grimmwerks

In my forays into mobile development and appcelerator.com’s Titanium for developing on iPhone and Android, I also found phonegap that allows a trifold approach for Android, iPhone and Blackberry.

Blackberry development on OSX isn’t quite supported as yet but Aziz Uysal has a great tutorial about getting the Blackberry SDK and simulator up and running on osx.

Found this over at vimeo, and just think it’s a great ‘up and running’ step through..

How To: Implement Facebook Connect on the iPhone in 5 minutes from Cat Lee on Vimeo.

Well, the newly fixed Macbook, after spending a week getting it nearly back to the same state, realizing I’ve lost a lot of music I was working on (some of it was *really* good), and getting a weeks worth of work done, has decided to freak out with the video display…

… strangely enough, it was fine all day; I left for an hour to go shopping and when I returned it was *not* in the same state as I left it. Got it to boot into the OS/desktop *once*; began to do some work, but then it did the weird every other pixel flakeout with the moire pattern…

With my head down in the specifics of technology so much, I tend to forget about what all of this we use relies so much on.. power.

I can debug and test, patch and peruse to my heart’s content, but if there’s no electricity there’s not much hope of anything happening… like a castle built upon the sand.

Today the power went out not just in my building, but seemingly my whole section of town since the traffic lights were out as well. With no power comes no responsibility it seems (and yes I’m looking forward to Kick Ass)… so right now I’ve gone to the local Barnes and Noble to piggy back on their working electricity and internet, hoping to see the two home computers come online on Skype to know when to go home..

….oh joy; school just called to tell me that the kids are being let out early, so I’m the one that gets to deal with my child’s withdraw of moving objects, tv, and video games. We might have to venture out into the world.

Update: power came back on, machines rebooted and signed into Skype.. got to watch the dog freak out.

Great synopsis of why Flash isn’t on the iPhone/iPad by John Gruber at Darin Fireball…

I know that Dreamhost (my host provider) has supported Passenger for Rails apps running on Apache, but I’ve only gotten a taste of it lately, as I was setting up my development machine as a LAMP stack with Rails and now Passenger (including the MacOSX Passenger pane).

I’m actually quite astounded how quick it is to set up; see for yourself:

http://www.modrails.com/

Apple seems to be really pushing for developers… too bad I’m on the east coast…got this via linkedin:

Apple’s iPad and iPhone Software Engineering division is growing tremendously, so we will be having a job fair at the Apple campus in building 4 on Friday February 5 from 11am to 8pm.

We are currently hiring for:
- Software Engineers from embedded level up to UI (applications, frameworks, firmware)
- Wireless and cellular software development and test
- QA Engineers (black box, white box, test tool developers)
- Software Engineering Project Managers (telephony, multimedia, build, factory)
- Carrier Field Test Engineers
- Software Engineering Management

You can check out all iPhone Software Engineering job opportunities at www.apple.com/jobs/us /corporate.html and click on the iPhone Engineering Division.

Please send your resume to iphonejobs@apple.com and bring copies with you. The attire is business causal. We are growing a lot, so please also tell your friends. Thanks and we look forward to seeing you on Feb 5 to join us in pushing the evolution of mobile communications.

Dan Ryan
iPhone Software Recruiter
408.974.5859
dryan@apple.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielryan

Address:
Apple, Inc.
4 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Directions:
- 280 to DeAnza Blvd
- Turn left on Mariani Ave
- Turn left onto Infinite Loop
- Drive around to building 4 (4 Infinite Loop, the “back” side of Apple’s campus) and park
- Go in the lobby of building 4 and ask for the iPhone SW Job Fair

Well Adobe did have a few things to say regarding the abscence of Flash Player on the iPad demo — but then again Christopher Cantrell wrote an article detailing how to get the multiple resolution out of the Flash to iPhone export…

…in response to another colleagues posts about not liking the iPad:

I agree that it’s not really a ‘tablet’ and that it’s tied to the appstore; but it DOES have a keyboard and prop stand (how it recharges).

However I don’t see it so much as trying to fit in the netbook/tablet space so much as how it’s going to change the way we deal with the CONTENT so much.

First off I think — though there will ALWAYS be books – books will go the way cds/vinyl has done; I see this fitting in a place specifically for tech, or students; people who have an awful lot of books that they might be needing to access rather than cart around huge tomes at all times. Or the medical profession; one server on an internal network, and all your files can be accessed right there. YES I understand it can be done today; but one app store app to fit in that market and it’s golden.

I also see a space where there will be MUCH more self-published works; if iTunes sets up the same sort of schema for pdf as they have for music, more indie writers will put up pdf and people might be more willing to purchase something for $2 that they can read right there, rather than buy online and ship, or in a bookstore. Just a thought.

Even the pay as you go cellular is great – buy the cellular, never use it until you’re on vacation, pay for that month and .. it’s great.

Past all this, as a musician, I see this multitouch being a new way of working with electronic music/samples etc. On top of that, I think it’ll really bolster gaming and how one would interact with games.

Don’t get me wrong – there are things I think that are wrong with it, and that might change in the future. I don’t know what politically is going on with adobe/apple but lack of Flash is just some kind of gameplay. I can’t see that staying that way if apple really wants to make this the ‘best browsing experience’. Lack of usb ports are another issue… but it’s def more of an extension of a computer than a computer itself — at least for now. Perhaps devices might be made using the dock port… I think apple is also trying to come up with some firewire/usb/dva/rgb standard port.. so…that might come into play here.

Finally – as an artist, I think the multitouch is great for drawing on screen, but if they had only added pressure to some capacity then one wouldn’t have to buy a $3k cintiq wacom. I personally would ask some hardware developer to create a very simple bluetooth pen that would send pressure senstivity from the pen point to the tablet; the tablet itself could handle the tracking, and combined with the bluetooth data in the driver, give an artist a real experience. Any takers?

Great video demonstrating Flash Player on the Google Nexus Phone. Now I’ve got to look and see exactly what one can do in regards with Flash and Android.

Ah — something else I want to keep track of; from the same site I found the Adobe Air tuts sumup, some great examples of JQuery.

Numerous links to Adobe Air tutorials – getting started, best practices and how to’s — can be found here.

Really cool 3d interface for those blessed with a Mac, Snow Leopard and the latest Safari – all done via CSS and javascript…

More info can be found here.

No, this isn’t a little chant I’m working on — I see I’m not the only one…

Carlos Ulloa – of Flash/3d/MiniCooper fame (how many people getting into Pv3d would just spend part of their day driving that thing around in his banner) — has also been playing with the sweetness that is Unity3d.

Unity3d is becoming what Director3d once promised — and I’m not so sure if it was just kismet that Tom Higgens – who used to be the Director Developer Ambassador for Macromedia/Adobe — is now on the Unity team.

The lady (lollyrot) and I have been delving into Unity, so you can expect a few strange games coming out of us soon…

Mike Morearty, developer of the Flex Builder team listed all the macros available in Flex Builder here:
http://www.morearty.com/blog/2007/01/24/macros-that-are-available-in-html-template-files/

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* this is not overheard at a Superhero convention.

Adobe recently announced that Flex will now be known by Flash Builder; my feelings about this are mixed however.  There were many times I had to explain the differences between Flex and Flash (and, saying ‘Flash’ in that sentence I mean the capital ‘F’ Flash CS4 authoring vs the little ‘f’ flash which is the compiled output), as well as explain in the end that there really WAS no difference as it was all flash in the end (note the little ‘f’).

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Here’s a great article on how GoogleWave changes the face of communication…

Recorded back in 1991-ish on my Fostex 1/4″ reel — the drums, mic’d with plastic Radioshack mics, and bounced down to stereo (while in the room with the drums), stereo bounce down of some bass/guitar combo, single harmoica track, 2 single guitar noodlings, and the main vox by Tom was recorded tiny and thin.. so there’s not much I can do now…

Neptune’s Fields: Wax

Added more flexified goodness for the Flex to Crestron interface I’m building for Abercrombie and Fitch that I described here.  I have to say, being an old Macromedia Director guy  that migrated to Flash (grumpily as the world did) I find Adobe Flex to be …well… it’s a joy to work with; I’ve actually become very excited about coding again.

[Update]: Heh I’ve been uploading all my old work so much lately I didn’t realize that the previous post about this interface was just below…

Have to say it’s quite fun — sort of reminds me of the old Director3d — or at the least the stuff that Barry Swan was coding as billboards before Director added true 3d support.

I’m writing a class for it for a sort of flipping card interface; I’ve seen this done before in Flash but not in Flex (if anyone has examples, feel free to send them my way).

Click the above image to launch it in a new window from it’s home on Amazon S3; for the time being it’s a bit large. Once I finish debugging I’ll post an example here.

Note: Flash does seem to play much slower in the lightbox; click on the top right video tab to see the 3d action.. it really seems to chug in the iframe.

I’m working on a Flex front end talking to a Crestron backend – and one of the things we’re doing is creating templates of different devices, one being a family of Crown amplifiers, each of which might have 2, 4 or 8 channels of audio to display. Each channel starts out with a Crestron join, but the next channel up it’s join begins at 21+ from the previous channel’s (if you know Crestron you’ll know what I mean).

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Just saw this app on TUAW and my fear that robots will take over has gotten one step closer in reality.  Though that little mechanical friend seems so cute (awww! A tuxedo!) it’s really powerful (as I’ve been claiming our future overlords will be!), as seen in the super capable mits of Jordan Rudess:

I caught this post over on Peter Kirn’s Create Digital Music that shows another example of Augmented Reality being used in an extremely cool way.  Todd Vanderlin updates us on his little virtual dj projects and demonstrates how he’s using augmented reality for his scratching.  Now the only scratching I know would usually entail some use of topical cream, but the augmented reality stuff all the kids are talking about on the intertubes is something I’ve been interested in after seeing examples of the FLAR Toolkit (FLAR being an acronymn for FLash Augmented Reality.  Kids today and their acronymns.)

Saw this over at Peter Kirn’s CreateDigitalMusic and luckily I’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, so I’m going to have to play with this. I’ve already had TouchOSC going through OSCulator to control Live so there’s nothing new there – but would like to see if the multi-touch control is reminiscent of the reactable.

MSAFluid for processing (Controlled by iPhone) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.