rob’s blog

Winamp has been my media player of choice for years because it is fairly lightweight, and has a long history off plugins.  Winamp also has the ability to use global hot keys which are keyboard shortcuts to play, pause and skip through tracks even if you’re using another application.

Since I got the iPhone, I’ve been leaving iTunes open more and more.  And since version 8 was released, I’ve been trying out the Genius play list.  The genius can be good, but sometimes it sticks an odd track in there and you need to skip.  The bummer is that iTunes doesn’t support global hot keys.

I can’t listen to music on a computer and work if I have to flip back to the media player just to change tracks , so I finally got around to searching for a solution and came upon Jacob Hickman’s iTunes global hotkey project.   I like it so far–it adds a “toast” or little roll-up/roll-down status display when you skip tracks and has a fun Domo-kun tray icon.  Check it out, if you’re a PC iTunes user.

In the past I’ve written about the Facebook platform as being the wild west of software development.  The reasoning was that 3rd party developers like myself were watching the platform shift and change on a daily basis.  The result was that functions were being introduced in beta, or replaced and deprecated frequently.

Developers working on emerging software platforms are a flexible bunch.  They’re used to having theirapplications break so long as the platform overall is being improved.  A better platform means more users, which means greater opportunity for 3rd party developers.  One thing developers do not like, however is having their software tools gobbled up an encorporated into the core of the platform.

I wrote about how this was happening in my blog post, Nationalization or Expropriation? Independent Facebook Application Developers Continue to Face Uncertainty.  Something entirely different is happening right now on the Touch platform, however.

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Neutrinos just wrapped its second iPhone application, it is a 20 questions trivia game called iQ.  It is great step from our first app, TipTotaler.  For iQ, I took on the user interface design for the application in addition to my normal website design and marketing.

The amount of graphic design and image handling in iPhone development is extensive and I’ve already blogged about a tool to assist in the 3d iPhone application icon design.  But the most interesting stuff is happening in Interface Builder and in xCode that I’m not supposed to talk about here.

Apple has an NDA up with all developers that they can not talk about their experience with the SDK.

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My friend Dave Peixotto is in charge of coding and software repository work on our iPhone application development.  I am in charge of the marketing and business aspects of our software company, Neutrinos, LLC.

One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app.  As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.

There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers:  First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57.  Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.

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“bittersweet being” is no more.

I ditched my Blackberry Curve and picked up an black 16 gigabyte 3g iPhone last week.  It had been a great experience so far, with only a handful of complaints.

[Note: Since this entry was written, I have been releasing iPhone applications to the iTunes store.  You may be interested in checking out our iPhone and iPod Touch Applications. -rob]

Yesterday, however I had a serious problem with the phone.  I was at Rock the Bells in Mansfield, MA and reached for my phone only to find that it had a solid white screen.  It would not respond to the sleep or home button.  I tried the hard restart (reset), and it would go blank, then if I did it again, flash the white briefly.  I did the hard restart (10 seconds home and sleep) a few more times and got to the Apple logo.

The device then boot up normally to the home screen, however the moment it went to sleep it would not come back to life.  It would just be a dead screen.  I could get it to come back to the home screen again by doing multiple hard restarts (not every one was successful in getting to the Apple loading screen, sometimes holding the two buttons only resulted in a vibration) but even then it required multiple attempts. If I missed the home screen and it went to sleep then the process had to be repeated.

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I just got back from the 5/3/08 RJD2 show at The Paradise on Comm. Ave. I had been looking forward to the show for some time, pulling the on-sale date from an RSS item from tourfilter and within a week or two tickets sold out. It was with great anticipation that I approached the show. I saw RJD2 perform from a distance at Bonnaroo a few years ago, and had seen the crowd get worked. The Third Hand, Randle John Krohn’s latest from March this past year illustrated the major transition from a primarily hip-hop based library of music built on very deliberate sampling.

In his 2006 interview with Pitchfork Media, Krohn gave some important details about the album that would become The Third Hand. Specifically, the album was a huge transitionary work for him, moving from sampling to performance both in instrumentation and his own singing. In addition he moved labels from Definitive Jux to XL Recordings in an outwardly symbolic movement from hip-hop to a destination between electronic and pop music.

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The 2008 Boston Marathon was today, and the course went just past the end of my block in Brighton. I’m usually drawn to road races as a spectator, since I’m not in anywhere near the condition to execute on a race like this right now, I get my kicks from cheering on the runners of the day.

Part of it is just the energy you get from cheering on total strangers. The other is the quiet self-motivation that I should be in training myself. My two marathons from in Portland are starting to seem a little far off, and neither of them were in a time that would have qualified me for the race today.

I did use the excellent vantage point at Cleveland Circle to take some footage of the elite runners group–ment and women leading the pack. I compiled the video and a few photos into a 90 second video and went ahead and tested out Flickr’s new video features.

There is some interesting discussion going on in the Facebook Developer’s forum. The gist is that Facebook has made changes that are causing some developers to feel disenfranchised. A few developers are upset enough that they are speaking of creating a union of independent Facebook application developers.

What might the goals of a union of Facebook application developers be? It would help to look at what has stirred the pot recently. About two weeks ago someone posted a complaint that Facebook had unfairly bent the rules to give CBS’s Sports NCAA bracket application advantages for faster viral spread across the Facebook user base. Adding insult to injury, the thread also pointed out that the CBS Sports NCAA bracket application had a poor user rating.

Two days ago another developer posted a thread titled, “Facebook has stolen my idea!” which describes the recently added “Do you know these people?” page on Facebook. The developer suggests he feels “cheated” because the new Facebook page duplicates his own application’s functionality. The developer’s application was forced to comply with platform development rules that required an obstructive approval process in order work correctly.

Facebook’s “Do you know these people?” page circumvents this approval process because it is not subject to the rules independent application developers must follow. Facebook made a better version of the application a part of the Facebook experience by bending the rules that crippled the original developer’s work. Continue Reading »

The modern software development process is sort of out in the open. Any sizeable project like a new version of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop is discussed widely in technology forums and blogs. Although beta testers generally sign NDAs with companies, details or full copies of beta software leaks regularly.

Google’s Android OS is not quite Open Source, but will rely heavily on the Open Source contributions from the public. This past weekend an ARS Technica article about updates to Android acknowledged Google’s creation of a public bug tracking system as a “sign that Google is taking the needs of the Android third-party developer community more seriously.”

Clearly, expectation of visibility into today’s major software projects has increased with the growth of the web. But what about older software? Who is looking into the games and tools that we used on a daily basis 15 years ago?

Know Your Mario History

A new Download Squad article discusses the impending release of a historical documents related to Sega video game development between 1993 and 1994. It claims that a “large community of Sonic fans have been searching for prototypes and lost levels in the games for many years now.” Indeed, you can read the granular details.

The new article says that a community member is planning on releasing “an entire year’s backup of data from the Sega of America offices from 1993-1994.” The article calls the eagerness of the community to review the information as part of a post-modern archeology culture, where people examine the assembly-level code of these game ROMs. Continue Reading »