Undercrank

• Barcelona, Spain
• Berlin, Germany
• Boston, MA
• Chicago, IL
• Helsinki, Finland *
• Hong Kong, China
• Oulu, Finland *
• Prague, Czech Republic
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA *
• San Jose, CA
• Seoul, South Korea
• Tallinn, Estonia *
• Tartu, Estonia
• Tokyo, Japan

I’m just getting back into the swing of things with Interface Builder after a little bit of a gap, and one of the first things I’ve noticed is that somewhere between the 2.2.1 and the most current 3.0 SDK’s, Apple have added a new special colour to the iPhone SDK, called “groupTableViewBackgroundColour”.

Previously it seemed you could only get this when creating your own grouped table view, but they’ve eased things off now so you can use it in regular views too. Nice!

High on excitement from coming back from WWDC, and following the advice given from All About iPhone, I’ve picked up an iPhone 3G S on pay-as-you-go for work.

As is necessary on the day of release of a new handset, here’s the obligatory sample video and photo from the device:

(Or watch the same thing on Vimeo, which may or may not look a little bit better.)

The photo test is of some lavender in the garden.  There’s clearly some actual depth-of-field going on, and I was able to touch to move the focus to the foreground flower head, just like the demo at the WWDC keynote:

Nine Black Alps have a new single out for free download – you can download a 160kbps MP3 from NME.com or get a nicer 256kbps one from the band’s official site when you sign up.

Why this lot aren’t way bigger is beyond me; it’s great to see they’ve dropped their sunshine pop aspirations on this track and are surfacing their inner grunge again. (Shades of “Negative Creep”, anyone?)

I spent last weekend watching my first ever ice hockey game – San Jose Sharks vs. Phoenix Coyotes. Whilst I’ll get round a more detailed write-up some other time, I think it’s quite easy to find one of the reasons for the popularity of the game in North America right here:

Note that the the referees only get involved once the donkey punch comes into play. As a football fan, it’s absolutely mesmerising to watch the drama unfold live – pull this sort of stunt on a Saturday afternoon in the Premier League and you’d have points deducted and the police involved.