I think I’ve finally given in, and let our AT&T business rep order one for me. Expected delivery time: up to 21 days. All because I was camping out, instead of camping out. I honestly would not have expected the 3G iPhone to be a bigger, and quicker seller than the first gen version — many people I knew were planning on NOT upgrading, but apparently many were, and many first time buyers stepped up.

Perhaps the rep will come through with a surprise, otherwise, in about three weeks I’ll do an unboxing….ugh.

Complaining aside, here’s the pick for Favorite Free iPhone App of the Day: Shazam!

Shazam bills themself as the ‘amazing music discovery engine,’ and I would say after just a few minutes of monkeying around with the app, that I concur. It is pretty amazing. According to the website, here are the key features and functionality of the application:

Already an industry standard, Shazam fully integrates with and complements the iPhone’s native environment, allowing you to seamlessly discover, buy and share tunes simply by holding your iPhone to music for just a few seconds.

• Tag music: identify music anywhere – whether it’s on the radio, TV, in a movie or in a store.
• Build your own soundtrack: see the list grow every time music is tagged.
• Get the music: go straight to iTunes to preview and buy.
• Music Videos: see related videos of the track on YouTube.
• Capture the moment: personalise the tag by taking a photo and adding it to ‘My Tags’.
• Share the moment: send track details to friends via email.

The Shazam application enables you to tap into a vast database of nearly 5 million tracks giving instant satisfaction for those times when you want to know the tune that is playing, learn more about the artist, buy the song immediately – or simply add it to your playlist.

In initial run through, we were able to play and successfully track songs from Faith Hill, The Eagles, Norah Jones, The Go Go’s and even Tennessee Ernie Ford. Shazam provided links to iTunes tracks available for purchase, and videos on YouTube.

I don’t even want to know how the engine works, I just want to have this magic application continue to provide many more moments of amazement and wonder! Get it FREE, at the iTunes App Store.

Last year I was one of the first couple of people in our town to get an iPhone. I brought down my RV and we played Halo and Guitar Hero all night long, got in the local paper, had friends bringing down food and drinks — really made a party out of it. This year, nada. My camp out buddies from last year went down at 5 am the day of, got in a then-short line, and walked out with iPhones.

During a lull in the camp out this year, I headed into a fairly large town around noon, only to find out that this years iPhone was actually a bigger seller than last years. Apple has reported that it’s sold 1 million iPhones over the weekend, whereas last year it took 74 days to accomplish the same goal. I could have told you that…because there are NO phones to be had around here. Checking in daily since I got back from my trip…ugh:

They had black 8gb iPhones available yesterday, but I’m fairly set on the white 16gb model, so here I sit, in an iPhone 3G void. All is not lost though, I have been enjoying the V2 update for the V1 iPhone mentioned in the previous post. I still have the beta version, and I think it’s acting a little funky, but downloading and playing around with stuff from the iPhone App Store is keeping me entertained while I wait.

Anyone else still waiting, waiting, waiting?

Fortunately, if you haven’t been following along, you can get up to speed fairly quickly with the Apple .Mac To MobileMe Transition FAQ on Apple’s website. This document should answer most of your upgrade questions if you’re a current user.

Bottom line — if you’re currently a .Mac user, you get the service upgrade without having to do anything. A couple of other decent items to note:

• Your .Mac subscription will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe at no additional cost.
• Individual subscription storage doubles from 10GB to 20GB.
• You may continue to use your current mac.com email address to send and receive email just as you do today. If you have any email aliases at mac.com, they will also continue to work.
• All of your existing iDisk files will be available on MobileMe iDisk.

And a couple of things you should be aware of

• As part of this transition to MobileMe, some features are being discontinued: Web access to bookmarks (bookmark sync between your Macs and/or PCs is still supported), iCards, .Mac slides, and support for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther sync.
• iPhone users: You will need to update to software version 2.0 or later to enable push mail, push contacts, push calendar, and push bookmarks. This software update will be available when MobileMe launches.

All this and much more at the Apple .Mac To MobileMe Transition FAQ on Apple’s website.

Third Party Applications on the iPhone: “Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

Read More at Apple Hot News

First, there are all of the announced changes from Apple:

1. Blazing Performance
2. Elegant User Interface
3. Easy Bookmarks
4. Pop-up Blocking
5. Inline Find
6. Tabbed Browsing
7. SnapBack
8. Forms AutoFill
9. Built-in RSS
10. Resizable Text Fields
11. Private Browsing
12. Security

These are all debatable, especially the 'Blazing Performance', but a few of these really stand out.

Namely, Resizable Text Fields. I checked on this, and sure enough, users can resize textarea elements in a form. Your layouts will be critical now, that the user can change the size of the containing element(s) well after your page has rendered. I wonder how many AJAX apps are going to be broken because of this.

Also, all of the form elements can be styled now! That's a big departure from previous versions of Safari. I'm glad the 'Safari form elements are perfect' snobbery has been replaced with an attitude more conscientious the of needs of web developers

The next big development is the find feature. Typing in the find area dynamically pops up results on the page, as they're found. The UI for this is amazing, and really shows the talent at Apple.

Of course the big question on everyone's mind is, 'How is all of this going to work on Windows?!'

Well the executive summary is: It does work, and it works well.

Tom and I loaded up Safari 3 though Parallels 3.0 on his machine running Windows XP Pro. The installer was typical Windows stuff. We were prompted to install the Bonjour Service and Apple Software Update Service for Windows.

This is another big development that I don't think a lot of other people have mentioned yet. Bonjour is a great program for Mac, that now will be available for Windows too!?! Apple Software Update will also run on Windows?!? We're going to be talking about this for a long time.

After we installed Safari, we encountered our first problem. For some reason (we don't know why yet), after we installed Safari, the network adapter for Windows stopped working. We used Parallels to specify the shared adapter, and everything worked again.

The app itself looks great on windows. It's not bound by the typical Windows frame. Safari 3 basically looks the same as iTunes already does.

It was really strange to see Safari as an option in the Start Menu:

One thing that is still frustratingly still an issue is HTTP_AUTH between Safari and Microsoft IIS servers. Even if this is a problem with Microsoft, I think the developers could figure some type of workaround for this.

Another problem I have with Safari, is lack of code-coloring in the view source window. I have yet to see a developer toolbar built for Safari (I live by Firebug), and until there is one, I'm not leaving Firefox.

Steve Jobs just left the stage as keynote speaker at the WWDC convention in San Francisco. Big announcements:

Safari on Windows!

Full Safari Engine on iPhone

The first item is huge for me. As a web developer, I’ve been hacking sites to work on IE for years now. Safari being release on Windows is a big deal. If the folks at Microsoft don’t think that’s something for them to worry about, just look at iTunes. I’m sure Apple will bundle Safari with iTunes to aid distribution.

The iPhone is another funny thing. Most websites people want to go to anymore are Web 2.0ish. That’s been a problem for those of us using Windows Mobile 5.0 phones. The built in browser is about IE 4.0 in features, so the things you need when you’re mobile (like google maps) just don’t work very well.

There were other features that really stood out as well. Time Machine will be a great feature. Just the other day, one of our designer’s hard drive crashed. He’s notorious for not backing up his stuff, and sure enough, he lost everything.

Built-in Core animation also looks amazing. The pictures of this can’t do it justice.

Also, the new Finder wil look like iTunes. It will allow users to browse files using Cover Flow, the UI concept that works so well in iTunes. Users will be able to preview files of nearly any type without opening the application they run in!

The new Dock is also awesome. It will utilize a stack concept so open files and apps can be ‘grouped’.

This is a real attack on Windows. It’s been 6 years since Microsoft released a new OS, and before the year’s end, it will be old news. It’s funny to see pictures of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together. I can only imagine the pictures are doctored. These guys are after each other’s throat.

I feel funny writing about all of this. I was completely Anti-Mac for a long time. Only recently (last 3 months) have I made the Mac switch. I’m in the market for a new computer, and I was considering selling out for a Vista machine.

Now, I’m waiting until October.

P.S. – Thanks to MacRumors for the pics!