugs, and enabling inlining and other optimizations. Please see its blog post and the Exception Handling documentation for more information.
• The LLVM IR Type system has been redesigned and reimplemented, making it faster and solving some long-standing problems. Please see its blog post for more information.
• The MIPS backend has made major leaps in this release, going from an experimental target to being virtually production quality and supporting a wide variety of MIPS subtargets. See the MIPS section below for more information.
• The optimizer and code generator now supports gprof and gcov-style coverage and profiling information, and includes a new llvm-cov tool (but also works with gcov). Clang exposes coverage and profiling through GCC-compatible command line options.

If you're already an LLVM user or developer with out-of-tree changes based on LLVM 2.9, this section lists some "gotchas" that you may run into upgrading from the previous release.

• LLVM 3.0 removes support for reading LLVM 2.8 and earlier files, and LLVM 3.1 will eliminate support for reading LLVM 2.9 files. Going forward, we aim for all future versions of LLVM to read bitcode files and .ll files produced by LLVM 3.0.
• Tablegen has been split into a library, allowing the clang tblgen pieces to now live in the clang tree. The llvm version has been renamed to llvm-tblgen instead of tblgen.
• The LLVMC meta compiler driver was removed.
• The unused PostOrder Dominator Frontiers and LowerSetJmp passes were removed.
• The old TailDup pass was not used in the standard pipeline and was unable to update ssa form, so it has been removed.
• The syntax of volatile loads and stores in IR has been changed to "load volatile"/"store volatile". The old syntax ("volatile load"/"volatile store") is still accepted, but is now considered deprecated and will be removed in 3.1.
• llvm-gcc's frontend tests have been removed from llvm/test/Frontend*, sunk into the clang and dragonegg testsuites.
• The old atomic intrinsics (llvm.memory.barrier and llvm.atomic.*) are now gone. Please use the new atomic instructions, described in the atomics guide.
• LLVM's configure script doesn't depend on llvm-gcc anymore, eliminating a strange circular dependence between projects.

Recent developments are demonstrating that our mobile phones are not as secure as they ought to be.

First, the Carrier IQ mess. This has been front-page material on a lot of news sites recently. Here's the story, in brief: A systems administrator from Connecticut named Trevor Eckhart has discovered an application that serves as an undocumented keylogger on more than 140 million mobile phones, even when they are sending SMS messages or browsing the web via HTTPS. Eckhard demonstrated the data-collecting behavior in a 17-minute YouTube video. The application comes from California Carrier IQ, which refers to its business as “mobile service intelligence.” Carrier IQ says it gives phone-service providers “a mission-critical tool to improve the quality of the network, understand device issues and ultimately improve the user experience.” Critics – including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and U.S. Senator Al Franken – say the software is a rootkit, and they are very concerned that the information Carrier IQ collects may be stored, transmitted, or yielded up to third parties (including law enforcement, with or without a subpoena). Apple says it will phase out use of Carrier IQ software. RIM has responded to reports that the software runs on BlackBerry phones with a denial. AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile install Carrier IQ software on phones they resell, while Verizon claims not to use it. If you're concerned about your phone, do a Web-search. This news is easy to find.

Second, researchers at North Carolina State University have published a report about security vulnerabilities they found in a range of Android-based phones. The problems aren't with the Android OS itself, but with utility applications that are frequently preloaded on customer handsets. The researchers found that these apps could serve as infection points for malware that could send SMS messages, sign users up for third-party SMS services, record phone calls, send text messages to premium numbers that charge for such calls, or factory-reset the system.

Third, vendors continue to find malware applications in the app stores. Due to the wild-west nature of the Android market, most of the malware has been found there. But a few apps have slipped into Apple's iPhone software store too. Vendors ban these apps from their Web sites as soon as they are reported, but new malware is quick to appear.

How serious is the malware threat? That depends on who you ask. Security-software vendor McAfee captured headlines when it issued a news release saying that Android-based malware was up 37 percent in the third quarter of 2011. The company was announcing the publication of its third-quarter “Threats Report,” which gives details of viruses and trojans detected during the past 90 days. Naturally, McAfee, which makes its money selling anti-malware applications, wants the threat to look serious. And the 37 percent rise does sound like a big deal...until you dig through the report and find that the figures are based on a rise from 60 infections detected during the quarter to 82. That's out of 75 million malware detections McAfee finds per year – 95 percent targeting Windows systems.

So the threat is small. But growing.

Compounding the problem is the lack of a coherent security strategy in the Android market, which is the fastest-growing part of the mobile industry. There are dozens of hardware vendors and service carriers, and they are probably unable to work together effectively to patch the security holes that threaten users. Makers of Windows-targeted malware-detection software are starting to pay attention to the Android platform, but early reviews suggest that their software isn't yet up-to-snuff.

In an amusing turn of events, Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, is offering security software that will run on iPhones and Android-based phones. The software, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, will allow system administrators to create groups, update user profiles, roll out or update software, and recover lost devices. Whether this will lead to new business for RIM or destroy the uniqueness of BlackBerry's last remaining selling point remains to be seen.

Why does all this matter? Because where there are smart phones, there's software. Where there's a security risk, there's a need for tech-savvy personnel to craft and administer solutions. Where there's a new hardware platform, there's an opportunity. That's right, I'm talking to you. This is a career opportunity. In the face of downsizing and outsourcing, your cubicle may not be as secure as you think it is. The smartphone security market is in its infancy and it's growing. Food for thought.

Web recommendation: Version 11 of Microsoft's venerable Visual Studio software-development environment is currently in beta. If you work in a Microsoft shop, you will probably upgrade as a matter of course. But it's still worth knowing about the new features and how well they work. The most comprehensive review I've seen so far is this one, written by Peter Vogel for Visual Studio Magazine. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. Boy, could he use a neck massage!

My son likes getting under the hood of his car, tweaking and tinkering.  I like getting under the hood of my computer and tinkering.  Just as my son likes to push the performance of his machine, I like pushing the performance of mine. 

Occasionally, my son will bump up against the limits of his knowledge, so he’ll come into the house, sit down at the dining room table, boot up the spare laptop, and start googling around.  Depending on the size of the problem, or what piece of machinery he’s working on, he can be engaged for hours.  Sometimes, he pulls out his phone and starts calling friends with expertise.  Not once in all the years he has been working on cars has anyone told him to get a Ford/Chevy/Dodge/Toyota, or etc. 

I also will occasionally bump into some esoteric little quirk of high-tech behavior that I have never seen before.  If I can’t find an answer on Google, sometimes I ask on Facebook.  I have over 4300 “friends” on Facebook, many of them are wizards.  Some are not. Inevitably, one of the non-wizards will say,  “You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Mac.”  And just as inevitably, I will unfriend that person.  It’s not like I don’t warn them ahead of time—but they say it anyway.  It’s the cyberspace version of Tourette Syndrome.

Actually, they're right. If I had a Mac, I wouldn't be having that problem—but I also wouldn't be running a state-of-the-art machine either.  Inside my custom case lurks a Sandy Bridge motherboard, an i7-2600K running at 3.40ghz, 16gb of RAM, a 240gb SSD for the OS, and 6TB of onboard storage—so when I'm trying to change a tire on my Ferrari, I don't want to be told I'd be better off with a Lexus. I wouldn't. The Lexus is very pretty. It’ll get you to the grocery store and the movie theater and the mall.  But it won’t get you the other guy’s pink slip at the track. 

100 years ago, and if someone driving a horseless carriage had to stop to change a tire, passersby would yell "get a horse." The "get a Mac" remark is the 21^st century equivalent.  It’s thoughtless.  It’s stupid.  It’s rude.  It’s what falls out of the mouth of someone who has nothing useful to say, but has to say something anyway. 

The remark doesn’t address the problem I'm trying to solve—it simply asserts that I’ve been wrong in all my choices.  It’s no different than a bible-thumper insisting that I’m going to Hell unless I accept Jesus as my savior. The remark is an arrogant assertion that my years of expertise in the x86 architecture has been wasted, and that my decades of investment in high-end hardware and software is immediately inferior to an overpriced and underpowered exercise in style that offers me significantly fewer options, almost no opportunities to get under the hood to tinker, and a much smaller menu of available games and applications. 

I don’t want to join iCult.  I see no advantage in living in a "walled garden" controlled by a corporation that has proven itself more interested in serving its own needs than mine.

Friends don’t tell friends to get a Mac.  So if you tell me that, I will unfriend you.  Honest.  (Unless you’re a redhead who owns a chocolate store. But that’s the only exception.)

Technology has defined my entire existence -- I have been using a computer since the rip old age of 3 and had Internet in my house from birth. My mother worked from home via an "Internet" connection that required her to turn it on, take a shower, feed me, feed herself and then, finally, be able to upload her documents. 

This immersion in the world of technology has taught me many things, some positive and some negative. I am endlessly fascinated by technology and reporting on it from a developer point-of-view helps me see the other side of the coin -- I get to get in your head, see what you think about when you create these magical devices that have guided me through childhood, adolescence and now literally run my life in adulthood. 

I owned a BlackBerry…in 2008. I wanted it to be an iPhone as I had fallen in love with Jobs' creation while living abroad -- everything was so seamless on my Mac and iPod Touch, and I wanted that in a phone too. But, unfortunately, Verizon only supported BlackBerry, so that's what I bought. 

It was an amazing device. It taught me that sleep is overrated, notifications need to be answered immediately and communicating/working on-the-go is the ONLY way to work. It taught me that Journalism was a career worth fighting for and readers on mobile devices were ten times more picky than those who sat at home with your paper/magazine after a day of work.  It taught me how to be a mobile journalist. It also taught me that I love a seamless experience, and how difficult it can be when a seemingly "awesome" device doesn't provide one. 

As I played with the RIM PlayBook today I realized once again why iAm an iPhone and iPad -- iDevices are sharp, beautiful and make you feel like you're part of something truly revolutionary. 

The iPad offers an amazing experience, and perhaps I have been drinking the iKoolAid for too long, but the PlayBook felt clunky to me as an end-user. Sure, it is a sharp, "sweet" device, but it seems too…computer-y (for lack of a better word). I am a Gen-Y millennial who wants to have a mobile, app-centric experience -- I don't want my cool, trendy devices to feel like the computer I use at home and work. I don't want it to feel like the 17-inch Toshiba I was using in 2002 as part of my high school curriculum. 

PlayBook may survive, however, I think RIM's time is done -- unless they can understand us, they won't ever be able to sell to us. We're either part of the "crazy ones," or we're hobbyists that love the fact that a search engine we started using in the sixth grade now creates a phone and operating system. 

So sorry RIM, but I'm not sorry that BlackBerry no longer fits my mobile needs. We had a good run and I'll always remember you as the one who turned me on to living, working, and playing on the go. 

Samsung planned to release the new Ice Cream Sandwich handset, the one that will supposedly unite the handsets and tablets - and solve all fragmentation issues - on Tuesday, but will now wait, according to a spokesman quoted in this Fox.com article.

A Samsung spokesman said "We decided it was not the right time to announce a new product while the world was expressing tribute to Steve Jobs' passing." 

Samsung is also currently engaged in 20 cases with Apple filed in 10 different countries, which it has no plans to delay according to the article. 

Do you think Samsung delayed Ice Cream Sandwich for reasons beyond Steve Jobs' death? Do you think it was the "right" thing to do? 

Share your opinions with us.