Merry Christmas
Dec 22nd
First christmas for cloudgoessocial.net
Merry Christmas to all the readers. And now that I’m at it also Happy new year!
Next year’s proposals:
1) be more social on the net – in particular try to write something that also non-techie might appreciate – and in particular try to WRITE…
2) honor the sub-header of the blog and talk about cuisine and travel
3) keep on going with all the hard (but so much interesting) work!
Best wishes for a happy holiday season.
~C
Who Am I?
Oct 15th
Screenshots of the Who Am I? application
A new software developed by me and some others, over at caffeineapps.com. It’s a simple and funny game, just take a picture of yourself or some friends, disguise it with our tools and upload it. From that moment on you’re part of the game, anyone in the world could find you.
For more information just look at the application website or try it out on your iPhone, it’s free! Get it from the AppStore
uMonitor V1.5 – New features!
Sep 21st
The new version (apart from some bug-fixing) adds:
- Copy/Paste for all kind of .torrent files You can surf your favorite sites and use the built-in copy feature of the iPhone to copy a link to a .torrent file and then simply paste it in the new field to add it to your uTorrent instance
- Profiles To easily switch from home wifi/outside network or if you have multiple instances to monitor
- [testing] SSL It should be possible to now use instances over SSL. I don’t have one to test, so please let me know if you manage!
It will be soon available over at cydia!
µMonitor V1.1 – New features!
Sep 7th
There will be shortly a new updated version on cydia (as soon as our friends at zodttd receive and update the new app, I sent it!). The new version has:
- Adding torrents: you can search for torrents and add them. They will start downloading immediately. Currently the search is done over at mininova.org and torrents are sorted by feeds. – Once the search is done, just tap on one torrent to start downloading!
- Sorting: now torrents can be sorted by: status, name, label, size, progress
- Searching: not finding your torrent between all the ones that you currently have? Just hit the search bar and you will get it for sure!
- Preferences: now it is possible to insert the address field in these way:
-
http://utorrent.dyndns.org/gui
-
www.utorrent.dyndns.org/gui
-
192.168.0.100/gui
-
192.168.0.100/gui/
- …
You name it, it should work fine!
-
- Overall performance: should be better, well, the code looks better, and minor bugs have been fixed
Upcoming features
- Multiple profiles: to edit different instances of uTorrent (or simply different locations)
- More choices while adding torrents (in particular, different search engines, such as: isohunt.com, torrentz.com, eztv.it) – We’re open to suggestions, write down which torrents site you use, and we’ll see if we can include them!
- Bug fixing! Please report any bug the application has, and we’ll see how to fix them!
- Feature requests: feel free to suggest anything, we’ll see what we can do! And if you donate we’ll hear even more! :)
µMonitor strikes back
Sep 1st
Given the recent interest on my torrent-monitoring application (thank you to the guys at torrentfreak.com for finding it out and writing about it), I announce that I will start development of the application once more to try and satisfy user requests (and fix a few bugs that I know are around).
Stay tuned for an update, which I hope it will arrive as soon as possible (at the current time I’ve been focusing more on other applications!)
Thanks for the interest, and remember that if you enjoy the application you might donate, it will keep me updating (and not look into other forms of financing, such as in-ads, which I hate) it with more than just self-interest for it!
ciop ciop
iPhone Augmented Reality Tips
Aug 29th
As I promised earlier on, here’s a small post with some suggestions on how to make AR apps.
When the iPhone OS 3.1 will be released (the sdk and os are now in beta), it will be possible (and approved by Apple) to overlay anything on top of the camera view, exactly to achieve Augmented Reality applications.
At the moment it is not possible to actively analyze the images presented to the user via the camera, unless using some tricks (which may not prove satisfying, i.e. take multiple screenshots of the screen), or jailbraking (or however it’s called the process of removing Apple’s restrictions) the device.
Following are some specs that most probably your application will need to use if it has to display some information based on your current location (GPS) and heading (compass).
In landscape mode:
Screen height: 320 px / 4.99 cm
Screen width: 426 px / 6.64 cm the camera view leaves some space under itself (which might come useful for some buttons/ui components), that’s why it’s not 480 px.
1 cm: 64 pixels
Camera FOV height: 34.6 degrees
Camera FOV width: 50.1 degrees
With these informations you should be able to do all kind of conversion calculations given you have for example latitude and longitude of something you want to display on screen, if you have the height as well you can use it to fine-tune the placements of all the items on the overlay view of the camera.
Hoping that this information can be useful to someone.
ciop ciop
Thank you
Aug 28th
As you have noticed I’ve added a donation button on the top right part of the site.
The other day Mr. William Edmondson, from Comcast has donated me some money. Being the first time such a thing happens I would like to thank him in particular. I hope you have found interest in what I write.
I will add a section of all the donors to my site, so your names won’t be forgotten. And from my side I will keep on writing and coding and keeping you updated.
Following up this weekend a new version of the ImageMagick for iPhone test project (which I know you love to read about) from the comment of another reader of this site. And also following a new post with some nice specifications of the iPhone that you may find useful (and it took me a while to dig out).
So, again, thank you all, and stay tuned!
ciop ciop
ImageMagick on iPhone – update with TIFF
Jul 28th
Here I go again with an update to the ImageMagick on iPhone saga.
As requested by a few people here on the site, I’ve added TIFF functionality to the compiled library. If you’re interested in reviewing the all process to compile ImageMagick for the iPhone please refer to my two previous posts where that’s described in detail: first and second.
TIFF is compiled with ZIP functionality, so you can compress your TIFF files.
As usual I’ve provided you with an updated script which now enables the compilation of tiff-3.8.2 alongside jpeg and png to have it supported in ImageMagick.
For the lazy there’s always the compiled static libraries and includes. But remember to take as well the *.xml configuration files for some ImageMagick functionality!
And the IM_Test Xcode project has been updated as well where the TIFF functionality is tested.
I guess I’ve updated everything accordingly. Please let me know if anything isn’t working for you. As usual contacting me here on the site.
ciop ciop
ImageMagick on iPhone – Benchmarks
Jul 14th
Thanks to Karl (see previous post comments and update) the XCode project has now the possibility to work on the images uncompressed. We (me and Karl) wanted to see the difference for ImageMagick to work with a compressed format (JPEG, for instance) and with an uncompressed format (raw data).
I’ve added to the project a simple benchmark, consisting in running the MagickWand creation, filtering and destruction a given number of times (customizable in the beginning of the source file, for instance 10), calculating how long it takes each time and in total.
The results are impressive, and can be better exaplined by looking at this simple graph:
Benchmarks running on the simulator and on the device (click to see better!)
As you can see working with uncompressed data achieves 3x faster results on the iPhone device, with a mean running time of 0.85 seconds to run an ordered posterize filter on an image of size 320×460 (the size of the iPhone screen). Similar results are also on the Simulator achieving 3.7x faster filtering for the same image.
The end line is trivial, working with uncompressed data, while being less easy (but as you can see from the project code not extreme) or intuitive yields much faster results!
You can download a better looking graph and the IM_test project as usual.
For any comment don’t hesitate to write, as you’ve seen I try to pick up my comments as much as I can (even on holiday!)
Thanks goes again to Karl who’s has the idea of working with raw images, and provided with the code to achieve so.
ciop ciop
ImageMagick on iPhone – Xcode
Jul 9th
UPDATE! (30.08.09)
Thanks to Jon Kean (see comments) the downloadable project now shows how to use images with unusual number of bits per component. As usual look at the defines at the top to check the functionality you want.
UPDATE! (14.07.09)
Thanks to Karl (see comments) the downloadable project now shows different ways of integrating ImageMagick with Objective-C UIImages offering both compressed methods, using JPEG compression as an example, and raw-data methods. Look at the define at the top to change which method the program will be using.
Many of you have asked me if I could post an Xcode project example to use the libraries and ImageMagick, and so, here it is.
The code is self-describing so I didn’t comment it much, it’s just a few functions call. All it does in this case is loading an image from an UIImage (Objective-C) into a format that ImageMagick (C) understands and can manipulate. Then it applies an ImageMagick filter (OrderedPosterize), which uses a configuration file (thresholds.xml).
Everything is working fine, and you have the complete set of libraries, headers and configuration files, and a configured XCode project right at hand.
If you still have any problem, don’t hesitate to contact me!
ciop ciop