Fun – Cocoanetics https://www.cocoanetics.com Our DNA is written in Swift Tue, 21 May 2019 06:48:37 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 39982308 iPhone 5 Fake Rumor Roundup https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/08/iphone-5-fake-rumor-roundup/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/08/iphone-5-fake-rumor-roundup/#comments Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:24:53 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6855 Current rumors about the next iPhone are that it will have a 4″ screen, a smaller SIM card and will probably start with pre-orders on September 12th. We’ve heard all that, that’s old news.

Following in the footsteps of the fake Asymmetric Screws rumour which was planted by Swede Lukasz Lindell (and friends) I felt a sudden wave of sadness crush on me when I realized that I simply lack the amount of creativity that goes into constructing a good Apple rumor. If only I was creative enough to think of several such good and believable rumours, I could probably make a living just from the blog traffic alone. #linkbait

So I vented this frustration on Twitter and to my surprise many people took this as an invitation to chime in and also play the game. Here’s a roundup of the best fake rumors I’ve heard. If you respond with a good one I’ll add your contribution as well.

One suggestion aimed at automating the Rumor Mill:

There really should be an App that randomly generates and spread Apple rumors. Would save us all a lot of time. — @donal_cahalane

Which was immediately followed by a witty remark:

There is such an app. It’s called Twitter 🙂 — @gianniponzi

But in all seriousness …

 

The Actual Rumours

Here we go, I’ve sorted the rumors slightly so that some are paired that go together well.

Apple is doomed! — @sneezr

Ah, the classic. Have we seen Peak-Apple? I can only go down from here…

I hear the new iPhone is going to have a tiny moustache. — @applingua

According to KnowYourMeme moustaches “are self grown powerhouses of awesome”. The iPhone is grown up and is awesome, thus it deserves a moustache.

iPhone 5 will have Push to Talk – Since Apple is buying Sprint it all makes sense now. I miss that PtT sound. — @jayjardim

Awesome, then we could finally play pretend-Police, tootiloot!

Apple will use rivets instead of screws in the next iРhone. — @glebd

That surely would make it even less recycleable than the Retina MacBook Pro!

I’ve heard that the screws in the new iPhone are entirely fictional. I guess that means they’ll hold it together with magnets. — @qrunchmonkey

Hm, that contradicts the rivets and wouldn’t that cause my iPhone to fall apart?

The Next iPhone To Have Two Dock Connectors, Can Be Docked Either Side Up. — @adurdin

Actually I have a better idea: How about being able to dock in Portrait AND Landscape?

Apple is about to launch a game console. You might be able to use an iPhone as a gamepad for guests. — @madewulf

Totally makes sense! Since my guests have iPhones they’ll always have their own controllers on them. And I have to get space iPod Touches for all unlucky people who don’t.

Conclusion

As our Swedish friends have demonstrated it is fairly simple to generate good sounding rumors and with the help of blogs and tweets those can be made to spread like wildfire if they contain a certain degree of general believability. It certainly helps to have a good 3D rendering that you mail to yourself and black out your address in the From: “to protect your sources”.

The less you originally provide as information the faster it will spread because people tend to snowball the kernel by attaching their own hopes and fears to it. TapMag UK has collected people’s outrageous ideas that Apple most certainly will ignore. True to Apple’s philosophy that the user never knows what he wants until he sees it.

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LEGO: Life of George https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/01/lego-life-of-george/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/01/lego-life-of-george/#respond Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:30:32 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=5800 LEGO’s Life of George game brings together 5 worlds like nothing else before:

  • 8-Bit Design
  • iPhone
  • LEGO bricks
  • manual interaction, a “touch interface” if you will
  • computer vision for gamification

Let’s have a quick look at this fun pastime that is all the rage.

The LEGO Life of George app is a free download on the app store. To play you need the box which contains some additional ingredients you need to play. You get 6×1, 8×2, 4×3, 4×4 and 2×6 pieces in red, green, blue, black, yellow, white. Any self-respecting LEGOist probably has these at home. Then there is a piece of cardboard that has a grid of dots which aide in recognizing the shapes you put together. Plus there is a very brief Getting Started guide and a sticker showing George in all his 8-bit glory.

The product is smartly priced at a level where you probably prefer the convenience of having it all in a box over pirating the pieces from your kids and using a scan of the mat. Also this level of innovativeness needs to be rewarded, so I purchased the original product at my Apple Store. And so should you: if not for yourself then for all the LEGO+iPhone fans around you.

You select a model from initially 130 models and your goal is to complete these in as little time as possible. So you select a model, build that from the included pieces, drop it onto the grid, tap the cam button on the iPhone app which displays the model and countdown. Then you position the iPhone such that it sees the entire grid. It does not matter where on the grid you place the finished model.

When playing you should make sure that you have sufficient space to lay out the pieces for faster access. Also the bricks have a tendency to fall to the floor if permitted. The models are rated in 12 difficulty levels.

The most fun, but also the biggest weakness of this game is Multiplayer. There is no support for Game Center and Online competition. Instead you have to make due with pass’n’play mode. Players alternate building different models, because it would be useless to be building exactly the same model if the person before you has already found all the pieces. Though there seems to be a balancing glitch: On one of my multi-player games I was getting a very difficult model while my opponent got something extremely simple. Unfair!

The other problem is that on several occasions the model was not recognized properly causing no points to be awarded. Instead you just get a display with tips to improve recognition, like tilting to avoid shine or making sure that the entire mat is visible. But no option to retake the picture. Annoying!

LEGO plans to sell us additional models for certain holidays, the first one being the Christmas pack for $2 which contains “3 new levels of Christmas content with 30 new Challenges and 45 models”. Don’t ask me how this works out mathematically and what the difference between challenge and model is. That the price is still $2 even after the turn of the year reminds us that Apple still does not permit In-App-Purchases for free.

Finally – what might be even be the coolest feature of all – you also get to make your own models. I tried making my Cocoanetics logo here:

The image recognition software tries to match the contained pieces with what it “sees” on the mat. But the pieces need to be upright. We build a ciqua logo, but with the pips pointing to the side and that was not properly recognized.  The software cannot differentiate between two adjacent pieces of the same color. If you please a 2 and a 1 next to each other, it is recognized as a 3. So far the models the app tries out all the variations that are possible and seems to always try to take the longest bricks possible.

Life of George uses image recognition technology from Eye Cue Vision Technologies which they describe themselves as “…the first and only low-cost vision recognition platform in the world for toys”. I image that the innovative guys at LEGO – which is extremely active in terms of product development for bricks as well as apps – found Eye Cue to be an affordable and simple to implement technology and so they hammered out this deal.

Their low-cost technology circumvents the problem you have with normal computer vision of having to adjust for a wide variety of image quality by simplifying the shapes it has to recognize, little squares in primary colors, and by using this grid mat for calibration. It’s is orders of magnitude more simple to recognize and align a grid of primary color blocks versus having to do edge and shape detection. This is an smart approach makes the technology robust enough for use by everybody. If you are used to buying LEGO bricks then you also have no issue with using this cardboard thing. So this partnership turns out to be a very nice fit between LEGO and Eye Cue.

LEGO is smart to exploring this unknown territory between digital and physical, between virtual and real. Normal apps which are digital offer much less satisfying value to the player than LEGO can.

If what I am hearing is any indication then LEGO has a hit. What’s next? Maybe an app to remote control LEGO robots?

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Perfect Diversion for iPilots: AR.Drone https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/09/perfect-diversion-for-ipilots-ar-drone/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/09/perfect-diversion-for-ipilots-ar-drone/#comments Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:05:09 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=5479 When the online Apple Store started to carry the AR.Drone that was one of the quickest orders I ever made. Hey, it’s just $300 and as an iOS developer you can expense it touting that you plan to write your own remote control app for it given that is has an iOS API. Or so goes the reasoning. We need some bit of reasoning to offset the otherwise awesomely emotional purchase, right? (Also available on Amazon.com)

I did not dare to do an unboxing video as I usually do with iToys because I figured I needed to learn to fly this thing first or otherwise that might be quite embarrassing to watch. Several weeks have passed now and I never got around to documenting my experiences I made. Until now.

So let me summarize all you need to know if you are considering getting one of these flying pieces of amazing engineering as a creative diversion next to your programming workdays.

The first assumption that will turn out to be false is to be thinking that the 300 bucks are the only kind of money you will be sinking into your new hobby. That’s just to get you started. As soon as you begin to need spare parts or want to experiment with aerial photography the costs start to rise.

Getting Started

You receive the drone in a beige box that contains a charger, one 1000 mAh battery, an outdoor and an indoor hull and some basic instructions. The battery needs to be charged which takes around 90 minutes, during which time you should visit the official AR.Drone site and watch the instruction videos.

Also you want to download the official AR.Drone apps from the app store which are available for free:

  • Free Flight – the basic remote control app
  • AR.Flying Ace – multiplayer shooting game, you need to have a buddy with his own drone to play
  • AR.Race – single or multiplayer, where you fly rounds in a physical course that you set up
  • AR.Pursuit – the only official app that costs $2.99, seems to be a spiced up version of AR.Race that also involves virtual shooting

The bare essentials are containted in the Free Flight app which works equally well on an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. It is recommended you put your iPhone into Airplane Mode and then turn on Wifi and connect to the drone’s ad-hoc network. Then you start the app which will check the firmware version of the drone and update it if necessary.

I found that I prefer to control the drone with my iPhone because while it is a cool bonus to have two cameras on board, you should not look at the screen but watch your drone while flying. So it does not matter that your fingers cover the video, but instead you have more direct control over the actions.

The default control mode is to have a button on the left side, anywhere you touch the screen. While you depress this the tilt movements of your device get translated in synchronous tilt movements by the drone. On the right side you have a 2-axis controller, again anywhere you put your finger down. Up and down makes the drone climb and fall. Left and Right cause it to rotate. Pros call this motion “yaw”.

It is best to start in a wide space indoors with the indoor hull. This has additional protective rings around the rotors but the distinct disadvantage of giving wind much additional surface to work on. So stay indoors and make sure you have a couple of meters in each direction to maneuver. Best might be to have a garage or if you are lucky an actual flight hangar.

The smaller the space the more likely you will crash your drone. The main beginner’s mistake is to yaw the drone such that the camera points towards you to make some pictures. It is ok to be a bit vain, once you mastered the controls, but right the beginning it is a very bad idea because your brain has not yet switched to reverse the control movements for this scenario. You tilt right and the drone moves left, right into the next wall.

While you are doing your first controlled movements, staying behind the drone, you will inadvertently have your first crashes. Don’t worry too much, the drone is an amazing feat of engineering that survives most of the basic crashes without any problem. When touching the wall causes the protection ring to touch a propellor the on-board electronics simply cuts power.

After every crash you should set the drone upright again and in the settings reset the trim. Then you just press the lift off button again and you continue. The original battery that comes with the drone is good for 10-20 minutes. I had to send my first drone in once to get it exchanged because mine only lasted for 3:30 minutes and Parrot support told me to get it exchanged.

Once you have gotten used to controlling the drone, and also learned how to adjust your movements when the drone faces a different direction than you, you can move outside. Make sure that there is as little wind as possible because again this makes it harder to avoid crashes.

Outside you need to take the hull without the rings and so your prop blades are now going to take some serious torture when you start cutting your plants. Trees are the drone’s mortal enemy, while it quite likes to crash into your soft lawn. Don’t forget to switch to outdoor mode and outdoor hull in the app’s settings. This changes some of the calculations the electronics as well as changes some of the other settings.

Going High

If your first configuration has survived long enough to go to this level 2 then you will be probably be tempted to see how high you can go. Only to find that there is a maximum altitude. The drone uses an ultrasound sender and receiver to measure the altitude and the default setting is limiting how high you can fly. Of course you are confident now that you can steer the drone even at altitude and so you quickly disable the limiter.

Above a certain altitude the ultrasound will no longer be strong enough to measure the altitude and so you see a blinking warning to that effect. You should also try to stand behind the drone when you fly high for a simple reason: wind speed increases the higher you are. Even if there is next to now wind where you stand there might be some more air movement a couple of meters up. This air movement will take the drone with it and you need to be able to compensate.

When you do that the altitude of your drone is only limited by the range of your Ad-Hoc Wifi connection. Note that if the connection gets lost the drone might just cut all engines and drop like a stone. Or it might just keep on doing what it was doing before. So testing the range of wifi towards the sky might not be a truly smart idea. Better to do such experiments horizontally over a field.

Landing is always best done by means of the landing button at the bottom of the screen. The emergency button at the top cuts all engines should you ever feel the need to.

The Hangar

If you crash it enough – and mark my words you will – you will develop a need for spare parts. All elements that make up an AR.Drone can be purchased individually. Looking for an expert store on the web I found and stuck with DroneTuner, a small online shop based in Ireland. The first purchases I made there were for a set of  shafts and the official tools. Even though the shafts are made out of metal they seem to bend when the prop hits something hard. While I was at it I also ordered a set of high performance ball bearings which make the rotors run smoother because they have a tighter fit with the shafts.

Then you also will want to purchase additional batteries because only flying for 12 minutes at a time is just too little. DroneTuner has some Lithium Polymer batteries that have the same specs as the original ones, but 50% more capacity, i.e. 1500 mAh instead of 1000 mAh. Parrot warns you to only use official batteries but I found nothing wrong using the larger ones.

There are rubber caps that you put the drone’s feet into to have additional space from the ground which is beneficial when landing and lifting off on gras. And a limited-edition protective carrying bag with the AR.Drone skull logo on it. And a box to sort the small parts in. And while we’re at it a nice case to collect everything in. 🙂

On my third order I had to also purchase the central cross on which the four motors and the central electronics are mounted on. My drone crashed into a tree high up and the drop to the ground had one of the beams break at the root. Superglue to the rescue, it fixed it several times since then, but I still will need to eventually exchange the cross for a whole one.

I have seen one company already that has two downed drones but nobody ever takes the time to order the appropriate spare parts and get them airworthy again. My point being, that the AR.Drone is too expensive at toy to “just try it out”. It needs a commitment to hone your skills and make the necessary repairs when you need them.

Video and Aerial Photography

The drone might just be a toy but we couldn’t call ourselves engineers if we didn’t also want to experiment with recording some video while flying. As you can see from the screenshots above the quality of the camera is only barely useful for this purpose. Though there are already several apps on the app store which allow you to take pictures and record video to MOV files. One such app is Flight Record for $5. I found though that I get too many dropped frames to have good video and also the resolution is too bad to be useful for anything else but experimenting.

There are two other viable options that other drone pilots have developed. Option 1 is a small “Keychain Camera”, Option 2 is to use a GoPro cam.

I bought myself such a Keychain camera plus mount from Dronetuner to experiment with it. It records AVI files on MicroSD cards. Theoretically class 4 cards are supported but you have to get a class 6 because otherwise you will drop frames. I spent around 100 Euros on all the things I needed for this experiment but in the end I found that there is a severe design flaw.

If your props are somewhat banged up then the whole drone will vibrate slightly. This may be much less with new props, I have not tried it yet. These vibrations cause the video from the keychain cam to show horizontal waves moving vertically over the picture. I suspect that is because of the long time it takes for the cam to record a single frame picking up the slight movement while scanning the CCD chip. Possibly another reason for this might be that I only had a class 4 card to test with.

My next experiment will be with a GoPro Hero HD camera which you can mount on top of the battery which is protected from the motor’s vibrations by some foam. That’s actually the same camera that Parrot themselves used for some of the demonstration videos. Though that’s another expensive toy, one such camera has the same price tag as one drone. Well, one needs a hobby.

Maneuvering and Racing

Once you got the video thing out of your system you will want to train to become a better pilot. One of the “moves” I quite like is to fly coordinated turns. Those are difficult to fly well because you need to coordinate a forward tilt, a sideways tilt and a rotation. Too much or too little of any one will make it look less pristine.

Another thing to try is to play like a real live Chopper. You fly to the other side of your garden, pretend to pick up some refugees and then you return to where you’re sitting. Yes, sitting, we geek pilots wouldn’t stand, would we?!

Finally one cool idea by Parrot is to fly races. For these you just get the free AR.Race app and then you define a round course for yourself. This can be in your house or in your garden and can be any route you like. Just make sure that you have sufficient room to maneuver and that you can remember the route even when you are trying to best your lap times. That’s a great way to keep honing your skills while playing a game.

In the “Rookie mode” you tell the drone that a lap is over by tapping onto its upper hull twice. So you fly the lap, tap tap. Fly another, tap tap. And when you’re done you land. Now if that is not enough fun you can get some extra props for your race course, pylons and a donut. These are inflatable and the bottom camera of drones is able to pick up the line to detect you passing the checkpoint. It’s on MY wish list for Christmas.

I wish I would know somebody close who also has a drone to techno-babble about it or try out the shooting games. But until then I will continue to step outside every 90 minutes to take a flying break, it’s a much healthier alternative to smoking or not taking any breaks from coding.

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What’s your Poison? https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/05/whats-your-poison/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/05/whats-your-poison/#comments Wed, 18 May 2011 10:07:03 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=5034 I asked the Twitterverse the following question:

iOS Developers: Coffee or Green Tea?

I was only half-expecting useful responses. But since I got 23 answers, I figured I might as well tabulate them.

Several people thought it funny and obvious that when Cocoanetics was asking such a question, the correct answer without fail would have to be: Cocoa. But it was not meant as a trick question, and REALLY, I think most people will call you a girl if you join their morning coffee round with a mug of hot Cocoa.

Coffee has a clear lead, but half of iOS developers prefer something else. “What else?” asks George Clooney, let’s answer him.

“Tea, Earl Gray. HOT!”
– Jean-Luc Picard (first star ship captain with an iPad)

Of the 32% tea drinkers 60% are choosing original Green Tea, 20% go for Black Tea, 10% for peppermint and 10% for Grapefruit Green tea.

Other drinks mentioned where water and Coca Cola, with twice as many mentions of H2O. No trace of San Pellegrino Limonata that Hunch said we are drinking.

Now, which really IS the smarter choice? Well, it seems to depend on your sex. A recent study found that women think faster under the effect of coffee, while men think slower.

Researchers discovered that men who drank the high-test coffee suffered greatly impaired performances in memory tests, as well as taking an average of twenty seconds longer to complete puzzles than the decaf drinkers. But women completed the puzzles an astonishing 100 seconds faster if they’d been given coffee, according to the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

Writing iOS apps is much akin to solving puzzles and your memory helps when you need to remember in which class file you put what function. We boys might want to lay of the hot mocha for a while and try to survive (and code) on tea.

But then again, we contractors get paid per hour anyway and so the benefits of a little cafeine-punch on the soul might outweigh the negatives of slowed down thinking.

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iWoman Featured https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/05/iwoman-featured/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/05/iwoman-featured/#comments Wed, 18 May 2011 06:22:11 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=5016 René Lindhorst attended the MobileTech Conference in Munich in April. He snapped this picture of a slide stating “we use our phones to manage every aspect of our lifes”. You can tell that this conference was in Germany due to the misspelling of “lives”. 🙂

I still love that they chose our new 2.0 iWoman icon top left, as indeed my wife (and many other humans of the female persuasion) use iWoman to manage a very important part of their lives. And thanks for putting it in good company: I see Pages, Evernote, Carcassonne and Angry Birds there, all apps that I also have installed, too.

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Shred Your Evidence In Style Like Dexter Morgan https://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/12/shred-your-evidence-in-style-like-dexter-morgan/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/12/shred-your-evidence-in-style-like-dexter-morgan/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:44:11 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=4242 On the Season 5 Premiere at 32:21 you can see how series protagonist Dexter (both a serial killer and a blood spatter analyst for the police) is destroying files about his victims.

When my wife saw that, she exclaimed “I want that!” which sent me to the Googles searching for what app this is. Turns out that quite a few people had a similar emotional response of “WANT” on seeing this on TV.

So in this article I’m giving you intrustions on how to achieve this.

Step 1: Get the Widget

You need the Shredder Widget which you can download directly from Apple or from the original maker interdimension media. If you love it, as we do, then there’s also a PayPal donation button.

You download and install the widget which results in having the widget appear on your dashboard. You can shred files there if you start dragging them on the desktop or finder and – while holding down the mouse button – switch to the dashboard and let the files drop on the widget.

The widget has 3 levels of security which you flip through by clicking on the widget.

  • Low: Bypass the trash can. This is a quick way to get rid of those files you know you don’t need, leaving the trash can for those things you just might want to dig out later. It still provides a 1 pass overwrite of the deleted data.
  • Medium: Secure erase. This mode overwrites your shredded documents with a US Department of Defense compliant 7 pass procedure.
  • High: Virtual Paper Pulp. Use this setting for only the most sensitive files. Though it might be slow, the 35 pass Gutmann algorithm will ensure that no data from these files is ever recovered.

As a regular user you should be happy here and can stop reading. The next step demonstrates a hack that lets dashboard widgets appear on your desktop.

Step 2: Hack it

Normally dashboard widgets are confined to the dashboard. But there is a developer mode that can be enabled by changing a default setting.

Open terminal and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES

To activate this setting you need to either log out and log back in or reboot your Mac. Once you are back to the desktop you can now drag widgets between worlds.

Step 3: Drag it

Now open up the dashboard, on modern Mac keyboards its the F4 key with the dashboard icon on it. Alternatively you can use F12.

Drag the shredder icon and without letting go of the mouse button leave the dashboard. You will see the shredder widget stick with your mouse pointer. Then you can let it go anywhere on your desktop. On my iMac it worked via the dashboard button, on an older white MacBook I had to set the function keys to be working without FN and then use the F12 key.

Step 4: Shred it

Now you get shred documents without having to call up the dashboard just by dragging them on top of the shredder.

You have to try this out to appreciate the feeling of relief you get when you see the incriminating files be shredded to pieces that no FBI data reconstruction algorithm can ever hope to restore.

Conclusion

You can still drag the shredder around as you like, but it will overlap all windows. Nothing can go in front of widgets that you have thus moved to the desktop. Which might be an argument against keeping it on the desktop as you might use some full screen apps where this might be annoying.

But with the described hack in place you are free to store the shredded on the dashboard until you are planning a bigger evidence destruction session at which point you simply move it to the desktop with a swift gesture.

If you are like me (no, not a criminal) then you have lots of screenshots on your desktop and having to empty the trash might be annoying for files that you know you won’t need any more. Here the Low security setting of simply bypassing the trash bin does away with this annoyance.

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iPad Smiles https://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/04/ipad-smiles/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/04/ipad-smiles/#respond Wed, 07 Apr 2010 18:53:37 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=2391 A friend/coachee of mine teased me with a picture showing him in loving embrace with this new iPad. I will be a couple more weeks until I can actually purchase one for myself. So I figured, I would want to give several developers that read my tweets and blog articles a change to show off their new iDevice as well.

We Europeans have a bit more waiting time, especially guys from smaller countries who want the iPad just the same, but have to bear Apple’s worldwide rationing of iPads due to initial touch panel shortage.

Stefan Sorin Nicolin, from Spielhaus FTW, illustrates for us the general mood amongst non-US-would-like-to-be-iPad-developers. He still has to imagine their famous Today ToDo app running on the shiny thing.

But for some the motto of this article is the opposite …

Smile! You’re Actually Holding an iPad!*

* …and are ENVIED by most of the rest of the world

Apple must be aware that some iPads are making an immediate run for the border right after having been sold over the counter in an Apple store. Thankfully there are no restrictions in being able to purchase iPad apps outside of the US.

The first iPad in the UK ended up in the hands of Andrew Weekes, author of Tweeterena 2 for iPad. Also available: Video Evidence of the unboxing with a funny comment by Andrew’s girlfriend at the very end.

Adam Krell, maker of FotoFind is starting on the iPad version soon. He feels young again when he looks at his iPad…uh, no, it’s actually his son who has different plans for using this very iPad. 😉

The first Austrian who got an iPad is Robert Meraner, in loving embrace with his “Precious!”

Derek van Vliet, Director of Development at Get Set Games, holding his iPad running their game PopTweets HD.

“AppStoreMod”, age 14, is the youngest iPad owner / developer I know. His first iPad app Game Plan is already published and his YouTube Channel has over 11,000 subscribers. I imagine he suddenly has even more friends.

 

Patrick McCarron appears to be really happy with the looks of his Shanghai Mahjong hybrid app on his new iPad.

Dylan Wreggelsworth, Designer, is excited about the future thanks to iPad. He now gets to design 4 times as many pixels. 😉

“Hmmmm. iPad you have. Smile you will”. Mike Sax lets famous Yoda do the smiling for him. And you can see that the iPad’s LED backlight is much too bright for most digital cameras. Or is it my website that’s so blindingly illuminating?

You still have a chance to rub in the fact that you have an iPad and I don’t. Just mail or tweet a photo and I’ll add it here.

UPDATE: … and here is mine. (Though I had to borrow the iPad for the photo)

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Developer Name Calling https://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/02/developer-name-calling/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/02/developer-name-calling/#respond Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:14:21 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=2029 I decided to concentrate on the iPhone platform back in Fall 2008 shortly after the general availability of iPhone SDK 2.0.  Since then I was frequently facing the necessity of describing what I do in a few words. Generally I described myself as “iPhone Developer”. But then two generations of the iPod Touch became just as important in sales as 3 generations of the iPhone and now Apple is releasing yet another category of device running iPhone OS, namely the iPad.

So the name “iPhone Developer” does not really feel like it encompasses all 3 device types. Especially if you are talking to laymen who don’t know about the OS being the common ground between all of them. So I asked the Twitterverse, with interesting and sometimes hilarious results.

“What should we call a developer who concentrates on developing for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad”?

42 responses, sorted by postage stamp.

Thank for the many responses!

Some people tend to think we are close-minded magicians, opportunistic gods and unconscious masochists, who are in demand and need eternal optimism to counterbalance that. But at the same time a couple of colleagues aggreated around three winning expressions, counting the votes.

  1. iPhone Developer (5) – the eternal classic
  2. Cocoa Touch Developer (4) – almost as strong and actually more true
  3. iPhone OS Developer (3) – more syllables seem to decrease the oompf

Runner up: Cocoa Toucher (2)

It appears that most people still prefer a device-centric nomenclature, which is not entirely false: there is the iPhone, the iPod Touch (which is an iPhone without telephone) and the iPad (which is a big iPhone). Apple doesn’t like if people compare all their mobile devices as different iPhones so you can often read “iPhone OS” in their literature which leads me to believe that they would prefer the third term.

In the middle on a very solid second place is the term Cocoa Touch Developer which is the most precise. But if you put “Cocoa Touch Developer” next to “Java Developer” you feel somewhat degraded, because this makes you feel like a geek and not like somebody who is able to tame the shiny beautiful phone with the i. Also Apple (and the iDev community) have not made any conscious effort to promote Cocoa as a programming platform, so most laymen would not be able to tell you the difference between Cocoa and Java. As bitter as this sounds.

So which description would you give your vote? Do you agree with the majority?

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Dr. Touch Fan Video https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/07/dr-touch-fan-video/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/07/dr-touch-fan-video/#respond Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:25:31 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=1090 Sometimes I’ve been known to accept services as payment for services rendered. This is one example where a fan offered to create a promo video for me. He’s probably the youngest member of my Cocoa developer network but seems to be full of creative urges.

Cheesy or Cool? Leave a comment what you think!

PS: If you are looking for Hebrew localization for your apps this young person might be your man inexpensive choice.

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