NPR’s All Things Considered had a nice story on Dr. Horrible tonight. This enjoyable, currently web-only, musical was produced during the writers’ strike last year by Joss Whedon. I highly recommend catching it while you still can.

Autoweek reports that a company called MyGallons allows folks to pre-purchase gallons of gasoline at a predetermined average price for the area where they live. According to the article, the gallons are loaded onto a debit card that the company says is accepted at more than 95% of the nation’s fueling stations. To take part in their service, MyGallons charges an annual fee starting at $29.95.

Miami-based MyGallons counts a membership of more than 4000 and has offices in Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio. It launched a pilot program in April. Verona estimates that the testers paid about $3.10 a gallon for gas, saving roughly a dollar over today’s prices. The debit card system measures consumers’ accounts in gallons of regular unleaded fuel. Pumping premium fuel or diesel debits more gallons, but if you find a station with fuel that’s cheaper than your purchased price, your account is credited with additional gallons. Still, there are some potential pitfalls, including the obvious question: What happens if gasoline prices go back down? MyGallons’ suggestion is to stock up; buy low and use it later if prices increase, though it remains to be seen if consumers would adapt to that kind of purchasing behavior.

It seems like an interesting service to help defray higher energy prices.

After bricking my iPhone this morning by getting caught in the iTunes server onslaught, I was able to complete the upgrade successfully this evening. The upgrade breathes new life into the EDGE iPhone – when I’m on a WiFi network it’s almost equivalent to the iPhone 3G. So far I’ve downloaded twelve free apps from the App Store and paid for one (Bejeweled 2). Even though I balked at paying $9.99 for an iPhone game, my friend Dave convinced me that 1) it’s a reasonable price and 2) it’s a small price to pay for something that I’ll use nearly every day. I can already tell that care must be taken with the lure of the App Store lest I go broke.

In related news, I finally received approval from Apple for my iPhone developer cert, so now I can try out my audio application on my iPhone and potentially sell it via the App Store.

If you’re looking for startup companies in your area, there’s a great new resource: Startup Warrior. It’s incredibly useful to drill-down into your region on the map and see all of the amazing work going on nearby.

Tonight the first CocoaHeads Reston meeting was held at Near Infinity Corporation. Jason Harwig gave an excellent presentation on WebKit, starting with a simple browser created completely in Interface Builder (it consisted of a text field linked to a web view). I’ve recreated it and included a snapshot below.

Next he demonstrated how to interact with the DOM and JavaScript. The JavaScript integration was in both directions, first he demonstrated calling JavaScript functions from Objective-C and then calling Objective-C from JavaScript. It should be noted that for JavaScript to call Objective-C you need to implement the + (BOOL)isSelectorExcludedFromWebScript:(SEL)aSelector; method and return NO for each of the methods you wish to call.

Finally, Jason walked through various uses of WebKit an demonstrated an application specific, full-screen browser he wrote for a game as well as a del.icio.us Cocoa application he wrote called Delish. Several other webkit based applications were also covered such as Fluid - a freely available site-specific browser creator, PackRat - a commercial site-specific browser for Backpack, and another application which I’ve forgotten (I guess I should’ve taken notes). As an aside, Jason brought up the interesting work that the 280North folks have done for their 280Slides web-based presentation called Objective-J. Objective-J (code named Cappuccino), is an Objective-C like language built on JavaScript.

Matt Wizeman stepped up next to demo a WebKit application he’s developing to wrap a troublesome time tracking web application. It was interesting the machinations he had to go through to know when the page had finished loading and to transition between pages since the application was JavaScript heavy, using tricks like clickable divs.

I learned quite a bit about WebKit. As soon as I got home I was energized to play with it.

Be sure to come to the next meeting on July 10th (day before iPhone 3G day)!