iPhone SDK, this is it. March 7, 2008
Posted by vinnyt in : Apple, Computer Science Theory, FreeBSD, GPS, Mac, Mac Apps, Programming, iPhone , add a comment I have been developing applications for mobile devices going on about 6 years now. I started out developing applications for a major medical information company here in Kansas City by the name of Cerner. Our platform was PocketPC, and from a development stand point it was nice, not that bad, but just not that powerful. There where limitations on the device that we encountered and had to overcome on a near daily basis. In the end however we successfully created a suite of applications that is in use today and doing quite well. My role was in this case to build most of the low level foundations that where used by the other developers. This sounds simple but frankly speaking it isn’t I had to in most cases devise from scratch many things that in my mind should be facilitated by the OS, but in pocketPC at the time they where not there.
I next moved on to PalmOS. I worked for a company that was targeting the trucking industry. Palm OS was about as bare bones as one could imagine, but it allowed for those of us interested in computer science and why we optimize our code a unique opportunity to explore that side of our skill set. Translation, the devices where very underpowered and so everything had to run as efficiently as possible to ensure that the user experience was not compromised. The result was we abandoned the projects and platform because well the target audience didn’t see the use and it would not fit in their business and second the applications we created where so complex they would be unusable.
Having developed on both of these there is one major problem that both devices share: designing a usable UI is extremely difficult. The stylus interface is terrible, and the screen is not big enough to build anything that needs large amounts of data. Next, each OS is very limited. Most of the applications I wrote needed to be asynchronous and networked. This meant multiple threads of execution and network connectivity when it was present. Let me just say this worked some of the time, and usually, when you did one thing you got locked out of something else. The last application I wrote for the mobile platform was on a pocketPC phone I carried for work. I used .NET and actually in very few lines I produced an application that connected to a bluetooth GPS downloaded position data and when a network became present the data would be uploaded to a web service where it was rendered(http://vinnyt.org/location/v3/) this worked pretty well but I ran into the same headaches I hit before network didn’t work all that well and the multi-threading was poor.
I firmly believe that the iPhone will solve these problems and it is going to be the future of mobile computing. To start with the OS is Unix under the hood this is hands down the future of computing. It has been the past and I believe that in the years to come it will continue to advance and evolve. With it you get multi-threading that will scale, you get robust networking and a rich API set that will take care of most of the problems that we as mobile developers encounter. The iPhone UI is very intuitive and with a bit of forethought the UI constructs provided will lead to some very interesting and great applications. I believe that in the next few years we are going to see the market share of this device expand nearly exponentially… Mark my words.
Leopard October 28, 2007
Posted by vinnyt in : Apple, Mac, Operating System Debates , add a comment On Friday Oct. 26th I joined hundreds of others in a line at the local Apple store and purchased a copy of the new hotness OS X, version 10.5. I had a little trepidation about upgrading to this OS on day one due to some reviews I read on several of the popular websites complaining about a few minor here and there bugs. However, after using the OS now going on 3 days I have to say there is not a single thing I have to complain about.
First off I have a standard MacBook and it is much faster. The biggest improvement is when I put the computer to sleep and come back to it. It wakes up almost instantly and there is no hesitation with applications they all are responsive right away. So far I have to hand it to Apple they go this one right. I do have one minor complaint and that is I don’t see any of the core animation stuff that was hyped up during all the demos and so forth leading up to this launch. I suspect that development companies didn’t get their developments cycles lined up with Apples release time frame so the Leopard only applications are not ready yet. We’ll see these in the coming months. Verdict: spend the money do the upgrade it’ll be worth it.
Why Apple Will win. November 2, 2006
Posted by vinnyt in : Operating System Debates, computers , 1 comment so far For quite some time now I’ve been very anti mac. This mainly was a result of my experiences with some of the early macs, and the fact that I had spent a large amount of time working with UNIX. I guess in my youth and lack of experience I was too short sighted to give mac a chance when they release OSX. As the saying goes with age comes wisdom, and I believe I’ve had somewhat of an epiphany. I was reading through digg this morning and came across an article talking about the release of Xcode. I then discovered that all you have to do is fill out a simple form and boom you have access to this product. Personally to me this is what will put mac over the top. I firmly believe that more than a clean interface it is software that makes an OS successful. If you look at BSD/Linux/M$ over the years, they success came mainly from the fact they had simple to use and powerful applications. Apple has always enjoyed a niche market, but now that you have an operating system derived from UNIX, and with an easy to use IDE. I don’t see why there won’t be a flood of applications coming out that will increase the popularity and ultimately make OSX the hands down winner. Being a UNIX advocate I hope this will come to fruition. We will have to see what happens with the next versions of Windows but frankly based on what I’ve seen from Apple, and my experience with UNIX I’m pretty convinced this is it.Do It yourself GPS tracking October 29, 2006
Posted by vinnyt in : Computer Science Theory, GPS, Programming , 1 comment so farI’m starting a series of articles on a recent application I’ve built to create an application I’ve created called “Where’s Vinnyt.” The name of the application clearly is a sign of my vanity. However, it is one of the more interesting spare time pieces I’ve created, and think it could be very interesting to anyone that has any interest in the fields of GPS, near to realtime tracking, and System integration. My interest in GPS arose some years ago when I borrowed a GPS navigation system from a friend of mine. I quickly discovered that not only did this system provide a fun and interesting means of getting around the city it exposed an interface that I as a programmer could access and leverage for my own fun. I will breakdown my aritcles as follows. First accessing the GPS, what data do you see, how do you get to it, and how then do you use it. Second data transmission and storage, how do I take data from where I am in the real world and store it and move it for use later. Finally, integration with Google Maps ( although this is tracking the data is not anywhere near real time, and so I think that let’s me off the hook.) Please check back I’ll be creating my first post in the days to come.
Using .NET without IIS October 14, 2005
Posted by in : Programming , add a commentSo the trick is how to effectively expose existing PHP code with out a significantly modify your code. As of late I’ve really began focusing on the object oriented aspect of PHP. The framework they’ve developped has become quite robust and is really alowing for very clean and efficient designs. So here’s where the trick begins by downloading this SoapDiscovery Class. You then create a file that sits infront of your existing class, this file will look similar to the follwing.
setClass( “ClassA” );
$servidorSoap->handle();
}
else {
require_once “SoapDiscovery.class.php”;
$disco = new SoapDiscovery(’ClassA’,’soapClassAManager’);
header(”Content-type: text/xml”);
if (isset($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) && strcasecmp($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'],’wsdl’)==0) {
echo $disco->getWSDL();
}
else {
echo $disco->getDiscovery();
}
}
?>
This looks at the incoming request and will either actually handle the call to the method or produce a WSDL suitable for use with the .NET development environment.
Installing FreeBSD October 10, 2005
Posted by vinnyt in : FreeBSD , add a comment
So I recently came into possession of this Sun Enterprise 420. This picture is not quite right that’s a SunFire 280, but the form factor is the same so it’ works. I initially began by trying out Solaris. It recently became open source, and so I figured I give it a shot. I used Solaris all through college, and became very familiar with it, and felt that it would run pretty nicely on this hard ware. The Box I have is a dual 450Mhz, with 2 gigs of RAM, and 2 18Gb SCSI drives. Not the fastest thing in the world, but frankly it’s 64Bit, and should run pretty well considering what it is. I downloaded Solaris from Sun, and got through the install. I began toying with it a little bit, and really it was just not very friendly I think they’ve changed a few things, or perhaps I’ve become rusty it’s hard to say exactly. So I decided to toy with something I have a little more experience with. I decided to try FreeBSD 6.0 for SPARC64. I started out by downloaded the release candidate, and burn it to a CD, and did the install. I then built mysql, then apache, then PHP, and finally eaccelerator, and got it all together and it’s now serving up the blog you’re currently reading. So my goal is to put a pretty heavy load on this machine to see what kind of mileage I get from it.
This is a test August 30, 2005
Posted by vinnyt in : Computer Science Theory , add a commentSo like I said I created this email blog post automation tool, and well I found out somebody already created basically the same thing in PHP. A while back. I’ve decided I’m going to stick with what I’ve created because I’ve invested a lot of time in it, and it works well so right now there is no point in changing it. I’m going to have to add more features to make it a little more robust obviously, but that’s something down the road that I’ll do. Any way this message is to test if my categories that have spaces in them work when I post. So do they!?
Wordpress extension August 23, 2005
Posted by vinnyt in : Programming , add a comment So I’ve created this script that integrates with wordpress. I have a project going that uses Easy Moblog. The cool feature of Easy Moblog is that you can post from an email account. Basically in the administration you give it a list of email address that are allowed, and then any emails received from that address are posted to your blog. I’ve created a perl script that does the exact same thing but for wordpress. It has a list of known email addresses, then periodically checks an account and then posts that to your blog. I’ve included features for posting images and everything, my next task will be to extend this to take emails from a cell phone and post those as well. The image below was attached to this message and posted. 
This is basically a thing for me to have some fun with so I’ll see what kind of mileage I get with it, and hopefully I’ll eventually make it freely available and give it to the opensource community.
GPS update July 27, 2005
Posted by vinnyt in : Programming , add a commentI’ve completed the GPS project for the win32 fat client. The program was designed as previously stated, 2 threads one reader and one writer and a non-locking queue shared between the 2 threads. So far all is well…
Starting on my GPS project July 20, 2005
Posted by vinnyt in : General, Programming , add a comment So,
I’ve had this idea now for a couple of years. I have been trying to build a real time tracking system for myself similar to Tracker watches. Early on I built a version that used Microsoft Roads & Trips, but this required a fairly heft connection to the Internet, as it generated a picture on the computer I was carrying with me and then uploaded that to my website. Frankly the feature set that I was able to create using this technology was less than desirable. So with that attempt working. I knew that what I wanted to create was possible, and it would just require me to dig a little deeper. A couple of years passed, and I bought a GPS and really began exploring the technology. I can now identify pretty much every NMEA sentence, and can almost convert the numbers in my head. Up until google maps came out I had been exploring how to use mapquest and the like. They have a simple interface, but every attempt I made at trying to figure out how their maps worked ended up in failure. So then Google maps was released, and within a couple of months I along with so many others figured out a way to lojack my way onto the map. The early incarnations of this software worked great, excerpt for the fact that every time Google improved their maps I ended up having to hack my code to get it working again. So luckly for all of us out there Google did us mappers a tremendous favor and produced an API so we wouldn’t have to fight every time they made a change. So my hat is off to Google for that. In creating this I now have all the tools I need to build my application. As it stands now you can play back journey’s I have been on by clicking on the “Where’s Vinny” link. What I have done thus far is simply carry my lap top and my garmin with me and using Hyper Term recorded the NMEA sentences, and then uploaded those to a data base when I had internet connectivity. Over they next couple of weeks I’m going to start spending more time with this application so that I can finally realize my goal of real-time tracking.
