So today the Strip beta has actually kicked off! We got the last few UDID’s that were sent to us into the mobile provisioning profile, and blasted out a link to download everything with instructions to everyone who signed up. Thanks for waiting!

Apple has made this process – using Ad Hoc provisioning to beta test your app – an incredible time sink. In other words, really expensive. You can get a sense of the process over here.

For those of you who didn’t get a UDID in to us already, send it in, I think we should be able to get you into the next round of provisioning and we’ll re-issue the profile with the next version of the beta once we’ve had a chance to take a look at everyone’s feedback and fix any issues that stand out.

So, please send us your feedback to support@zetetic.net, we’re really looking forward to it!

A few folks have asked us what’s happening with the Strip beta. We’re almost finished provisioning all the Ad Hoc profiles. Don’t worry about what this means, other than it’s unbelievably annoying crap that Apple makes us do so we can have beta testers without making you pay for the app. Feel free to write them a strongly-worded letter!

Other things to read while you wait:

• Unspace has opened up registration for their follow-up conference to RubyFringe: FutureRuby (Stephen and I will be attending!)
• The AppleiPhoneApps.com folks coin the term Pocket Rejection, which I think is very clever if depressing.
• Geithner out by June?

STRIP isn’t the only iPhone application we’ve been working on. Can’t really go into the details right now, but I just wanted to give a heads up:

We’re getting the beta email list together for Strip on the iPhone, we’ll be announcing the details shortly. If you want to participate, please shoot us an e-mail at support@zetetic.net. For those who aren’t hip with it just yet, Strip is our personal information and password manager. It stands for Secure Tool for Recalling Important Passwords, and you can read more about it over here.

Thanks for your patience while we’ve been getting the app together. It’s basically all set to go, but needs some user-vetting, and we need to spend a little time cranking out some utilities to migrate Palm Strip users to the new app (or to at least give them a CSV they can use to migrate to another platform).

And now I leave you with the Moz, got work to do:

I have admittedly ragged on Palm a bit of late, but I just watched their webcast on Developing Application for webOS, and I had but one thought:

“Ssssssssssssnap!”

Seriously, though. If you’re doing iPhone development, sure you get the Cocoa framework and access to OpenGL and all that, but you don’t get such open access to the system and other applications (with Sync!) like you will with webOS. At least, that’s my hunch, I guess time will tell. But just the basic layout of the high-level architecture warms my heart.

You know what else is awesome? The API has “stages” and “scenes”! That rocks.

Jury is still out as to whether you can run processor intensive games in this platform, but honestly we’re not game programmers, and this does seem to uniquely enable easy development.

On a total tangent, I went to the Jelly NYC event at my workspace today and mentioned that next week we’ll be starting the beta for Strip on the iPhone (sign up for the mailing list over here, or just e-mail us). Of the 15 or so people there, one of them was a hard core, long-time user of Strip, and is still toting his Palm around waiting for a way to migrate to his iPhone. Can’t wait. Stay tuned!