Tag: Technology

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Does experience count in mobile development?

The other day, I was instant messaging with someone and jokingly questioned why anyone would listen to what I had to say about mobile development. Then I realized that I’ve been doing mobile application development for almost 17 years! Just writing that sounds unreal. I wrote my first mobile application my senior year in college for the Newton. On a tangent, how did a college student get a Newton and the quite expensive developer tools? The Apple Personal Interactive Electronics (PIE) group licensed my NotifyMail application and exchange, I received a Newton MessagePad 110 and the developer tools when developer tools cost way more than the $99 Apple charges to join the iOS developer program.

The application was quite basic; it counted down the number of seconds until I graduated from college. Yes, I was tired of school and ready to graduate! I guess I kind of got hooked on mobile development and that’s where I’ve spent a majority of my career; first Newton, then Palm OS, and now iOS. I’ve played with Windows CE/Mobile and WebOS, but never wrote anything for those devices.

I don’t think I could write Newton or Palm OS code these days, but some of the concepts are still the same, such as limited screen size and limited memory. However, iOS is so much more advanced, it’s unbelievable.

On the flip side, some may say that my experience is also a hinderance as I may be stuck in my ways. This may be true, but I’d like to think that it isn’t the case. Hopefully my long history of mobile development continues to serve me well.

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The utility of a URL shortener

I’ve setup Twitter Tools to post links to my blog posts to Twitter and that’s been working well. I did this as one of my friends doesn’t subscribe to my RSS feed, but likes to read my posts. He is a frequent Twitter user, so this solution works well. Since I haven’t been using a URL shortener, some of my posts don’t make it to Twitter as the URL and title make the post over the Twitter limit of 140 characters. The other day, I decided to see about solving this.

There are a number of URL shortening services out there, but I kind of have a problem relying on a third party for the service. Also, one of the most popular one, bitly, is under a Libyan top level domain. I found YOURLS the other day and set it up. It was pretty easy to setup and I picked a subdomain for easy management. The WordPress Plugin for it kept creating extra links and that kind of annoyed me. I found that someone created a Twitter Tools plugin to work with YOURLS. I tested it and it worked perfectly.

So, now all my posts to Twitter are using my own URL shortener. The URL shortener is pretty maintenance free and easy to setup, so as long as I have my blog around, I think I can keep this running.

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Suggestions for the TSA

I’ve ranted a number of times about the TSA, so I’ve decided to offer the TSA some suggestions on how to handle airport security. I ask for nothing in return, even though I’m sure my ideas would be worth millions if I was contracted to do an overhaul of it.

In no particular order:

  • Redeploy military personnel to patrol the airports with M-16 machine guns. The wars overseas are not winnable, so put the soldiers in our all volunteer military (not the national guard troops) to work at the airports. The machine guns and troops in fatigues is at a minimum an excellent deterrent. Having flown within the months after 9/11, it was almost comforting to see the military there. The TSA officers at the checkpoints are not very menacing and aren’t even armed.
  • Bring in bomb sniffing dogs. They’ll likely be able to detect explosives more efficiently than the full body scanners or the random swap testing. In addition, if someone is nervous, dogs will make them even more nervous.
  • Profile people. This seems obvious, but train personnel to be more observant and watch people that fit certain profiles.
  • Watch behaviors. Train all the personnel to watch passengers’ behaviors.
  • Get rid of the full body scanners. They’re a waste of time and money. Return them and get our taxpayer money back.
  • Stop the 3-1-1 rule for liquids. Confiscating a bottle of hair spray is ridiculous.
  • Do the full body pat downs on people that show signs of being uncomfortable or are acting in a way out of the ordinary; don’t do a full pat down on a child that doesn’t fit a profile.
  • Stop confiscating nail clippers, nail files, etc. If you can get a knife inside of security like I had used for dinner last week, nail clippers aren’t going to hurt anyone. Also, look at maintenance workers that have all kinds of tools that could be used as weapons.
  • Tighten up perimeter security. There was a story the other day about a castaway in a wheel well that got onto the tarmac.

There are a few things that I don’t mind that have been done:

  • Reinforcing the cabin doors.
  • Prohibiting lines from forming outside the cabin door.
  • Taking off shoes; while a little inconvenient, I can handle it.

Let’s get real TSA and start being smarter about how the billions of dollars are being spent. The costs can be cut tremendously if we didn’t waste it on useless screening techniques.

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Review: Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-WX9

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I enjoyed editing video on my iPad 2 in iMovie which got me started on putting all my video in a format that the iPad could read without conversion. While our Canon PowerShot SD960IS wrote video in h.264, a format that the iPad can read, the audio was a PCM format that the iPad didn’t like and therefore iTunes wouldn’t put the video on the device and using the camera connection kit, I still couldn’t get the iPad to play it. If my dream of taking an iPad on vacation to edit a movie while still on the vacation using video shot during the trip, I had to find a compact digital camera that output the video in an iPad compatible format. I wasn’t convinced that just reading the specs would ensure compatibility, so I decided I was going to look and buy locally in the event I had to return the device.

About 2 weeks ago, I was going to go to Best Buy, but due to a cranky child, I didn’t make it. The following day, I saw some cameras in the Best Buy ad, so I looked up specs on a few of them. I decided to take a shot on the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-WX9
. Normally I’m not a huge Sony fan because of their insistence on using Memory Sticks, but a friend of mine told me that starting in all their cameras from last year or maybe earlier, the cameras also accepted SD cards.

Best Buy was sold out of the camera (it was on sale for $199, $20 less than normal) so I ordered it with free shipping and received it last Friday. After reading and re-reading the specs, I absolutely couldn’t wait for it.

The first thing I did when I got it was find the setting to capture videos in mp4 format in 720p. After doing this, I shot a video, took the card out and placed it in the camera connection kit on my iPad. The iPad imported and played the video without problems. That pretty much sealed the deal for me to keep the camera; the rest of the features were gravy since the camera already did more than my Canon.

The Sony almost has too many features to be usable, so I’ve tried to learn a few ones that are useful to me. First off is panorama mode. I’ve used stitching programs before, but due to them not being convenient, I think I have 1 wide picture in my collection. This mode makes it simple to capture a very wide picture that looks great. It’s easy to use and one feature that I’ll be using again.

The next feature that amazes me is the smile shutter. You turn it on and it detects when someone smiles in order to snap the shutter. In my testing, it works quite well if there is only one person in the picture; if there is more than 1 person, it’s only going to focus the detection on one of the subjects. However this could be used for self portraits and getting in the picture by having everyone frown until the photographer gets in the picture then everyone smiles. It should also be great at getting pictures of my son when he’s smiling even when he’s not really a happy camper.

The 16 megapixel resolution is a bit overkill, so I scaled it down to 10 megapixels and the images still look great. The Carl Zeiss lens and 5x zoom seem to perform better than the Canon.

While flipping through the options, I saw it mentioned Eye-fi and I had to dig into the docs which are inconveniently only on the CD and not the website (they’re in HTML and I prefer PDF since I can put them in Paperless and even put them on my iPad for easy access on my next vacation) to figure out what this meant. Basically there is an icon which tells you when the Eye-fi card is uploading and you have the ability to turn off the uploading to conserve battery.

I almost fell over when I saw that it charges over USB. Unfortunately one end of the cable is a Sony proprietary connector. The good news is that as long as I remember the cable, it is pretty easy to find a USB port for charging. One caveat is that it appears to draw a little too much power to charge from one of my chargers. Using an adapter I recently got for my XPal Power battery to charge my iPad, I can get the camera to charge on that charger. The large battery charges the camera without the adapter.

The one major downside I found to the camera is that the colors on the LCD are pretty awful. The images look washed out, but viewing pictures on my computer or iPad show that the colors are properly represented in the actual images.

Pros

  • Records movies in a format the iPad can read directly (720p, mp4 format; this is not the default).
  • Easy to use panoramic mode.
  • Smile shutter is pretty good at detecting smiles.
  • USB Charging.
  • Indicator for Eye-fi uploads.
  • Pretty sharp pictures.
  • Accepts a variety of formats including SD, SDHC, and SDXC.
  • Burst mode to capture 10 images in rapid succession is easy to use and works well.

Cons

  • Proprietary cable for charging.
  • Display makes pictures look wasted out.
  • Manual is delivered as HTML instead of PDF. However, using wkhtmltopdf and some command line magic, I was able to create a PDF of the HTML documentation.
  • Too many features! I haven’t been able to dig into everything and I’m not sure I can remember how to use everything even if I understood it all.

Summary

Like most of my reviews, this one is pretty favorable because I did my homework to find a product that met my needs. I’m extremely pleased that the device records video that is directly readable on the iPad; just about everything else is gravy to me. The cost of digital cameras has come down so much, that in the $200 price range, there are so many choices. Deciding on which one to get is extremely difficult. So far, I like the camera and it is taking pretty good pictures.

I don’t think that people can go wrong with this camera. If you’re looking to display your videos on an iPad and don’t want to have to deal with conversions, this camera fits the bill. (Note, however, that the 1080i default video format cannot be read on the iPad.)

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Traveling without a laptop

Ever since I bought my first laptop well over a decade ago, I think that I’ve taken one on every trip with a few exceptions. With the rise of the iPad, no longer do all my trips necessitate me taking a laptop. In the last year, I’ve been on 2 trips with just my iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard (to make it easier for me to blog :-)), and a MiFi for connectivity. The first trip my wife forbid me from taking my laptop and I survived; the second trip which was last month I actually didn’t want to travel with my laptop.

The iPad 2 has pretty much sealed the deal that I don’t have to travel with a laptop on non-work trips. Now that I’m a salaried employee and actually get time off where people are bugging me, I don’t feel compelled to fix bugs, write code, tweak a server, etc. Also the power of the iPad to edit videos makes it an ideal device to take on a vacation where I can take pictures and shoot video, then assemble a movie while still on vacation (the catch here is that our digital camera has to store the video in a format that the iPad can read when I put the SD card in the camera connection kit; I’ll address this in another post).

The “limited” abilities of the iPad are a huge plus to me as there is no way that I can write code on it and I don’t feel guilty about it. There is no doubt in my mind that on my next vacation, my laptop will be left at home.

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Are we safer?

Every time I fly, which isn’t all that often, I feel compelled to write something about the sorry state of the TSA. In the last 6 months, I’ve flown 3 times and on 2 of the legs, I was supposed to go through the full body scanners (in 1 case everyone had to go through), but opted out as I believe the government needs to be a bit more honest with the public on the safety of the devices by letting the FDA monitor them and by performing regular maintenance on them (they’re used far more than any x-ray machine in a medical facility). While the officer explained the process, it was a complete waste of time.

This past trip, at the San Diego airport they were only putting select people through the full body scans, but for some reason that didn’t speed things up. I arrived at the airport at 5:30 am for a 6:40 am flight, but by the time I made it through security at 6:10 am, everyone that wasn’t stuck at security was already on the plane. The screening process is getting longer and longer and I don’t think we’re any better off than years ago. All the statistics say that air travel is safer than driving. Many experts say that we need to profile, but this would be considered discriminatory. It’s easy for me to say we should do this as my physical characteristics wouldn’t make me a candidate for profiling.

While in the Portland airport, I had dinner at a restaurant past security. I was given a knife for my meal. While the knife wasn’t all that sharp, it was a piece of steel and as anyone that has watched a movie or TV show knows, pretty much any flat object can become a weapon.

We have spent far too much money on this ridiculousness that isn’t making us safer and is wasting our time. To be comfortable, I’m going to have to arrive at the airport an extra half an hour early in case the TSA decides to frisk everyone; for this trip, it would have meant getting up at 4 am! Uggh!

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Amazing advancement in digital video

Over the last few years, the advancements we’ve seen in digital video absolutely amazes me. Since I recently converted all my videos to a format that can be displayed on the iPad, I’ve been watching a bunch of video with my son as he loves watching videos of our dog. Using AirPlay on the iPad streaming to the Apple TV, we can watch the videos on our 37″ TV.

As we watch the movies, I can clearly tell which camera we used to take the video. Some of the older video is just awful and is quite grainy like half of the videos we seen on the news from people’s cellphones.

My first modern day digital camera that I bought in 2003 was an Olympus Digital Stylus 300 that shot 3 megapixel still pictures with no ability to shoot video. My next camera that I bought in 2005 was a Pentax Optio S5i that shot 5 megapixel still pictures and 320×240 video. Since the 320×240 video was pretty awful, I had a Panasonic Mini DV camera which shot video about 4 times the resolution of the Pentax (720×480). However, the Mini DV camera became a pain to carry and a second device just wasn’t convenient. So when I saw the Flip that shot at 640×480, I bought one as I wanted to capture all the moments of my son’s life (like any good parent). The Flip worked well and we took a lot of video, but like the Mini DV camera, carrying a second device basically proved to be the end of the Flip.

As I wanted better video, in 2009, I went with a Canon PowerShot SD960IS which takes 12 megapixel still images and 720p video. 720p is 4 times the resolution of the Flip and 16 times the resolution of the Pentax! This increase in resolution is amazing and makes a huge difference in the experience of watching video.

In just 8 years we’ve seen compact digital cameras go from having no capability to shoot video to overpassing standalone consumer video cameras. The consumer cameras we see today in some ways are better than commercial video cameras of just a few years ago.

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Is there such a thing as too many features?

I recently bought a new Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-WX9 and after scouring the manual, I have to ask is there such a thing as too many features? The main feature I was looking for in a new compact digital camera was the ability to record videos in a format that the iPad could directly read.

The Sony has all the buzz words and more; it has image stabilization, 3D shooting, 1080i video recording, motion detection, background defocus, iSweep Panorama, backlight correction HDR, and something called Smile Shutter technology (which is actually quite cool where it takes a picture when it detects the subject smiling). I’ve figure out how to use a few of the features, but how am I going to remember to turn on a feature when I want to take a picture? I have no idea. Worse, I have to explain to my wife how to use it and use some cool features.

Does the average non-techie person figure out how to use 1/4 of the features of the devices? Should manufacturers reduce the number of features and make them easier to use? I doubt this will happen as features sell devices even if people don’t use them.

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Confused AppleTV

This evening I went to watch a show on my AppleTV as I’ve done every night in the last week. I used my iPad to select the show and when I hit play nothing happened. I used ezDesktop to look at my Media Center and saw that iTunes was running fine. There were 2 possibilities; the AppleTV was confused or the Mac Mini needed a reboot. I browsed the shows on my iPad via the Videos app and started a show without problems which lead to only one possibility.

After a quick reboot of the AppleTV using the only method I could find (yanking the power plug), it came back and was able to watch the show.

Why did the AppleTV become confused? Why isn’t there a way to reboot the box without getting off the couch? I have no idea.

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Experimenting with WordPress Caching

In the last few days, I’ve read about caching WordPress blogs to improve performance. I’ve played with this in the past, but always gave up as it wasn’t something I needed, at least not yet. However, I took another stab at it and installed W3 Total Cache to see how much good it would do.

The plugin is amazingly easy to setup and seems to work well. However, one thing that kind of annoys me is that new blog posts don’t update the home page. Of coure, I can turn off caching of the home page, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a cache. As a happy medium, I turned down the caching to 300 seconds (5 minutes). If I ever get Fireballed, I’ll change things around and hope for the best. (For those out of the “know”, fireballed means getting linked to by John Gruber’s Daring Fireball site. Basically if you get linked from there, your site is going to get pounded with hits.)