Good Morning, Campers!

Registration for iPhoneDevCamp 2 opened yesterday, so if you want to attend this non-profit working event for iPhone / iPod Touch developers, head on over to the registration page and sign up. Spokesperson Raven Zachary told TUAW that the organizers are expecting all 500 spaces for the event to fill quickly this year due to the hype surrounding the iPhone SDK and the sellout crowd at WWDC 2008.

This year's camp will be held at Adobe Systems in San Francisco August 1-3, 2008. You'll be able to create iPhone and iPod Touch apps with a group of the brightest and best developers, designers, and testers. We haven't yet heard if there will be singalongs, canoe races, or lanyard weaving, and you're on your own for making s'mores over the warmth of a MacBook Pro.

Will I be going to camp this year? Unfortunately, I won't, but I am looking forward to seeing the innovative apps that will emerge from this long weekend.

Thanks to Raven for the heads-up

If you're living in a Boot Camp world and have a need for changing your startup disk from time to time, enterprising TUAW reader David B. has written a couple of AppleScript apps with your name on them. Boot (Camp) Sargent beta 0.1 is actually two scripts: the first to set your startup disk to Windows (*shudder*), while the other resets to Mac OS X. In this fast-paced, multiple OS world we live in, little apps that save a few clicks can make all the difference.

Boot (Camp) Sargent is available at the first Google Pages site that I've ever seen used to promote or offer anything like this. Extra points for the tag line, "because holding down the Option key during startup is too hard", since I've actually heard people say that on the job in the past.

Yes, before you fire off a flaming comment, we know this is The Unofficial Apple Weblog, but we thought it might be nice to post a tip for those of you who either want or need to play with the next generation of Microsoft Windows, reportedly due out within the decade (hey, it was originally due in 2003 - by its present 2007 date they'll be almost half a decade late already). This Apple Discussions forum thread details a slightly more appealing trick for getting Vista, now in a public beta (but overloaded with download requests as of this writing), to install and run with Boot Camp. Basically, you need to have Boot Camp already set up and installed with Windows XP. Then, burn a DVD of the Vista beta you just downloaded. And before you ask: no, unfortunately, Vista won't run on Parallels Desktop - yet. Parallels has publicly mentioned making this work with a future version, but there is no ETA for when this support will land.

Now - and this is the 'at your own risk' part - you need to use some kind of partition manager (the forum poster used one from within XP, but I've heard you can use one that starts up from within the Vista installer when booting from the DVD) to delete an ambiguous partition that Boot Camp creates that is around 180-200 MB in size. Again, we can't stress this enough: this is done at your own risk - you are messing with your boot record and after this step, Boot Camp won't be able to adjust your partitions or blow away and reclaim your Windows partition anymore. Mac OS X and Windows will still boot just fine, but this isn't an ideal setup for the faint-of-heart Boot Camp user.

if you take the plunge and nuke that partition, however, you should now be able to boot from the Vista DVD and use it to upgrade your copy of Windows XP - which in and of itself could spark a discussion as to whether one should upgrade or install clean new versions of Windows; it usually isn't recommended with Mac OS X, who wants to take bets on Windows' ability to have a smooth OS upgrade ride?

If you try any of this stuff out, feel free to post your thoughts on the experience, and then go wash your hands of one of the dirtiest things you can do to a Mac.

Summer is almost upon us, and you know what that means! Corn on the cob, lemonade, and Apple Camp for the kids! What's Apple Camp you ask? Why it is a free program that Apple runs in all of the Apple Stores that let's kids and their parents have some hands on fun with Macs.

This year there is a podcast workshop, a webpage workshop, a music workshop, and a movie making workshop. You can sign up for two of these free workshops, but please remember that there are targeted at kids 8 to 12 years of age.

Space is limited and each workshop's registration is strictly first come first serve.

[via ifoAppleStore]

Booting only two OSs on your MacBook Pro is, like, totally so last week.

Aside from earlier reports, it apparently is possible to bring a third OS to the party, as OnMac.net has posted a how-to wiki for booting WinXP, Mac OS X and Linux on a MacBook Pro via Boot Camp (so far, this is untested on other Intel Macs).

Gentoo is the version of Linux used in the how-to, but the Slashdot post where I found this is confident that it would be simple to get other flavors of Linux working.

But forget all this triple booting stuff... when is someone going to crack the 4 OS barrier? I want a quad boot with Microsoft Bob running on a MacBook Pro!