We use cutting-edge, latest technologies to track and manage our conference and holiday travel: a white-board that sits on our mini-bar fridge.

In Australia we have 6 states: Queensland (God’s Country), New South Wales (home of Sydney), Victoria, Tasmania (Dr Nic’s birthplace), South Australia, and Western Australia. Over the next two months, the travel whiteboard says that we’re visiting nearly all of them. Yikes! And this doesn’t include Dr Nic having just travel to Brazil and back for RailsSummit in São Paulo.

Most of the travel is so we can catch up with other developers: RailsCamp in Adelaide, CocoaHeads in Melbourne, and iPhone Tech Talk and Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC’08) in Sydney. Click the whiteboard photo to see the dates. Or visit Dr Nic’s Dopplr page for live updates.

We’re always happy to catch up with developers interested in iPhone and Ruby/Rails development and any potential clients whilst we’re in your city, so ping us an email! ()

A few months ago the Mocra office was just Dr Nic, and then Anthony joined, then Bo, the Claire and yesterday Chendo commenced work. Everyone has their own machine and iPhone.

Finally we took delivery of an iPod Touch purely for testing purposes of our client iPhone projects.

This pushed us to take action against our carbon footprint.

Solution? We bought a Happy Plant. Symbolically the test iPod device has been named “Happy Plant”.

I have no idea how you calculate a “carbon footprint,” but the plant does make us happy!

Today, Apple lifted it’s Non-Disclosure Agreement on released iPhone software. This is great news for budding iPhone developers and seasons Cocoa developers alike, as now a flow of information can begin.

Up until today, it has been impossible to to discuss iPhone-related topics with anyone outside your own company/contract, and only with those who had signed the NDA. I suspect that now we will see an avalanche of blog posts, screen casts, tutorials, forums, and mailing lists pop up with a wealth of information that the iPhone community have individually discovered. Everyone can stop re-inventing the wheel, because solutions to common problems can be shared and discussed.

Watch this space or our company twitter account, @mocra, for links to good resources and tutorials.

You can read more about the latest NDA change at this AppleInsider article.

Our main office is in Brisbane, Australia. Of 1 million residents we have about 12 attend our monthly Cocoaheads/iPhone dev meetings (Brisbane Cocoaheads). It is very exciting to be sponsoring Matt Gallagher (author of Cocoa with Love blog) to fly up 2000km from Melbourne for the day to speak at our club.

Hopefully this is the start of more visits between Australian cities of iPhone/Cocoa developers, who seem to be a solitary bunch. Once you get some face time and meet each other then collaborating online becomes much more powerful. We hope that this leads to formal and social national conferences or camps in the future.

Reference: October Meeting: Special guest flying in from Melbourne

Quietly we released two open source projects: a versioned migration manager for database access and we started on an open-source iPhone app for accessing the Highrise web app. We’ll write about these more very soon, though the migration manager has already been mentioned by the Gus Mueller who created the FMDB wrapper for SQLite that all iPhone developers are using.

We host our open source iPhone/Objective-C on GitHub, who recently released a “top projects by programming language” list. Our two projects were coming first in four of the categories!

Did you know your company can put its own software on your iPhones? Wow!

The most innovative, futuristic mobile-smartphone is fully programmable, and your Sales Team or Research Team or your Whole Company can have iPhones with your own dedicated iPhone software - you can even connect it to your company’s existing information systems and databases.

Just like the desktop and laptop computers throughout your organisation, your new iPhones will become the complete mobile office.

If you have in-house software developers, then send them to Apple’s iPhone Dev Center, where they can download the development kits and information. If you or your staff have any questions about this process, either ask on the Apple Mailing Lists or we’re happy for you to contact us for an independent perspective.

If your organisation does not have an in-house software development team, or they are not equiped or trained to write iPhone applications, then we’re available to develop your applications or train your staff, as required. Please contact us as soon as possible so we can schedule in your requirements.

We publicly launch on the 11th of July, but already we have Version 2 of our website under development. Its so lovely that a portion of it now adorns our front page.