Apple distributor Renaissance Corporation, which has been bringing Apple products to Kiwi homes and businesses for over 20 years recently said that Apple has yet to provide New Zealand with a release date for the iPad.

Yes, patience will have to be a virtue – whether we like it or not. Short of flying to the U.S. and lining up outside your friendly neighborhood Apple store, New Zealand residents will have to wait it out indefinitely before they can call themselves proud owners of the iPad.

This is due mostly to the unanticipated demand for the iPad. It’s huge presale interest has driven back even the US release date by a few days. In many cases, the demand has simply outstripped the supply, which just means more waiting for markets outside the US.

Other markets like Japan, Australia and Canada expect to have their iPads in by the end of April. Kiwis, however, will just have to wait and see.

Enterprising Kiwis are also getting a slice of the applications pie ever since the Apple Apps Store started getting worldwide attention and eventually became recognized as a powerful platform for such purposeful software.

NZ computer professionals and their start-up application development companies have been seeing steady growth alongside the booming development of the Apple Apps Store. Application development companies like Polar Bear Farm, Orsome and Smudge Apps are just some of these New Zealand companies who are responding to public demand for useful applications for their iPhones.

These companies have been responsible for bringing best-selling iPhone applications. Polar Bear Farm for example put ShowTime, one of the first video recording applications on the iPhone on the most downloaded apps list, while also producing Face Match, a software that uses image detection technology.  Smudge Apps, on the other hand, is responsible for such top rated apps as Flicks, a movie schedule finding application and Chords, which identifies a played note.

Another software development company, Orsome, has a different approach to applications development. They believe that finding a niche is important for an applications development company to prosper, a need that Orsome’s Peter Watling thinks is not totally being satisfied.

Watling believes that for an app to really be useful, it has to be relevant to its locality. This belief led Watling to create the MetroInfo app, a utility to help Christchurch bus users get wait times on their buses and updates on their MetroCard credits. Though it has yet to climb to the top of the App Store’s bestseller list, Watling’s app has been particularly useful to Christchurch residents and is something that he is constantly getting local praise and gratitude mail for.

Taking all of these into consideration, it seems that there is a future for IT professionals and software developers to go into applications development. The rapid growth of technology will create demand for technology experts to create more diverse software for users. Suffice it to say, you won’t find IT jobs wanting in this niche of the technology industry.

And rightly so. Dial-up speeds are slower than snails on a racetrack, and personally, in this day and age of megabyte speeds, dial-up has been due out the door for quite some time. I guess it’s just taking us, Kiwis a little more than usual to realize the potential of other Internet connections and finally drop our hold on dial-up and embrace newer, faster technology.

This, according to the World Internet Project survey, which presented the following statistics:

• Kiwi broadband usage increased from 67 percent in 2007 to 82 percent in September of 2009.
• Dial-up connection usage decreased from 31 percent to 16 percent.
• The increase in number of broadband users in New Zealand is the sixth fastest growth rate among the 30 member countries surveyed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation.

Does this mean that in the future, dial-up will be non-existent in the average Kiwi’s technological landscape? That may very well be the case, but it won’t be totally eradicated. There will still be some old-schoolers out there who will rely on their telephones for Internet connection, but rest assured, the trend is turning and it’s doing so quite quickly, and in the next few years, there will definitely be more broadband subscribers than dial-up users.

So if you’re one of the remaining few still using dial-up, it might be time to rethink your choice of Internet connection. Faster technology out there will be better able to facilitate your use of the Internet. Whether it’s for business or pleasure, anything faster than dial-up will definitely do you a world of good and with more people moving to Broadband it can only lead to more tech jobs in New Zealand

To Gmail users reading this, you probably already heard of Buzz, or encountered it when you opened your Gmail accounts starting last week. Buzz is Google’s answer to Facebook. It is a social networking tool that allows users to connect with their friends, loved ones and acquaintances by relying on the principle that your email contacts, especially the ones you send messages to the most, are also the ones you would want to keep in touch with on a social basis; and much like Facebook, it works by allowing you to post status messages, upload photos, links and the like to share with this network of people.

If you think about it, Google was actually working on a really good premise by allowing email contacts to interact with each other. After all, that’s how you usually find your friends on Facebook too, aside from the Friend Finder method. One of Facebook’s chief tools for helping you find friends is by importing your contacts list from your primary email accounts.

The problem, however, that cropped up in the first week of its release was that Gmail users who were introduced to Buzz (and let me emphasize here, usually without really wanting to use it, because Buzz is integrated with Gmail and if you want to check your Inbox or send a message off to someone, Buzz is right there, a colorful little tab in your left hand panel, attached, bonded and packaged with Gmail) found out that they were now following email contacts or were being followed by said email contacts automatically!

Definitely an issue of privacy. Why so? This is because Gmail assumes that the people you email automatically pass your privacy screening standards, and doesn’t ask for confirmation of whether you want to follow or be followed by them. A big no-no for people who keep a contact list over email whom they don’t want to interact with socially – like bosses, or clients and the like. It also exposes your contacts to each other, allowing say, a boss to find out that you are also in contact with, say, a rival company.

Now, I can easily say that I don’t have to use Buzz, even as I’m using Gmail because I can just ignore it and let it sit its colorful bubble on my left side panel, but the fact that it exists, and that it does some things automatically that I am not yet aware of or prepared for is an issue for me. Hey, I didn’t sign up for it like I did Facebook and it being integrated in my mail automatically doesn’t fly well with me.

I would rather that Google had advised its users of the introduction of Buzz before actually launching it and providing users with the option to either agree to integrate Buzz into their Gmail accounts or reject it, leave it out of Gmail but give them an option to reintegrate their social networking tool at a later time. The fact that it’s integrated with email can be a big advantage over having separate accounts, but if that’s the case, users should have the freedom to choose to integrate or not, depending on how users actually utilize their social networking pages and the degree of privacy that they require, which, if you think about it is really the issue of utmost importance here.

To Google’s credit, after getting negative feedback over privacy issues in Buzz, the company has already begun to address issues of privacy control and are now working on ways to make Buzz a better companion to its infinitely better email counterpart.

Go will provide the security and performance of a compilled language like C++ while having the speed of a dynamic language like Python.

Go - The latest Google open source language

Who is Go aimed at?

Google describes GO as ” Go is an experiment. We hope adventurous users will give it a try and see if they enjoy it. Not every programmer will, but we hope enough will find satisfaction in the approach it offers to justify further development” You can find more information about GO at Golang.org which is the official site for the open source language.”

Google is using this language internally so this is a good testament. But, what will external users think of it?

Google describes Go in thier recent blog

“Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. In our experiments with Go to date, typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go is designed to let you move fast. We’re hoping Go turns out to be a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing and a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, with some cool features like true closures and reflection.”

Watch the video for more information about Google GO.. or check out GO for yourself