Scott builds Software

Ben's Iron

Ben Britten Smith, or Ben Britten, wrote the first chapter in iPhone Advanced Projects. Get the book. Ben’s chapter alone is worth the price.

His sample code is elegant, demonstrating a common design pattern for implementing 2D and 3D games. Ben’s explanation of a particle generator on an iPhone is particularly engaging. Particles are simple sprites with textures pulled from an atlas. A Particle Emitter generates sprites within a defined 3D region, like the back end of a tiny space ship. The Particle System is an embedded OpenGL game loop, animating and destroying sprites with every tic. The demo system uses basic physics (velocity, size), a handful of textures, and OpenGL color transformations. Commercial systems are more complex yet follow this pattern.

Apparently Ben was also using Cheetah 3D, a compact 3D modeling package for the Mac, written by a scientist in Germany. While not Maya or 3DMax or Poser, it has many of the same features for a killer price. You’ll want Rob Bajorek’s model exporter, too.

And the Iron? You’ll have to ask Ben. Its the logo from his site. Maybe it has to do with clean code, ironing out all the kinks.

Tom Krazit of CNET wrote an article about the Google Phone recently. He said, quote,

“…assuming Google really is planning on releasing a completely Google-branded phone at retail, such a plan could derail the momentum enjoyed by Google and its Android partners this year.”

Momentum? Do we really want another Windows, this time with Chrome but on mobile devices?

Empower Andy Rubin (the brainchild behind Google’s mobile efforts) to go nuts. He should be given complete, autonomous reign over the gPhone. Pick a set of technologies that compete with the iPhone. Tune ChromeOS to squeeze every bit of joy out of the hardware, blowing away his earlier success with the Sidekick. Then we’ll have some real competition, a chance for Chrome OS to shine. Please make me eat crow for my post on Chrome. I’d like to see a healthy market competition without a green screen of death.

Competition often produces better goods and services, at lower prices. We all win. Go, Andy, Go. Make the gPhone. You have my vote.

Green Tape

Croton on Hudson took a step forward to revitalize the Harmon District, an area hit particularly hard by the recession. The village board approved a resolution to rezone the Harmon district, a first step toward enabling entrepreneurs to build profitable retail space with rental units. The Mayor (Leo Wiegman) also announced a new “green tape” initiative.

Green Tape?

Its the antithesis of Red Tape. Green Tape is his word for process re-engineering, removing extra layers of red tape, streamlining local government. The title is catchy. It calls to mind other green initiatives, conserving natural resources, preserving our environment.

We all spend a lot of our waking hours at work, in our towns, working with people. Green Tape. We need more of it, conserving one of life’s most precious resources — time.

Cow mooing

One of my first applications was just approved by the Apple Store last night. Woo-hoo!

Pushtone 1.0 is an app for sending hilarious alert sounds to an iPhone or iPod touch. If you’re offended by movies such as Wedding Crashers, Animal House, or comics like Chris Rock… this isn’t for you. If not, grab two iPhones or iPod touches, and pushtone to your heart’s content. Your phone never sounded so inappropriate.

I wanted to experiment with the new Push service, play with images, sounds, animation effects, table views, registration, XML feeds, backend servers in the cloud, embedded feedback through email, SMS gateways, and more. This little app packs a lot. The hard part was making it really easy and viral.

Registration? Its automatic. Sending a pushtone? Three taps. Tap once to get a list of pushtones. Tap a second time to choose a Pushtone. Tap a third to send it to yourself, or tap the phone number and quoted saying to send them to a friend.

The SMS gateway was an interesting challenge. Carriers are more than happy to let us send SMS and MMS messages from a cloud server. You just have to pay for it. Handsomely. Think a nickel an SMS, thirty cents per MMS.

I found a database of over 300,000 phone entries, held by an obscure US Government agency. By law they publish a list of all phone number “sets” and who owns them. A set is defined by the first 3, then the next two digits in a 10-digit phone number. This works pretty well. However, the agency hasn’t yet figured out how to track numbers that were ported.

For example, suppose you first had 914 555 2345 on Verizon. If you bought an iPhone and wanted to keep your number, the phone companies “port” your number from Verizon to AT&T. So, even though Verizon technically owns the set of numbers 914 55x xxxx, they’ve made an exception for you, 914 555 2345, and given it to AT&T. These are apparently not reported to the agencies.

The end result is that the database is mostly accurate — except for ported numbers. I mapped that database to the known email gateways, then send the SMS by sending an email to the appropriate carrier gateway, using their addressing format (e.g. Verizon would be 91455552345@vtext.net).

Ants on Site

Back when we did the web site for the Olympics, we’d occasionally take a break over pizza and brainstorm about geeky “cool” things to add to the site. We called the site our WomBeast. Wom stood for Web Object Manager. Beast was what it felt like working with the sprawl of machines and code 24 hours a day.

One of my favorites was “WomAnts.” The idea was to track where everyone was on the site, in real time, like ants walking around a picnic blanket. We could inspect the ants, interact with them, chat, and see the pathways they created. With the flip of a switch, we’d see ants crawling on the site. Click! We’d talk to you. Flick! You’d be logged off. Ooo, the power of it all.

Now that I’ve had this blog and a number of other sites, that curiosity is as strong as ever. I now create avatars anonymously for all that visit here. For chat, I’m trying out Google Talk. You can see your avatar on the upper left of the title bar. If I’m online, you can click and chat with me. Soon I hope to be able to chat with you, in reverse, for free.

This will take a bit to write in my spare time. Still, its a fun hack.

Are Apps the next gold rush?

Apps are on the cover of Business Week!

The article talks about the $1B App market and young companies like Zynga, Social Gaming Network, Tapulous that are minting cash. Little Zynga has exploded to several hundred employees, offering engineers perks like a Lamborghini for a day. Virtual goods, virtual gardens, social games, Dance-Dance revolution clones for your fingers, business apps, and more are rocketing to the tops of the charts.

But why Apple? Why didn’t this happen before now?

Apple was the first company to release a real, bonafide operating system on a mobile device. The OS includes a graphics pipeline, fun sensors (an accelerometer, magnetometer, realtime audio, realtime video, proximity), mobile networking, gobs of storage and computing power, and the ability to program in near machine language (C, Objective C). No other phone comes close.

These bite-sized apps are such a breath of fresh air when compared to PC bloatware and enterprise drudgery. Apple has made software and computing fun again! We’re happy to pay the buck or two for the pleasure.

Myers-Briggs is popular at major corporations, startups, psychologists and more. They have developed a 4-dimensional matrix of personality profiles, based on whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, thinking or feeling, intuitive or sensing, judgmental or perceptive.

Today a colleague offered up four questions to quickly guess your personality type. I didn’t think it would work. The results were surprisingly accurate (though clearly anecdotal).

Let’s call it Myers-Briggs for Idiots. Here they are. What personality are you?

1. After a long day of meetings, do you like to (A) move on to a party to relax, or (B) go home and be by yourself?
2. Do you prefer to hear about things (A) in general, or (B) more about details? Describe today’s weather. If you say “nice day,” you’re general. If you say “it started off at 56 degrees, rained a bit, then cleared around noon, when the sun came out at 3…” you’re clearly detail oriented.
3. When making a big decision, do you (A) think mainly about the impact on people or (B) prefer the objective right thing to do?
4. Do you (A) like quick resolution to issues, or (B) prefer to brainstorm all the possibilities?

Answers:
1A = E, 1B = I, 2A = N, 2B = S, 3A = F, 3B = T, 4A = J, 4B = P

String your answers together, E – N – T – J.

I was playing with Ooyala this morning, helping a client build streaming video into their site. The tools are easy to use, beautifully designed. We were up and running in less than five minutes with a demo account. Lots more to learn, of course, but its quite impressive. The Ooyala ex-Googlers have a winner here! I’ve included a sample video here that I downloaded from their video exchange.

A Hip Hop Marketer shows off an App in USA Today

Marketers are increasingly looking to apps — little interactive games, utilities, and entertaining toys — to reach a massive, on-the-go audience.

USA Today had an interesting article today about marketing and mobile applications. Besides the standard frothy statements about the future size of the mobile market, they hinted that new, mobile social networks and applications may emerge. These newcomers could displace today’s traffic monsters like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Possible? Sure. Just think. Twitter didn’t exist three years ago. Now you can’t avoid it.

Foursquare is my latest favorite. On the iPhone, I’m addicted to Sonic Media’s global network of leaf trombone and ocarina musicians. Try being a judge, meet two new friends. Hilarious!

North Highland Partners

Peter Drucker said it best. Every business starts with a customer.

Earlier this year I helped a customer build a few apps. Apps to me are the next wave of widgets. I’m pretty excited about the prospects of the iPhone platform, Flash 10, and cloud computing. Apps are seemingly everywhere, on the phone, the TV, my car’s dashboard, blogs, Twitter.

The customer’s CFO emailed me. “Where do I write the check?” I quickly incorporated, naming the company after the street where we built our first house: North Highland Partners. Today I put a placeholder at our domain northhighlandpartners.com.

In the last tech wave, we’d build the Powerpoint, craft a Web 2.0 slik sight naim, look for investors, attend conferences, send out fliers, get a logo, design t-shirts. We’d buy traffic, hook up AdWords and more. We hoped to be the next Four Square, Twitter, or Facebook.

In this economy Drucker rules. Start with what you do best, get a customer to pay for real value. Deliver quality. Cash the check. Repeat. Referrals will build when you deliver. Thirty days in, we crossed six figures in qualified opportunities. Last week we crossed seven. I was stunned.

The App wave is growing. Fast. Now, back to coding. We’ve got this really cool iPhone app for a movie that… well.. can’t say yet. Its under NDA.