As we've been working on applications for the Palm Pre, lots of people have been asking us a lot of questions, most of which we couldn't really answer yet.

One of the big areas people asked about was what the phone was like. And we just weren't allowed to say that much to date. But with the launch only two days away, the press has been given a look at the phone, and the response has been overwhelming. And I'm not talking about the Palm trade press, but folks who have been pretty hard to impress, including some big fans of Apple products for years, people like David Pogue, and Walter Mossberg.

So I thought I'd share with you some of the recent articles:

• David Pogue, in the New York Times: Palm Pre, Elegant Contender
• Walt Mossberg, in the Wall Street Journal: Palm's New Pre Takes On iPhone
• Peter Svensson, The Associated Press Review: Dazzling Palm software beats the iPhone
• Engadget's Joshua Toplosky: Palm Pre Review

We're excited to see such leading journalists in the tech space share our enthusiasm for this great new platform. We're ready to build more great apps for the platform, too, so if you're interested in how we can help, give us a shout.

It's the first Wednesday of the month again, and that means it's time for the Pivotal Labs/Outside.In monthly Ruby Happy Hour. It's the first one since GoRuCo, so there's even more to talk about than usual. (Thanks Josh, Francis, and everyone else who made this a great conference again this year.)

Where: Outside.in, 20 Jay St Suite 1019 (10th Fl), Brooklyn, NY
When: 7-9PM today, Wednesday June 3rd
Who: If you’re a developer who uses Ruby and would like to meet some other Ruby folks, toss around ideas, or just have a few beers, we welcome you with open arms!

There will be pizza, beer, and great discussions for everyone. More details on the Outside.In Blog, and please RSVP if you can, so we know how much pizza to get.

We have a winner in the Pivotal Tracker GoRuCo Haiku Contest.

Collin Miller submitted the winning entry:

Rivers of Action
Clearly Sculpt a Way Forward
My Path is Now Clear

We thank everyone for participating. There were a number of great entries, but this piece really stood out.

Collin, come on down tomorrow and say hi. I'll be there all day enjoying the conference with some other folks from Pivotal Labs and demoing Pivotal Tracker for anyone who doesn't know it already. Congratulations on your win!

One day only... We're giving away one ticket to GoRuCo, the Gotham Ruby Conference happening here in New York tomorrow, Saturday, May 30th.

Rules: Submit your Pivotal Tracker-related Haiku to tracker-haiku-contest@pivotallabs.com by 5pm ET tonight, May 29th.

We'll pick one winner, at our sole discretion, to be announced here. All submissions are licensed to Pivotal Labs to use however we see fit, and you retain the ability to use them as you see fit, under the Creative Commons commercial attribution share alike license. The winner will be granted one ticket to GoRuCo, to be used tomorrow.

Valid entries must include name, telephone, and email. Name will be used in attribution, but neither the telephone number or email will be made public.

So have at it! Give us your Tracker haikus. Don't know Tracker yet? Check it out!

On Wednesday night we hosted our first San Francisco Tracker Users Group (SF.TUG)

It was a great opportunity to meet more of our users, and hear directly from them about how they're using the product, and share with them some of the philosophy behind it.

We're excited by your enthusiasm and we will definitely make the TUG a regular event here in San Francisco, and we are planning to start one in our New York City offices soon. Please visit the Meetup group to join the discussion, and for more information and the schedule for future meetups.

I had a great conversation with Darryl Taft at eWeek last Friday about our experience developing for webOS. Much of of our conversation is in his article: Why Some Developers Think the Palm Pre Could Upstage the iPhone.

Last week, Wolfram Arnold of RubyFocus interviewed Edward Hieatt, our VP of Engineering, and Davis Frank, one of our engineers, to try to get at the heart of how you build a scalable software development team.

The interview is posted on RailsLab, at http://railslab.newrelic.com/2009/03/18/scalable-teams-part-1-communication

It's a nice piece. We look forward to the second installment.

I'm very pleased to announce that Pivotal Tracker has won the coveted Jolt Award, in the Project Management category.

I want to thank the judges for selecting Pivotal Tracker above a category dominated by Agile project management tools, and for rewarding Tracker for innovation.

I want to thank the community who have used, evangelized, and supported Tracker, and in particular Obie Fernandez, Ward Cunningham, and Nivi; plus everyone over at Engine Yard for hosting the app.

And of course I want to thank and congratulate the development team and visionaries, particularly Dan Podsedly, Alex Chaffee, Rob Mee, Mark Michael, and Edward Hieatt for envisioning and then building the tool that we've come to depend on.

Tim Carroll at Palm Infocenter recently spoke with Chris Sepulveda, our VP of Business Development, to ask some questions about the developer experience working with Palm's new platform.

The interview (http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9688/webos-developer-interview-with-pivotal-labs/) provides some early glimpses of the new platform, and puts it into context in the wider mobile space.

Jon Dahl has a great write-up on Rail Spikes comparing Pivotal Tracker to just about every bug tracking application out there.

http://railspikes.com/2009/2/2/pivotal-tracker-bug-trackers

He hasn't had a chance to try it out on longer projects yet, but we use it everyday on projects (like tracker itself) that have been years in development and refinement.

Thanks, Jon, for the thoughtful exploration of the product!