Two:Thirty AM » Software

Browser Testing

Jason — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:55:24 +0000

A couple months back I decided to see what it was like to use various browsers. This was mostly to see if I was missing anything. At the time I was using Google’s Chrome browser, so I was going to try the other 2 in the top three. Of course the top three are Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. You may be thinking, “what about Opera!?”. Well that is a browser, but that’s like saying a Blackberry is a smartphone.

I set out to try Safari and Firefox for a full 30 days with no other browser being looked at during that time. I tried Safari first, and then moved to Firefox. Here is the short version of the results.

Safari
Pros: Bookmark sync with my iPhone and iPad.
Cons: It handles tabs weirdly, just couldn’t get used to it.

Firefox
Pros: Has pretty good syncing across multiple computers, and an iPhone app.
Cons: MEMORY LEAKS!!!! OMG! It was not uncommon for this thing to use over 1GB of memory! WTF!?

Winner: Chrome!

As I write this I am using Chrome again. I really don’t have any complaints about the browser, it really just feels like it is doing it right.

What do you think?
(flame me for the BB comment below. After that, tell me how good your blackberry is at email!) :)

Writing an iOS app!

Jason — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:16:14 +0000

In June of 2010 I finished writing my first application for a mobile device! Actually, this was the first full fledged application for any device. It was an app for the fledgling OS called WebOS from Palm. I had never written an application before, but since WebOS was built with web technologies which I had some familiarity with, I thought it would be an attainable goal, and it was! Creating that app and getting it published to the app catalog was such a fulfilling experience for me to say the least.

After going back and forth between various phones and platforms following the demise of WebOS, I ended up with an iPhone 4. This of course meant I would be using iOS. After about 6 months or so I was starting to get the itch to work on creating an app for my phone again. After doing some research about iOS development, I decided to start out my adventure using the Titanium IDE. This meant I could not only build apps for iOS, but also build an Android version of the app as well with the same codebase.

The best part of building this app was that it was built by both myself and my wife! We started a new company to develop software and attacked our first app! Our first app was completed in about 2 months in-between work and life. We had a lot of fun building and learned a ton as well. Now that our first app is in the iTunes App Store, we are working on a few updates and new features for it. After that, we are going to begin our second app!

I have been really happy with the workflow and feature set of Titanium so far; no major issues at all. We will definitely be using it for our next app as well!

iOS App: CarTunes

Jason — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:54:22 +0000

If you are the type of person that listens to your music on shuffle and likes to hit next a lot to find the perfect song for that moment while driving, then CarTunes is for you!

The above describes me perfectly. I found this app a couple weeks back and have been in love with it! The app does one thing and does it VERY well. The point of the app is to be an interface to your music player that is car friendly. It is perfect for this!

The design of the app is very polished and beautiful. The controls are super car friendly with no small buttons to try and focus on hitting. The control is done through various swipe gestures. One flick to go to the next song, one flick to go to the previous song, and a simple tap on the screen to pause/play.

It looks like the way this app works is by becoming an extension of the “iPod/Music” app on your iPhone / iPod Touch. This most likely means that it will only work for music that is local to your device, at least for now.

Overall this app is exactly what I want in a car control system for my music. Check out some screenshots below to see the interface.

iTunes Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cartunes-music-player/id415408192

Mac Resource Inspector – Apple Store

Jason — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:10:05 +0000

I went to the Apple store the other day with Valerie to get her MacBook battery looked at. In years past, the technician at the Genius Bar usually would just run some diagnostics or maybe even use a couple tools from a bootable CD.

They have quite a cool setup nowadays though. They now take your computer, and plug in an ethernet cable and netboot the machine. I am unsure at this point if the netboot server is local to each Apple Store or perhaps it is calling to the mother ship. I am going to research this further and see what I can find out.

Once booting, it asks “Do you have the customer’s permission to run this?” and you hit yes, a few OS 9 looking progress bars go by, and it automatically runs through a complete systems diagnostics and gives you a summary read out of all the system’s components.

Here is a quick photo I took of the laptop after it finished running the diagnostics.

You can see that the summary is saying the battery is indeed bad. It also has a warning on the hard drive, this is due to the hard drive not being the stock hard drive but an upgrade.

I would love to have this tool at work running on a server for troubleshooting systems. Hell, I would love to have this at home for troubleshooting!

Going to do more research on this for sure. If you know anything about this setup, please comment below!

Quick Hands On: Blackberry Playbook

Jason — Sun, 01 May 2011 20:04:04 +0000

We were in an Office Depot yesterday to drop off some packages to be mailed when I happened to see a display for the Blackberry Playbook. I had seen many online reviews for the tablet but hadn’t actually seen one in the wild yet. We took the opportunity to go check it out and play with it for a bit to see what it had to offer. The consensus was “nothing too special here”.

The size and feel of the device was very solid, but after getting past that, it kind of fell apart. We found the UI to not be very intuitive or discoverable. After figuring it out, however, the UI did offer some nice visuals.

After that, it was time to find out what kind of applications this thing had to offer. This was a source of disappointment. It seemed like every time I launched an app, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, it was simply just launching the browser and taking me to the website of those services.. I would assume there are third party applications in their catalog that are native code, this demo unit just wasn’t loaded with any.

Finally the price. At $499, $599, and $699, I am not really sure you are getting your moneys worth. If you are a die hard blackberry user and this thing integrates with that experience for you well, then great, otherwise I would say hold off.

Make your own CR-48! ChromeOS Netbook.

Jason — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 17:35:39 +0000

Since Google decided to not send me a ChromeOS CR-48 notebook, I had to make my own!
(I still REALLY want a CR-48)

The Hardware
I picked up a super cheap Acer Aspire One over at Fry’s.
Model: D255E
Processor: 1.66GHz dual core Atom
Memory: 1GB (upgraded to 2GB for $23 from amazon)

All together the hardware came in at just under $200.

The OS
I downloaded the latest build of hexxeh’s Chromium OS called Flow from http://chromeos.hexxeh.net.

I then installed in on a 4GB thumb drive so I could verify that all the hardware was compatible, and it was!!

Instructions for installing the OS on a thumb drive can be found on the main page http://chromeos.hexxeh.net (Linux, Windows, and Mac)

After all the hardware was verified working, it was time to install the OS on the internal drive!

Press Ctrl+Alt+T to switch to the command prompt
Type “shell” to go into the shell.
Type ”/usr/sbin/chromeos-install” and press Enter.
Enter the Root password “facepunch”
Follow any prompts
Unplug the thumb drive and reboot!

That’s it, it will now reboot into ChromeOS (and damn quickly)!

How is everything going a couple days later?
Everything is going great! At this point the only thing that doesn’t seem to work is binding the Caps Lock key to be the ChromeOS “Search” key, but that is not a huge deal.
I would like to swap out the standard 7200rpm HDD that I have in there with a much smaller and faster SSD. Since ChromeOS doesn’t need much space, there is no need for a 100GB spinning hard drive. This thing already boots in like 30 seconds, but why not make it a little faster :)

*UPDATE* I swapped out the 100GB 7200RPM HDD for a 16GB SSD! Amazing! Boot times have gone from 26 seconds down to 16 seconds!!!

Rooting around in my Nexus S.

Jason — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 05:50:10 +0000

Well, It finally happened. My Nexus S was working too perfectly, so I had to go ahead and root it and load a custom ROM. :) Here is a quick little how-to of what I did to make it all work. All files are linked below. This is not a final release of CyanogenMod 7, but it has been rock solid so far. I use a mac in case that matters to you.

1) Unlock the bootloader.

To unlock the bootloader, you reboot your phone into fastboot mode. you can do this by holding down the power and volume up key. At this point you connect your phone to your computer and fire up the terminal.

./fastboot oem unlock

2) Install Clockwork Recovery Mod

./fastboot flash recovery recovery-clockwork-3005-crespo.img

3) Flash CyanogenMod 7 RC2

boot into clockwork recovery and install the CyanogenMod 7 RC2
(I had to wipe my phone and clear the cache before the install would work)

4) Install google apps

install the google apps that are not included (for legal reasons i believe)

After this, I signed into my google account and my phone began pulling all of my apps settings back down from google’s servers.

FILES
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123007/fastboot-mac.zip
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123007/googleapps-20110120-signed.zip
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/123007/recovery-clockwork-3005-crespo.img
http://download.cyanogenmod.com/get/update-cm-7.0.0-RC1-NS-signed.zip

http://download.cyanogenmod.com/get/update-cm-7.0.0-RC2-NS-signed.zip

**This of course can explode your phone, so be careful and don’t do it if you are unsure.** KABLOOM!!!!!

Nexus Yes!

Jason — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:37:37 +0000

It has been a rough year for me in the cell phone area. Throughout this year I was on three or four different platforms across six or so handsets. It was definitely a year of swapping. I started out the year with a Motorola Droid that replaced my iPhone in October of 2009. From there I migrated to the Palm WebOS platform with a Palm Pre Plus handset. After that phone was dropped and left with a cracked screen, I moved to a Palm Pixi Plus, still on WebOS.The Pixi Plus was a super awesome little phone with a hardware keyboard that was a dream to use. When Microsoft Windows Phone 7 was announced I was (surprising) intrigued with what I saw. The phone that caught my attention was the HTC HD7. I went to see the phone in person and 30 minutes later walked out of the store with one in hand. Everything with the HD7 was going along nicely until December 16th came along. The release of the Google Nexus S. I looked at it online. I saw it in person. I ordered it online via express shipping! Why did I drop Windows Phone 7 so soon? Simple answer; google services. I use a ton of Google services everyday and the simple fact is that Windows Phone 7 does not integrate with Google services well at all (surprise!).

After a week of use, I am honestly completely blown away with this device / OS. The Nexus S is absolutely fantastic in the hardware and software departments. The Nexus is running the latest version of Android, 2.3 Gingerbread. A big plus to the Nexus S is that it runs a build of Android that is completely untouched by carriers or manufactures, just pure Google. When it comes to hardware, it feels like what I have been wanting in a phone for a very long time. Solid quality, great look, and not a lot of extra unnecessary crap.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still a huge fan of Palm/HP WebOS! The problem is that I personally can’t sit around and wait for things to shake out in the Palm/HP universe. And to be honest the drama that was pouring out of the community lately was starting to really bug me. I would love for WebOS 2.x to come out and make me switch right back. I am totally rooting for them, excellent group of people over there at Palm!

Windows Phone 7 is most definitely going to be a major contender as we head into 2011. Other players in this market are going to have to take notice quickly if they haven’t already. Unfortunately, as much as I like the OS, it will most likely never been what I need as long as I use a mac and a ton of Google services. I am however, VERY happy that there is a new contender in the phone OS war. Competition is what we need to move ahead!

As always this could change at any second, but I am calling the Nexus S the bar that all new phones must at least reach in order for me to even acknowledge. It is official, the Nexus S is the best phone I have ever used as of December 26th, 2010.

PROS:

Beautiful screen
Great build quality
Comfortable to hold and talk on
Doesn’t get hot when talking on the phone
Gingerbread (Android 2.3) is brilliant
“Anti-fingerprint screen coating” seems to actually be real!
The power button is in the correct place (not on top)

CONS:

No notification light / indicator
No dedicated camera shutter button
Very slippery

SIDENOTES:

Haven’t been able to try the front facing camera on a video call yet
Haven’t had the opportunity to try the NFC (Near Field Communication) anywhere

Windows Phone 7: Photo Apps

Jason — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 21:48:44 +0000

Pretty much anytime I get a new phone / mobile device that has a camera the first thing I do is promptly download a ton of photo manipulation applications. It is amazing what you can do with a simple camera phone and some neat filter apps. I recently started using a new phone, the HTC HD7. This phone runs a completely brand new version of windows mobile they have called “Windows Phone 7″. You can read my previous post about that here. I just wanted to take a minute here and list out some of the coolest photo apps I have found in the marketplace this month. Here we go!

Apict by Oliver Payen. $0.99

Colorize by Kitron Software. $1.29

Crop by Dog & Pony Show, Inc. $1.29

Photo Caption by Pelnor. $0.99

Photo Location by Daniel Vaughan. $1.99

Photo Magic by Appa Mundi LTD. $1.99

Photo Studio by Moovesoft. $2.99

Picture Lab by Schulte Software Development. $1.99

Thumba Photo Editor by Thumba Corporation. $0.99

*Photo Enhancer by HTC Corporation. $FR.EE (only on HTC phones)

Windows Phone 7

Jason — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 21:28:39 +0000

It’s true! I got a new phone! (like that is a surprise) If you read the title of this post, you probably are not only aware of what the new phone is, but may also be confused as to why I would do such a thing!? Well, the fact of the matter is, Microsoft did something very right this time around! After having used and seen what Microsoft has done in the past with windows Mobile, I was not holding my breath for the launch of Windows Phone 7. Once Windows Phone 7 finally hit I was quite impressed with what I saw. After watching a bunch of videos online and reading a bunch of reviews I had decided that I liked what I saw and thought I might be in the market to pick up one of these phones.

(Side Rant: Almost every time you see a picture of a Windows Phone, it is of the phone I have placed to the left here. Problem with this is, THIS PHONE DOES NOT EXIST! I love the design of this phone and this is the phone I wanted to buy. I can’t imagine how it makes any sense to anyone to market your product to consumers with a device that does not exist??)

Moving on.

Since the phone I really wanted was fake, I decided on what I thought to be the best phone in the first round of WP7 phones, the HTC HD7. The phone is quite beautiful, not perfect, but quite nice. I really like it. That is about all I am going to say about the hardware, since afterall, the hardware really doesn’t matter. The OS is what is important here, that is the part that is going to stick around, phone to phone, and (hopefully) grow with you.

From the very first use of the OS, I really thought they did it right. The design and user interafec are very beautiful and easy to use. I find the interface to be quite intuitive. (Somewhat hardware related) the OS is VERY snappy and responsive as well. The phone came with a pretty solid base of applications and services.

I really feel that if Microsoft stays on top of this platform and updates regularly, adding features, this platform is going to do very well and bring them back from the dead in the area of smartphones. Windows Mobile 6.5 was a complete disaster, which means they have an uphill battle trying to convince people that WP7 IS actually something different, not just a rev of that pile of garbage. I am really hoping they do not drop the ball on this one, because with enough effort, they will dominate the competition that has gotten far too comfortable in the mobile OS space.

Windows Phone 7 is definitely something to go check out in person.

Issues I am having:

If you use Google calendar, and have multiple calendars, it only seems to sync the main one.
I have had a couple apps crash, but a reboot fixed it. To be expected from a 1.0
Unlike other mobile platforms that give you a choice of search engines and so forth, this does not. So far WP7 means you have to use all Microsoft properties. Bing, Bing maps, Internet Explorer, etc. I have to think this will evolve to more choices in the future if they want to compete and gain users.

Features that are still needed

Taking screenshots (really?)
Custom ringtones (really?)
Copy & paste (really?)
Folders

Applications that are still needed

Pandora
Evernote
Toodledo sync
Google Maps
Dropbox
More twitter apps (of course)
Navigation Apps (that don’t cost $9.99/month)
Official Google Voice
More photo editing apps

If you have a WP7 phone and have more suggestions/hints/tips please feel free to leave them in the comments. If you don’t have a WP7 phone, feel free to ask anything in the comments also!

HTC HD7

My name is Jason, and I’m a WebOS developer!

Jason — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:00:07 +0000

Background:
Ever since I started using smartphones, I have always wanted to create applications for the phone that I was using at any given time. From Blackberry, to iPhone, to Droid, to Palm Pre Plus. It was never about striking it rich like many have done with their mobile apps (not saying I wouldn’t like the extra $); it was always more about just the cool feeling of having something you created from the ground up running on hundreds, maybe thousands, of what is arguably a person’s most personal possession today: their phone.

iPhone Software Development:
I got an iPhone the day it came out back in 2007. Of course when the iPhone was originally launched there was no official SDK for creating applications, so there wasn’t much that could be done as far as writing apps, past jailbreaking and creating apps with the unofficial SDK. Flash forward to when the platform saw the launch of the app store and then you saw an explosion of developers writing applications for the device. Unfortunately by the time I finally got around to learn the languages necessary to create applications for the platform I was already on may way to the next platform, Android.

Android Software Development:
After getting fed up with the iPhone and finally feeling like Android was ready for prime time, I made the jump! After using the platform for a couple months and getting used to it, I again started the task of beginning to learn the languages needed to write applications on the platform. After getting a working hello world app going and all that, something interesting happened. I found myself dabbling in a new platform already! A platform that I thought had already died shortly after getting its legs. That platform was WebOS!

WebOS Software Development:
Plam’s WebOS really came out of nowhere for me. I had seen it and played with it briefly when it initially came out, and found it to be sub par. A short while later, I found myself at a Verizon store playing with the newly revved hardware and updated OS. I fell in love almost immediately! WebOS felt like the first mobile OS that was actually built with the end user in mind. It was completely intuitive, and I don’t mean like how the other guys say their OS is intuitive; this one actually is. Everything about the OS just felt right. It did what you wanted, and more importantly it did what you would expect in just about every situation. The multitasking was light years ahead of what anyone else was doing. Needless to say, I really like it, obviously. Anyway, I knew that this was finally going to be the platform I’d get an application on. I was so passionate about the platform that I had to be involved as more than just a user. I started by getting a WebOS book and attending Palm’s awesome Developer Days event at their headquarters with my fiancée. We learned a ton of great info there, got some more dev materials, including a FREE developer phone! A free phone? I know! I started writing a couple applications shortly after that, which ended up being a little over my head, so I toned it down and created an app that ended up being the first app I would submit to the catalog. (at the time there was a $99 fee to become a developer, and a $50 fee per application submitted to the catalog. Both of these fees are now waived!) The app was called USAF, and was an informational app about the United States Air Force for use by anyone, in the Air Force or not. It was a way for me to get practice and show my support for the armed forces, since I am a USAF veteran. Getting that app published in the catalog was a huge day for me! Not to mention when I started getting downloads. I was expecting (and would have been happy with) 50 total downloads. When the numbers were more like 1000 per week, I could barely believe the stats! A few updates to the app later, and I am still loving it! I simply cannot wait to see what happens to the platform with the recent acquisition by HP and 2.0 of the OS on the horizon!

If you have not seen or played with WebOS, please give a Palm Pre Plus a try. You won’t be sorry!

10+ WebOS apps we really want!

Jason — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:21:05 +0000

Google Voice - http://www.google.com/mobile/voice

Mint - http://www.mint.com

Remember The Milk - http://www.rememberthemilk.com

“Photo Manipulation Apps”

Google Docs - http://docs.google.com

Miro Sync - http://www.getmiro.com

WordPress - http://wordpress.org

Google Navigation - http://www.google.com/mobile/navigation

Amazon - http://www.amazon.com

Qik - http://qik.com

April 2010: Ten Must Have WebOS Apps

Jason — Sun, 02 May 2010 21:49:17 +0000

Evernote $Fr.ee
A great mobile app to access your evernote.com account.

RTFM Beta $Fr.ee
Still in beta, but works great for accessing your Remember The Milk account on the go!

aniWeather $Fr.ee
Very cool little animated weather app for checking weather in locations of your choice.

Slacker Radio $Fr.ee
Mobile app for accessing Slack Radio from anywhere.

Tweet Me $1.50
A new Twitter client that just set the bar for WebOS Twitter clients!

Gowalla $Fr.ee
Check in everywhere you go on Gowalla!

MyQ for Netflix $3.00
Add, edit, and view movies on your Netflix Q from anywhere you are.

Google Latitude Assistant $1.49
A much needed addition to WebOS. This allows your phone to update your Google Latitude as intervals specified by you.

WootOn! $Fr.ee
A very good interface for looking at the various Woot! properties.

Preware $Fr.ee
A package management application for the Palm Pre. Preware allows the user to install any package from any of the open standard package repositories on preware.org (or any other location that hosts an open standard package repository). Preware relies on a custom written service developed from community research which allows the mojo app to talk to the built-in ipkg tool.

What sucks about Android.

Jason — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:46:47 +0000

What sucks about Android.

Well, to be honest, very little! I switched from using an iPhone to using Android in November of 2009. After switching I never looked back. To this day I do not regret it one bit. Sure the platform is a little less polished, but it is so much more forward thinking and open. This makes it number one for me. All that being said, there is one thing that is absolutely driving me up the wall; OS updates. I see a huge problem in the way Android OS updates are rolled out. I am mostly speaking to version 2.0 and later since all the 1.x builds were still, in my opinion, in Android’d infancy stage. When the OS hit 2.0, I felt it was ready for prime time.

Since Android is open source, anyone can grab the OS and modify it how they see fit. A lot of hardware manufacturers are doing just that. It’s great on the one hand because you get a bunch of cool versions of the OS, it sucks on the other though because updates to those handsets are very slow to come and are never up to date with the virgin “Google Experience” phones. If a handset maker wants to make a custom OS version, at this point, they seem to be locked into using older 1.5 and 1.6 versions of the OS code. This sucks for the consumer because even with a brand new phone they are stuck with 3-6 month old technology on day one of using the phone.

With each new release of the OS like 2.0 and 2.1, the new OS seems to launch with a single phone. With 2.0 it was the Motorola Droid. With 2.1 it was Google’s very own Nexus One. Meanwhile everyone else is stuck with whatever version their phone came with. This almost makes it seem like if you want the latest OS you have to buy whatever phone is launched with it. This of course will not work.

I am not sure what, if any, are the technical reasons for this. Perhaps drivers for specific hardware are the culprit. What I would like to see is a more uniform release schedule of OS updates. If drivers are the problem, there should be a more common specification for how hardware is to talk to the OS and every handset maker should follow that spec. If you want to have a hardware keyboard, here is how it talks to the OS, same with touchscreens, trackballs, cameras, speakers, and so forth. Something similar to how USB peripherals work on a computer. If i get a new USB keyboard, no matter what it looks like, it still types normally. There should not be a difference in how an HTC keyboard talks to the OS vs. how a Motorola keyboard does.

I use a Motorola Droid so I have a “Google Experience” Phone. In this case I would like to see updates hosted by google. When google put out the Nexus One with 2.1, I would have liked to see a ROM download for “Google Experience 2.1 Update” and one for each of the carriers if necessary. This would ensure the platform keeps moving forward, and applications are more likely to work across the board

Currently in the Android market you are seeing over and over applications that say “does not work with droid” or “must have 1.5″. If the latest version of the OS were more readily available, I think more developers would be developing for the newest version and taking advantage of all the newest updates have to offer

So, to say that Android sucks, would be a gross mistake. Android is absolutely fantastic! Any of the problems I have seen up to this point are all nothing to worry about. I had an iPhone from the very first day it was launched, and to be honest it sucked until half way through version 2.0 also. Although I love Android and recommend it to a lot of my friends, I would still not recommend my mom use it, but very soon in the near future I think I probably will be able to.

Sprint’s HTC “Hero” 30 second Review

Jason — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:25:48 +0000

Well the HTC Hero has finally made it stateside..kinda. Instead of the
next gen looking Hero, we got the crappy knockoff version at Sprint
that looks like every other phone. It came out today, so we stopped by
the local sprint store to check it out. I didn’t really care too much
about the handset, nothing too special there. More important is the
Android Sense UI. The UI is beautiful, however feels very clunky sadly
:( I think it is a problem of a phone UI finally outpacing the hardware
it was designed for. Is this phone a winner? Probably, if you are with
Sprint. Am I switching from my iPhone? No. I am thrilled however that
this type of innovation will fuel competition in the mobile sector.