Today is my 4th anniversary as an iPhone owner. I stood in line (first and only time) at Optus and was lucky to be one of the few people to get a prepaid unlocked iPhone 2 - the first iPhone to officially launch in Australia.

I was hooked. Before owning the iPhone, I was a PDA user - Palm to be precise. I started with the Handspring, the first colour PDA and I even had the mobile attachment for it. Sure it was big and bulky and people would snigger at it, which is exactly why I'd never get one of these phablets or tablaphone such as the Galaxy Note. I then went through the Tungsten series and then the LifeDrive, the first PDA with a 4GB hard drive. It was a great device despite it's battery life and poor web browser. It had Wifi, my notes, my calendar events and contacts.

So, to me at least, the iPhone was a natural progression.

Palm was dead in the water after they bought and shelved BeOS (yes, I'm bitter) and then failing to get their new version of PalmOS out the door. Here came Apple with a touch screen device with built in storage, wifi, contacts/calendars in fact all the things the LifeDrive did but much better. No stylus required, excellent browser support with Mobile Safari, 5-6x better battery life and the ecosystem was a thriving. It was a cellular device too, which meant I could get rid of my Nokia phone and it's clunky interface. 

Any device I own, I must code for it. I can't help myself. I like to write apps and so the Xcoding journey began first with the official Rinse FM app, which is still my most popular release to date. I'm still rocking an iPhone 4, skipped the 4S due to finances and the fact that the 4 is still usable, with the iOS 6 beta and am looking forward to seeing what Apple does next. 

"At last, we're going to get an R18 rating for games. Come January 2013, gaming grows up in Australia." writes AtomicPC.

“These are important reforms over 10 years in the making,” said the Minister for Home Affair, the Hon John Clare.

This means that games like Left 4 Dead 2 won't get bastardised and games like Syndicate won't just get a flat out ban.

Today in San Francisco, Apple launched WWDC 2012 with it's opening introduction from Siri. Tim Cook then took the stage to talk about how well the App Store is doing and how it only going to just get bigger. He then showed a video highlighting how the iDevices has been embraced by blind people, growing businesses and education.

The MacBook family was the first to get a refresh with the Air and Pro getting the Ivy Bridge processor, faster graphics, memory and storage and IO (USB 3 port). Phil Schiler then introduced the new thin MacBook Pro with Retina Display (2880 x 1800). This is amazing, he showed a Final Cut screenshot that had a full 1080p viewer window and still plenty of room left over for the timeline. It has 2 thunderbolt ports, USB3, HDMI and SD card slots. Photographers and Movie people will flock to this machine. The caveat is those 2 thunderbolt ports are for your Gigabit Ethernet adapter and FireWire 800 if you need them. Priced at $2,499 AUD.

Craig Federighi then came out to talk about OS X Mountain Lion and it's iCloud support being added to numerous applications. He also showed off the other iOS-like apps such as Messages, Reminders, Notifications and Game Center. We'd seen all this at the Mountain Lion preview early this year, however, he continued to show newer features such as the new Safari with (finally) searching from address bar and iCloud tab syncing. A new power saving feature called PowerNap that allows apps to update even while the machine is in sleep mode; AirPlay Mirroring is available so you can now beam your OS X desktop to say an Apple TV or XBMC (when they fix the Mac version). Awesome. Mountain Lion will be available next month and cost $19.99 US to cover all your Macs.

Scott Forstall (aka the smug bastard) hit the stage to show off the latest iOS version 6. Siri got a number of improvements including language support for Korea and China. It's also coming to the new iPad (3rd Gen). A big social move by Apple was adding Facebook integration to iOS with single sign-on much like the Twitter support but also does things like integrate the birthdays to your address book.

A nice welcomed feature is Do Not Disturb allowing you to schedule when you don't want phone calls / notifications. No more needing to make sure the phone is on silent before going to bed now. FaceTime now allows you to make 3G calls, so no surprises there.

Safari gets the tab syncing feature as mentioned with OS X and full screen support for landscape mode. Mail gets a new feature called VIPs, which allows you to set particular users as VIPs meaning they get priority support and also makes it easier to see just their emails.

PassBook is a new app for tickets, boarding pass, store cards, etc to be integrated in the one place. Not sure how many Australian businesses will use this feature but it would be nice. At least US users are going to have fun with this.

Maps has not only a new icon but is completely written from the ground up app and dumps Google Maps to boot. The map searches are anonymous, real-time and crowd sourced. It also includes turn by turn navigation, which works from the lock screen. Siri is also integrated as well. There is a new feature called Flyover, which gives a top down 3D mode for maps where they not only showed off San Francisco but Sydney as well. It looks really good. Apple has done to maps what they've done to other markets and re-envisaged and blown away the competition.

iOS 6 is available to developers today and available to the public in Fall (Northern) / Spring (Southern).

Algoriddim, the developers behind the djay application for iPad, iPhone and OS X now have a new app called vjay - The iPad Music Video Mixing app.