Deadly Nadder from Flame It!

Last fall Ben Preuss called me from ThinkNerve. Ben runs a fantastic little studio in Brooklyn, partnering with Hollywood boutiques, producing dozens of Flash widgets and microsites. I’ve always been an admirer of his work.

Ben had an iPhone project called “Flame it!” and wanted to know if we could help. The idea was silly but fun: transform your breath into a fire-breathing dragon. Sounds simple enough. Today we submitted it to the App store. Shortly we’ll submit the native French and German versions.

Yet, when all was said and done, the App had to be written in OpenGL, CoreAudio, C and C++. The menus were all custom, maintaining the look and feel of the movie. Listening to your breath, processing the audio, then controlling the stereo sound and flame in real time required a bit more work than I originally thought. The audio engine is custom, as you’re recording, playing and animating sounds in a real-time loop with less than a 10msec delay.

After I got audio working — suspending correctly, resuming without hanging, and handling sound effects in real time — I had to create a new particle engine for the flames, inspired by the fabulous work of Particle Illusion. It should be able to play all effects from their library of thousands, some of which were used in 2012 and other Hollywood films. So fun. As the movie draws closer, new flames and particle engines will showcase the unique character of the starring Dragons. You can even use a multiplayer mode, flaming particles across a local WiFi network in real time using UDP.

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).

iPhone Font List

When working with text on the iPhone, the documentation doesn’t show you the list of fonts available on the device. I ran a little script and produced a listing of those found on a standard iPhone, version 2.1:

Family name: Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN W3
Font name: HiraKakuProN-W3

Family name: Courier
Font name: Courier
Font name: Courier-BoldOblique
Font name: Courier-Oblique
Font name: Courier-Bold

Family name: Arial
Font name: ArialMT
Font name: Arial-BoldMT
Font name: Arial-BoldItalicMT
Font name: Arial-ItalicMT

Family name: STHeiti TC
Font name: STHeitiTC-Light
Font name: STHeitiTC-Medium

Family name: AppleGothic
Font name: AppleGothic

Family name: Courier New
Font name: CourierNewPS-BoldMT
Font name: CourierNewPS-ItalicMT
Font name: CourierNewPS-BoldItalicMT
Font name: CourierNewPSMT

Family name: Zapfino
Font name: Zapfino

Family name: Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN W6
Font name: HiraKakuProN-W6

Family name: Arial Unicode MS
Font name: ArialUnicodeMS

Family name: STHeiti SC
Font name: STHeitiSC-Medium
Font name: STHeitiSC-Light

Family name: American Typewriter
Font name: AmericanTypewriter
Font name: AmericanTypewriter-Bold

Family name: Helvetica
Font name: Helvetica-Oblique
Font name: Helvetica-BoldOblique
Font name: Helvetica
Font name: Helvetica-Bold

Family name: Marker Felt
Font name: MarkerFelt-Thin

Family name: Helvetica Neue
Font name: HelveticaNeue
Font name: HelveticaNeue-Bold

Family name: DB LCD Temp
Font name: DBLCDTempBlack

Family name: Verdana
Font name: Verdana-Bold
Font name: Verdana-BoldItalic
Font name: Verdana
Font name: Verdana-Italic

Family name: Times New Roman
Font name: TimesNewRomanPSMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT
Font name: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT

Family name: Georgia
Font name: Georgia-Bold
Font name: Georgia
Font name: Georgia-BoldItalic
Font name: Georgia-Italic

Family name: STHeiti J
Font name: STHeitiJ-Medium
Font name: STHeitiJ-Light

Family name: Arial Rounded MT Bold
Font name: ArialRoundedMTBold

Family name: Trebuchet MS
Font name: TrebuchetMS-Italic
Font name: TrebuchetMS
Font name: Trebuchet-BoldItalic
Font name: TrebuchetMS-Bold

Family name: STHeiti K
Font name: STHeitiK-Medium
Font name: STHeitiK-Ligh

UK-based Truphone, a VoIP service provider for Wifi/data enabled handsets, today unveils a special version for owners of the latest version of the iPod Touch.

– Tech Crunch, 12/3/08

I want one!

This has free WiFi calls, an iPod, iPod applications all wrapped in one little $229 device. To really top it off, how about a free interface to SMS that correctly intercepts and relays text messages from a given phone number?