Steve Jobs announced the arrival of iPhone 4 at WWDC today. The highlights of the iPhone 4 are as below:

1. New Hardware Design: Front and back camera with flash, 2 mics, integrated antennae, and 24% thinner. Quad band HSDPA, 7.2Mbps, 802.11n WiFi, GPS, compass, accelerometer.

2. Retina Display: Four times as many pixels, 326 pixels per inch (300 is the limit for the retina!), 3.5 inch display, 960 x 640 pixels, 326 pixels per inch, 800:1 contrast ratio, IPS technology (better than OLED)

3. iPhone 4 is powered by the A4 chip: Micro-SIM, larger battery – improved battery life – 7 hours of 3G talk, 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 hours of WiFi browsing, 10 hours of video, 40 hours of music and 300 hours of standby.

4. Gyroscope: 3 axis gyro, the gyro tied to accelerometer, compass together for six axis. pitch, roll, yaw. rotation about gravity, 6-axis motion sensing.

5. New Camera system: 5 megapixel, backside illuminated sensor. 5x digital zoom, tap to focus, and an LED flash. Records HD video – 720p at 30 fps. LED flash stays for video recording. You can record, edit and email right from the iPhone. iMovie for iPhone at $4.99.

6. iOS 4: iPhone OS4 aptly renamed to iOS4. You can see the features in another post I wrote earlier.

7. iBooks: Bookshelf, PDF reader, iBookstore

8. iAds: Apple’s ad network, comes on live on July 1st, 2010 for all iOS 4 devices.

9. FaceTime: Video calls on iPhone. WiFi only. iPhone 4 to iPhone 4. No setup. Camera can be flipped to the rear or front. Portrait or Landscape. This has to be the all time, life-altering, feature in any product…

Checkout all the features, the design, and the full technical specs of the new iPhone 4 phone at Apple. Last but not the least, see it for yourself in this video of the new iPhone 4 phone and the photo gallery in all its glory…

Availability: Pre-order starts on June 24th, 2010. “AT&T is going to make an incredibly generous upgrade offer. If your contract expires at any time in 2010, you can upgrade to the iPhone 4. You can get it up to six months early.”

Colors: White and black.

Pricing: iPhone 4 – $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB. iPhone 3GS – $99.

iOS 4 upgrades: For the 3G, not all the features are supported, same with the iPod touch, and this excludes the first generation. Upgrades are free for all these products. Available on June 21st, 2010.

Hat tip: Engadget and gdgt did a live coverage of the event. Thank guys, for your coverage for people like us, who could not attend in person.

For over the years I have read and enjoyed the articles and posts from Smashing Magazine. They have helped me in contrasting and getting to the bottom of a lot of things. I have benefited from the excellent viewpoints, free fonts, free themes that they made available from time to time. As always, as I was reading the daily post, and I read the following and I wanted to help as well.

What happened here today, on the Smashing Magazine’s website? Well, here is the thing: we need your help. Only sound financial conditions can guarantee the steady stream of high quality content which you are used to on Smashing Magazine. Today we need your financial support. Please help us by buying our new eBook "Professional Web Design".

Well, needless to say I went ahead and ordered the eBook. In the past, I have ordered their printed book “The Smashing Magazine Book”. The printed book is a valuable asset to novice and experienced web developers and designers alike. I am looking forward to reading the eBook. The eBook contains a selection of their best articles about professional Web design and the business side of web development. It contains 10 already published articles and 2 exclusive, newly written pieces. The book costs only $9.90.

Plea: Please tweet my post, or just tweet the url to the eBook and the printed book so that we can all help Smashing Magazine. It is a very small thing on our part to do to keep this very valuable asset going.

It is the festive time of the year. With leaves turning colors and trees going bald thereafter, the season ushers the festivities – Diwali, Durga Puja, Halloween, Thanksgiving and finally Christmas.

Well, it is Thanksgiving and it is customary to thank people who touched your lives. On the personal front, I am thankful to my wife for being a great companion and for being the love of my life. I am thankful to my beautiful kids to be part of my life. I am thankful to my dad, mom and sister for their blessings and love. I am thankful to all my friends for being there for me, supporting me and being part of my life. Above all, I thank God for everything he has bestowed upon me and my family.

On the professional front, it has been a great year for me. It was the year I planned to step up my freelancing efforts. I was blessed and I nailed a few projects. During the course of the year, while I dabbled in code, I am thankful to a lot of people.

I am thankful for the great plugins by Rick Olson (technoweenie) and John Nunemaker, that I used in my projects. I am thankful to the team behind Aptana for providing an excellent Ruby on Rails IDE for free. I am thankful to Ryan Bates for his invaluable screencasts at Railscasts.com which has helped in numerous occasions. I am thankful to Unfuddle and Github for hosting the source code for my projects for free. I am thankful to the numerous bloggers who’s postings have inspired me and helped me learn along the way.

I am thankful to Olimpiu Metio at Rails Magazine to make me part of the editorial team. I am thankful to the great team members Bob Martens, John Yerhot, Khaled al Habache, Mark Coates, Starr Horne and Carlo Pecchia at Rails Magazine. We had a blast. By the way, Issue #5 coming soon in Dec. I am thankful to all the authors for their cooperation and all the people I interviewed for their time.

I am thankful to RailsBridge Builders for giving me an opportunity to work on open source projects and helping non-profit organizations. I would like to thank Mike Gunderloy for his leadership and vision for RailsBridge. I would like thank Mike Breen for his help and support in various projects.

I am thankful to Sarah Allen, Grace Liu, Chris Lerum, Thomas Jack and Petros Amiridis for an excellent team experience while working on Sunset PTA project. I learned a lot in team work and gained insight in working with people in different time zones.

I want to also thank my good friend Wynn Netherland for keeping my hopes high, giving me advice, showing me the path and encouraging me. Thanks a lot for inspiring me with your work.

Finally, last but not the least, I want to thank all that have subscribed to this blog and my other blog, followed my tweets and encouraged me with their comments and feedback. Please keep them coming.

I wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Dear friends,

I have been sponsoring a child for the last 10 years. It is such a satisfying feeling, I cannot explain in words. I get letters and photographs of the child I am sponsoring and it brings tears to my eyes whenever I read his letters. It is just amazing what you can do with a few dollars to a person’s life. I have seen this child grow through photos and letters sent to me. I write back to him often.

If you would like to make a difference in a child’s life, you can support my Lift-One Project at http://www.liftoneproject.org/goto/rupakganguly. Just go to the bottom of the page and click on the “Sponsor a child now” link.

I believe we can all change this world to be a better place by just doing our part.

I am trying to do mine. How about you?

Sponsor a Child Now.

Please spread the word to all your friends and family. We can all make a difference together.

It is always exciting to write the first post. But, this time it is a little different. Although, I already blog at Developer’s Shelf, but it is still exciting to start a new blog. The main reason for starting this blog was to focus on Ruby on Rails. I have been playing with Rails for a long time but never got out and wrote anything. Well, the other reason is that I usually straddle between Microsoft technologies and Ruby on Rails, hence the challenge to distribute time.

Well, I have decided to write about my experiences in Ruby on Rails. I will start a Learning Rails series of some sort. I want to talk about new plug-ins, generators, code snippets, templates or just about anything interesting.

So, subscribe to my blog and let me know what you want to read.