I wrote my first check of the year yesterday and remembered to date it “2009.” More importantly, it wasn’t a personal check—it was a business check.

I don’t intend for this to become a link blog—not because of some high-falutin’ ideals, but because I assume most potential readers are at least as connected into the Mac dev community as I am and will have already heard the latest cool news.

But the latest post by Glen Aspeslagh describes Ecamm Network’s usage of a project which seems to deserve increased exposure: Cocotron, “an open source project which aims to implement a cross-platform Objective-C API similar to that described by Apple Inc.’s Cocoa documentation.” Or, as glibly summarized by the Ecammeratus: “Wrote a Cocoa app? Just add a new Xcode target, hit compile and out shoots a Windows version.”

Sure, it doesn’t work perfectly, but Glen’s warts-and-all description sounds promising. If you have a product that could benefit from a Windows equivalent please give Cocotron a look and contribute code—so it will be easier for me to use when I come up with a product that could benefit from it.

Hooray, Apple has decided to lift the long-in-the-tooth NDA on the iPhone SDK!

Yesterday I tweeted: “Sorry, but I still feel black iPhone UIs are the equivalent of brushed metal.” I was aware that people I know personally are writing applications that this would seem to disparage. I also knew that I should follow it up with more explanation than can fit in 140-character chunks.

I’m not usually one for New Year’s Resolutions, but this year I set three goals—one personal and two professional.

The prizes for Iron Coder at C4[2] have been announced: A MacBook Air loaded with more than $5,800 (MSRP) of software for first place and “just” the software for second! Gah! Now I really wish I’d been able to go so I could…watch the award ceremony.

That’s just software created by attendees. It’s an impressive Who’s Who of companies and applications, all sitting down together in a conference room for the weekend.

First WWDC sold out, but I got in on the last day of early registration.

Now, C4[2] opened registration and sold out while I was off on a weekend getaway. I hadn’t attended the previous two years, but was hoping to make it happen this year. There’s not much I can do about that except say “bummer” and look on the bright side: I had been very close to booking a flight and room when the dates were first announced, and I haven’t had to spend the day canceling reservations now.

What is the next Mac dev conference this year, and where should I set up my tent for the line?

This is one of those cool little tidbits I learned during a WWDC session and can share now that Xcode 3.1 is out: Xcode 3.1 has changed the way you should add Apple-supplied frameworks. Although Apple claims in the Release Notes (you have read them, haven’t you?) that the process has been “simplified,” the method isn’t really apparent from within Xcode.

When last we joined our intrepid WWDC newbie, he had just entered Grand Keynote Cavern. Come along for the action-packed continuation (and conclusion, I promise!) of The Tale of WWDC.

I haven’t been waiting around to have the last word on WWDC; I’ve been busy and distracted, but I suppose it’s time to sum up my experiences.