Taken at OPNET Technologies, Inc.

Taken at OPNET Technologies, Inc.

Taken at OPNET Technologies, Inc.

Taken at OPNET Technologies, Inc.

Taken at OPNET Technologies, Inc.

Bill Shrink put together this awesome info-graphic for the current batch of top smartphones on the market as of today. I find it interesting that the new AT&T minimum plan is the cheapest TCO of the bunch, which is my current plan.Note: This does not include Verizon's announcement of the Motorola Droid X, being announced very shortly.
Find the best cell phone plans at BillShrink

As most people know, I'm fairly computer and operating system agnostic, I generally have three systems running, consisting of a Mac, a PC running Linux and a laptop running some version of Windows.

The screenshot pictured here is from my Mac connecting to an SMB share on my home server. Notice the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) pictured. Even more ironic is that this is actually my Ubuntu Linux machine, not an actual Windows box so BSOD will never actually happen.

You just get the occasional kernel panics (ok, ok...rarely) or like what happened to me last week, a corrupted initramfs image via Update Manager in Ubuntu 10.10. Such are the hazards of playing with pre-released software...

AppleInsider | Inside Apple's new Xcode 4 development tool

This is very exciting to me as I've always thought that Xcode has lagged behind popular free IDEs such as Eclipse or NetBeans, at least in its design and layout of the tool itself. It is ironic to me that, for a company that so prides itself with standards and even publishes a well known application style guide, would break all the rules when it comes to its very own IDE. This is the very tool that application developers use to create and should be the flagship in following Apple's design rules. And yet, it is one of the oldest, non-Apple applications you'll ever encounter.

From a technical standpoint, the new tool is very exciting as a developer. The new compiler, llvm has hit the big time recently in newer Linux distributions and will finally be leveraged for OS X. I have yet to see a single bad comment regarding this compiler compared to gcc (ignore the complaints about people having to update their old applications, they should be doing this from time-to-time anyway.) The compiling speed improvements, runtime speed of binaries, much improved compiler error messages are all big wins.

Additionally, I really like that Apple has created a matching debugger, lldb and then donated it as open source. Time will tell whether the open source community embraces the tool but it has to be an upgrade to gdb... seriously.

Lastly, inclusion of git by default just proves to me that Apple is forward thinking. I'm a huge advocate of git and host all my own work in it. Having a well thought out diff tool native in the IDE just makes life a lot more simple.

Now, the million dollar question is, when will we be able to get our hands on it? I'm hoping that the new tool is released with iOS 4 on June 21st, as that would make sense from a developer perspective. For some reason, I don't think this will happen, but it should.

Personally, I'm ready to burn through some major bandwidth cap to get this update.