We love this story. Back in July we wrote about the inspiring experience of Peldi Guilizzoni, a lone software developer who'd built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and who was opening up his financial records on his blog to show everyone how things were going. We'd been following his progress since before he launched, but just 6 weeks after Balsamiq hit the market at roughly $79 per license, we wrote that Peldi had already made $10k in revenue.

That was a cute story, but now it's been just 5 months and today Peldi reports that ...

So those of you who anticipated a Jabber/XMPP chat client on the iPhone (and iPod Touch) after TUAW rumoured that 'a new XMPP framework has been spotten(sic) in the latest iPhone firmware' back in April were close... but no cigar. Same applies for those who hypothesised about P-IMAP or IMAP IDLE being used by MobileMe for push mail.

The real story, as it turns out, is that Jabber (the same open protocol behind many instant messaging networks including Google Talk) is actually being used for delivering push mail notifications to the iPhone. That's right, you heard it ...

Free science courses are a great way to prepare for college or review what you have already learned. They also serve as a valuable resource for self-learners who want to increase their science knowledge without the standard out of pocket expense. There are a number of elite universities that offer free science courses online. Examples include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Notre Dame and the Delft University of Technology.

During the dot com boom I founded a software startup with some friends - with me as the CTO. We developed a software for knowledge management. It was a combination of blogs, wikis, a document management system, link managment, skill managment and more. We started in 1999 which was quite early for wikis and blogs [...]

The Promise The promise of Cocotron is a big one. Wrote a Cocoa app? Just add a new Xcode target, hit compile and out shoots a Windows version. Your mountains of Objective-C code now cross compiles and is no longer stranded on the Mac. You put your feet up, having just shipped [...]

Google is launching Google Apps Labs today, a new platform for experimental apps (Google Moderator is one of the first to be added). These are third party applications that can be added by businesses and schools using Google Apps. In addition to Google Moderator, two other apps are available now: Google Code Reviews (peer review of software code) and Google Short Links (change URLs to something shorter and more descriptive). What's most interesting about the announcement is that Google will be opening up the platform to third party developers who want their apps to be available to the "million-plus ...

An update to our recent post on Facebook Connect: Facebook is pushing partners hard to be prepared for an official November 30 launch. 24 of 26 announced launch partners have yet to integrate Facebook Connect. We've spoken with a number of them. All say they are still planning to integrate the product eventually, but complain of bugs and other issues and wasted development efforts to date. Some, afraid of policy changes that will make Facebook Connect less interesting, also say they're waiting to see the final product before launching. A number of new features are being added. One ...

I write a column for computer programmers called "Stevey's Blog Rants." It's basically a magazine column — I publish to it about once a month. The average length of my articles is about 12 pages, although they can range anywhere from 4 to 40 pages, depending on how I'm feeling. But for precedent, don't think blogs: think of Reader's Digest. The blog format sets the wrong expectations. Hence

If I had a dime for every time I heard a web programmer apologize for the way his/her pages looked before revealing them, I certainly wouldn’t need to work anymore. As with color picking, I think that programmers tend to avoid doing certain things not because they are inherently bad at it, but because they don’t [...]