On June 23rd an announcement was made at the Marketcircle Blog which revealed that an iPhone companion to their business productivity application, Daylite, was being developed. The news has been greeted with great enthusiasm from current Daylite users, and we got a chance to talk to Marketcircle's president, AJ, about their mobile development plans.

First, for those not familiar with Daylite, it's what AJ refers to as a Business Productivity Manager. "It's more than a PIM," AJ stated, "it's more than groupware. Our premise is something called a Productivity Pyramid. The bottom layer is tasks, notes, files, meetings, urls, et cetera. The second layer is people: contacts, your companies and users. The top layer is what we call objectives, which is projects and opportunities." Daylite is geared towards helping small business -- ranging from one to fifty people -- move forward.

Very recently, Marketcircle released a new version of Daylite which integrates with the iWork suite. Daylite can also integrate with Mail.app and supports Sync Services for iCal and Address Book syncing.

The developers at Marketcircle were receiving constant requests for mobile applications for Palm, Blackberry, etc. AJ says that, at that point, the richness of data provided by Daylite didn't sync well with the available platforms. "And no offense to those platforms," he went on, "but they're quite ugly." All of that was "until we got the iPhone."

Screensteps, the software documentation generator we've come to love, has reached an official 2.1 status and has been released into the wild. Well, as wild as software documentation gets, anyway. This gem is a TUAW favorite and I'm personally very psyched about the new upload-to-blog feature, which has come a long way since we first announced it in the beta. The other 74 enhancements, changes and fixes can be found in the release notes.

You'd expect software in this genre to be well documented ... you won't be disappointed. In addition to the extensive, ScreenSteps-generated online manual, there are new screencasts available on the updated website. You can also grab a 30-day trial of ScreenSteps Pro on the download page. The Standard version is priced at $39.95 and the Pro version comes in at $59.95 (feature comparison).

I happened to have a chance to sit down with Trevor and Greg, creators of ScreenSteps, at WWDC. It's quite by coincidence that I managed to finish editing and uploading the video right before they let me know about the 2.1 release. Our chat is after the jump.

ExpanDrive made a pretty good stir when it was released. If you haven't seen it, it's an application that allows remote SFTP servers to be mounted (using MacFUSE) and used seamlessly as part of the filesystem. We've been following it as it develops and I wanted a chance to talk to its developers about what's up next.

I caught up with Jeff Mancuso of Magnetk last week and did just that. I found out where Amazon S3 plans are at, and what ExpanDrive has to offer Flickr, Facebook and other web applications. The video (after the jump) is very nicely lit, too, just for you.

Update: Magnetk was kind enough to hand us a coupon code for $5 off of an ExpanDrive license, good for the first 50 TUAW readers who use it. Enter SHFVRDEFO1SGA3QI at checkout.

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I missed my chance to meet up with Vara Software at WWDC, which I was lamenting even before they went and won two Apple Design Awards, including Best Mac OS X Leopard Application. I called Paul Carnine, Vara's founder and one of its developers, to talk about the achievement, Vara Software in general, and their increasingly impressive software lineup.

The software winning all of the acclaim right now is ScreenFlow, which we excitedly covered when it was initially released. With the last several releases it's become increasingly polished and continues to be one of the best screencasting applications on the Mac market. It's possibly the only application in it's category to rightfully bill itself as a complete "studio." Apparently Apple appreciates this one as much as I do.

Dave and Roustem from Agile Web Solutions, authors of the form-filling powerhouse known as 1Password, were happy to talk about WWDC, Mac development and the future of 1Password and its upcoming iPhone counterpart. We've taken quite a few notes as 1Password has developed, and while I love the iPhone bookmarklet, I'm excited to see work being done on a native app!

There were laughs, tears and some pronounced (and lovable) Canadian colloquialisms. And that's just in the 10 minutes that survived the editing. Video after the jump.

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Mike Lee (yes, the self-proclaimed world's toughest programmer) has a new project called Tapulous. Last time we spoke with Mike, he was part of Delicious Monster but has since moved his focus to the iPhone. Tapulous includes several prominent names from the jailbreak community (including Polar Bear Farm) and is working on a family of "social iPhone applications." We talk about that ... and Lemurs, of course, but that was at my insistence.

I had a quick chat with Guy Horrocks from Polar Bear Farm on his way out of the Keynote. The video quality is well below our prestigious TUAW standards, and for that I apologize. Regardless, it's a pleasure to talk to a member of a team which has been delivering functionality deemed by many to be missing from the iPhone, such as the contact search that they previewed for us last time we ran into them. They're certainly not complaining that the announcements at the Keynote will nullify that particular application, they've got plenty more to work on.

I got Guy's perspective on moving from the jailbreak scene to "legitimate" iPhone application development, as well as some thoughts on the apps presented in the Keynote. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to demo -- or even talk about -- what they're currently working on. I assume that was out of fear of the World's Toughest Programmer lurking nearby, with whom they're currently in cahoots. Of course, it could have been the NDA.

The guys who comprise 280 North aren't actually working on any Mac applications. I tracked them down because what they are doing -- bringing the quality and usability of the Mac experience to the web -- is remarkable. Their web application, 280 Slides, turns making beautiful, web-based presentations into quick work. It's built on a platform called Cappuccino, using what they've dubbed Objective-J (named for its similarities to Objective-C) -- a library they created which provides a highly useful layer of functionality to standard javascript. According to 280 North, Objective-J provides a web development platform that is more Cocoa-like by removing a lot of the lower-level variables that are the bane of most web developers. Easy cross-browser compatibility, anyone?

2 of the three members of 280 North are former Apple employees, working on the iPhone and iTunes, respectively. They state that 280 Slides isn't so much "Apple-inspired" as it is "good-inspired," but the Keynote resemblance is hard to deny, especially in comparison to other, less-polished web-based presentation apps. 280 Slides is still a work-in-progress, but these guys are coding hard and fast to build what is going to be an excellent application. Check out the video (after the jump) and then take a peek at 280 Slides.

We gave Niclas and Martin from Gravity Applications a chance to talk about their latest (finished) project: Searchlight. It's an exciting application that provides a web interface to your system-wide Spotlight database, allowing any web browser on any platform (including your iPhone) to search, preview and download files from your computer. The chat was fun, but it got even more interesting after the camera stopped rolling and Niclas showed me their next project. I can't reveal it yet, but I can tell you that I've been excited about it ever since and -- because that's a terrible teaser -- I'll tell you that it's quite likely to be a huge step forward in solving some of my most perplexing organization conundrums. I promise to cover it thoroughly when it's released. In the meantime, here's the Gravity team elaborating on Searchlight and their first time at WWDC. Video after the jump.

Amongst my WWDC fumbles was the decision to conduct an interview in Yerba Buena park, adjacent to a main drag. At the time, it seemed like the best available option. Really. Martin and Dominik from TheCodingMonkeys (mentioned here on occasion) are the casualties of that blunder, but I managed to compress and EQ the sound enough to make the video work. It would have been a shame to miss out on these guys.

TheCodingMonkeys, seen here perched upon large rocks, have recently joined forces with Boinx to work on a joint project that is going to be very, very cool. More about that after the Boinx interview goes live. It seems that TheCodingMonkeys have a lot to keep mum about, but we get some hints about their upcoming iPhone projects and -- among other things -- assurance that SubEthaEdit will continue to develop. Video after the jump.

TUAW was lucky enough to spend a little time recently chatting with Anders Nilsson of Polarbit.com. Polarbit is an independent game developer based in Europe. They recently ported their mobile Raging Thunder racing game to the iPhone and released it as a free beta to the jailbreak community. (It's hosted at the Big Boss repository.) Built around the iPhone's accelerometer, Raging Thunder really expresses the fun, interactive potential of the iPhone as a gaming platform.

Read on past the jump for the full transcript of our interview.

Evernote has plans for your brain. More specifically, a vision for the the augmentation of your memory. Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote and a recent Mac convert (who's been enthusiastically replacing his relatives' PCs with Macs to cut down on tech support calls) filled us in on Evernote's big plans.

Originally, Evernote was a Windows desktop application for taking notes, and it was (and is) top-ranked in its class. Then they decided that a broader array of input options and more accessibility could take Evernote light years beyond the initial plans. This included creating a Mac desktop client and a web application to interface everything. It can take your text notes, web clippings, pictures and more, organizing them with a tagging system and attribute filter. The ultimate goal of Evernote is to be, as Phil puts it, a "universal human memory extension."

The Mac desktop client is being developed from the ground up, not ported from the Windows client. This makes for a true Mac experience and a beautiful interface. Feature parity will eventually be maintained (Windows users currently have a slightly different feature set), but the two clients are being developed separately. Read on after the jump to find out what makes Evernote different from your current system for tracking all the information in your life (and find out how you can get in on it!).

Knowledge@Wharton, the online business journal of The Wharton School, has published an interview with Steve "Woz" Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, notorious prankster and a somewhat reluctant entrepreneur. It's one of the more in-depth interviews with him that I've read, covering the past, present and future, his relationship with Steve Jobs, his unique brand of humor and digging for further insights on otherwise ubiquitous information.

If you woke up this morning wishing you could peer inside the mind of a major player in the history of personal computing, and hoping for a dash of humor and a side of Apple insights, you're in luck. And if you never read iWoz, this interview is practically a CliffsNotes ... so you can pretend you had the fortitude to at least peruse the 288-page tome.

Check it out at Knowledge@Wharton.