If you're beta testing your iPhone apps, you will no doubt be familiar with Ad Hoc builds. These are the builds you send out to your testers along with a mobile provisioning profile that lets them test your app out on their iPhones and iPod Touches.

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Demoing iPhone apps during presentations is a bitch because Apple hasn't (yet) given us a way to mirror the screen like Steve Jobs does during his keynotes. The alternatives all suck to various degrees: use a camcorder, an Elmo (the projector, not the Muppet), or the iPhone Simulator. The iPhone Simulator is the easiest option and is fine unless you're trying to demo features only found on the device (like GPS, etc.) or make a demo video of your app being used in the field.

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The cool thing about user submitted content is that you can't always predict what you're going to get. Our speakers at the Singularity Web Conference, for example, submit and update their own bios and session descriptions on the site. Yesterday, I noticed that Dr. Woohoo had put up an image of one of his awesome generative artworks in his session description.

Of course, since I hadn't considered images in session descriptions, this had the side-effect of breaking the layout of the sessions page.

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This is a quick screencast to show you the data export solution I've created for Google App Engine that lets you backup your application's datastore and restore it either locally on your development machine or on the same Google App Engine application on the deployment environment or on a different Google App Engine application (which you can use as a staging environment).

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Our friends at Mozilla are trying to set a world record today for the most software downloaded in 24 hours to mark the launch of Firefox 3.

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