JustHumans Wordpress Plugin
Jackson Whelan created a WordPress plugin that implements JustHumans form spam protection. check it out!
Bike Maps With Touch Gesture Support
Michael Wesch took the iPhone / Android touch map example I put together a few months back to create a free service for bike commuters in Manhattan, Kansas. He creates his own map tiles which include information helpful for bike commuters such as where bike racks, bathrooms and water fountains are. The roads and paths are color-coded for bike-ability and he is using browser based geolocation and touch gesture support to make a full screen map track your progress as you bike. Check out the project here:
http://mediatedcultures.net/bikemanhattan/
And the full screen touch gestures version here:
http://mediatedcultures.net/bikemanhattan/map/map.html
He tells me that he is looking into adding route capability in the future.
Flipboard iPad App
Every once in a while, something comes along that makes you just go "yeah, that's what it should be like". The iPhone is a great example of this. As it happens, I did the Stanford iPhone Application Programming course on iTunes U taught by Evan Doll and Alan Cannistraro. I'd been following Evan on Twitter and yesterday he announced a free iPad app he has been working on called Flipboard. I had one of those "that's how it's supposed to be" moments where everything just clicks. The iPad is great for reading, especially magazine-like content with video. But Twitter clients for example tend to visually treat all content the same. Flipboard draws together many social media sources and presents it in a magazine-like format. It is really quite stunning. Check out their video or give it a try yourself.
Free iPhone 4 Cases from Apple
Apple is giving away free "bumper" cases to existing iPhone 4 customers to solve an antenna issue, but the program is currently set to run out on September 30th, 2010. Steve Jobs mentions that Apple will review their options at that point and figure out what to do going forward. This has me thinking that Apple might be targeting October 1, 2010 for a more permanent hardware fix. I wonder if this will have a measurable impact on iPhone 4 sales right around October 1.
Cellphone "Bar Display" Indicators
Apple's initial reaction to the iPhone 4 signal strength issue was an admission that they miscalculated the number of signal strength bars that they show. Steve Jobs mentioned in today's press conference that there is no standardized algorithm for calculating "bars" so the industry has been on it's own. But there must be some general consensus out there because a new version of iOS was released "fixing" this issue. Clearly a favorable "bars" indication is somewhat of a selling point for both a phone and a carrier, so there is some grey area here.
But my question is, what do the bars actually stand for? If you ask someone just walking down the street, chances are they might say that it indicates the strength of the cell signal. I would imagine that in the middle of a city were there are many cell stations and lots of radio frequency noise, you would see "five bars" pretty much all the time. But out in rural areas where there is comparably far less radio energy around, you might expect to see very few bars. Of course this doesn't seem to jive with the realities of cell phone usage today.
Regardless of how much radio energy is around you, the only thing you really care about is how much "signal" is there that you can actually use. So, many cellphone signal strength indicators display the far more useful "signal to noise ratio", or the amount of signal you have to use that is above the noise floor. In the middle of a city where there is lots of radio frequency noise around, there may be less useful signal even if the overall power of that signal is greater than that in a rural area. Background noise, as it turns out, is a very significant factor.
But wether or not to show the signal to noise ratio isn't the only decision to be made. When you "death grip" a cellphone, the signal strength understandably drops. Obviously the instant you grip the phone, the signal has dropped. But for marketing reasons, it makes sense to add some delay to the bar display because the drop might only be temporary. Some phones take upwards of one minute to accurately display the new level. (to it's credit, the iPhone is fairly quick to respond - which has been somewhat of it's undoing in the recent days) Obviously what is going on here is some sort of average over time with the time being a big variable manufacturer to manufacturer.
Almost comically, an increase in signal strength is usually indicated many times faster than a decrease. Release your grip on a cellphone near you or check YouTube to see how quickly some manufacturers spring back. Obviously there is some discrepancy from device to device and marketing definitely plays a pivotal role.
Regardless, there isn't much clarity around what signal bars indicate and there needs to be a standard. It is already hard enough to evaluate problems with the various carriers around the world without "bar discrepancy" getting in the way. Does anyone know of an effort underway?
iPhone 4 Antenna Issue
Letter from Apple: Its a software bug in the way bars are displayed.
Translation: We aren't going to fix the hardware issue.
The Race Across America with Bandwidth
I just returned from helping out with Bandwidth.com's attempt at the most difficult bike race in the world. The Race Across America starts in Oceanside, California and ends in Annapolis, Maryland. The week-long event forges it's way from the Pacific Ocean, across deserts, over the Rocky Mountains, through the plains, over the Mississippi and the Appalachian range to culminate at the Atlantic ocean. David Morken, Joe Parke, John Murdock and Sean Matt fielded a four man team and a bunch of others pitched in as crew members to help out. And wouldn't you know it, we ended up winning! Here is a video of the experience.
iPhones and Location
Apparently I am at a house just off Dutton Road, a few miles south-west of Bangor, Maine. Or at least my iPhone thinks so.
I happen to know that I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts just off of the Charles River. Looking out my window, I can see Kendall Square, some MIT buildings and a bit of the Boston skyline. So why doesn't my iPhone agree?
I don't know exactly, but I have what might be an interesting guess. The iPhone uses several methods to figure out it's location. GPS, while the most accurate, can take a few minutes to get an good fix and generally won't work indoors. Another option is to get a fix given the cellular towers in the area. Because the positions of the cell towers are known and signal power can be measured, a very quick rough estimate can be made. However, the accuracy is down to 200 meters at best so another option is to see what WiFi access points are within range. Using a similar algorithm, a more accurate fix can be had.
But how does the iPhone know where a particular cell tower or WiFi network is? Enter SkyHook, a Boston-based software-only location service that Apple uses to take this information and return a location in under a second. Skyhook catalogs cell towers and WiFi networks from around the world and make the data available via query. Given a constellation of WiFi networks and cell towers, a fairly quick and somewhat accurate fix can be made.
Or so I thought.
Enter another key piece of information that you may have already picked up from the picture above: About a month ago or so, I got a micro-cell from AT&T. As it's name implies, a micro-cell is a $149 low-power cellular radio transceiver that can be deployed where needed. It uses an Internet connection to communicate with AT&T and send calls back and forth. I use one because not too surprisingly, AT&T service is flaky and a micro-cell happens to solve my dropped-call problems.
My micro-cell has a GPS in it so AT&T knows where it is for 911 emergency reasons but Skyhook doesn't. Add to that the fact that many people have micro-cells and I am willing to bet that at least one or more of them share the same ID. As long as the micro-cells aren't too close together, this isn't a problem. But it is for Skyhook because they drive around cataloging networks for use in their service. In my case, I'm guessing that my micro-cell is new enough not to be in Skyhook's database and that another micro-cell with the same ID as mine was cataloged off of Dutton Road a few miles south-west of Bangor, Maine. I think that is why my iPhone is very misguided at the moment.
That's my guess, at least. I also installed iOS 4, the latest version of the iPhone operating system, and that may have contributed to a change in the way location is reported but I think the above explanation is more feasible. Does anyone else have a better explanation?
Get Conference Starter iPhone App for Free
If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, we're offering a refund of the $4.99 purchase price of Conference Starter, the app that lets you start ad-hoc voice conferences. You can create a conference with anyone who has a phone number and there are no PINs or call-in numbers to remember.
Here's how it works. Conference Starter lets you pick up to 25 contacts from your address book (or type in arbitrary phone numbers) and touch "Start Conference". The system then calls you and asks if you would like to start the conference. If so, everyone else is called and asked if they would like to join. Eventually everyone is dropped into the conference together and everyone can talk. Each participant deducts $0.02 per minute from your credit while in a conference and the conference ends when you hang up. (or you run out of credit!) When you buy the application, the $4.99 purchase price is added to your account as credit.
If you would like to give it a try for free, we will refund the $4.99 purchase price of the app to the first 50 people to sign up here:
http://conference.rnd.bandwidth.com/free/
Don't worry, we'll confirm that you are within the first 50 before you have to go buy anything!
Lost to the West is Riveting
I am immensely proud of my brother Lars Brownworth's book Lost to the West just released this week in paperback. It really is the armchair historian's introduction to some 1,100 years of forgotten history. It is quite an achievement to pack that many years into 300 some-odd pages and yet the book still begs to be read. Just look at some of these chapter titles: "Of Buildings and Generals", "Swords that Drip with Christian Blood", "Basil the Bulgar Slayer", "Death and his Nephew" and my personal favorite: "The Pegan Counterstroke". You can get a good feel for how this book just yanks you in by reading some of the first sentences. The prologue starts with:
"History isn't supposed to hinge on the actions of a single man..."
and chapter one starts with:
"The long-suffering people of the third-century Roman Empire had the distinct misfortune to live in interesting times..."
How can you not be drawn in? And then you start to get a sense of problems that just might become disastrous:
"The empire might have been profoundly transforming itself, but its citizens were oblivious to the change..."
and then:
"The death of their great enemy sent the Roman world into wild jubilation, but it did nothing to alleviate the true danger..."
From one blow that should surely extinguish the Byzantine flame to the height of human civilization, and then back again, the book reads like a novel. But you could never make this stuff up.
To cap it all off, the West owes an incalculable debt directly to the Byzantine world. From simultaneously sheltering the classics from the ravages of a hostile enemy and a dark age Europe to the basis for the modern Western legal system today, it is hard to point out anything in the West that hasn't been influenced in some way by the Byzantines. Yet few could even frame the argument. And how can we hope to understand the Middle East without understanding the civilization that sat at the crossroads of East and West for over a thousand years? How did we just forget about this? Why isn't this taught in the history classes of every school?
Read this book. If it doesn't get you fired up, I don't know what will.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
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About Me:
Name: Anders Brownworth
Location: Cambridge, MA, USA
Work: Writing iPhone and Android applications at Bandwidth.
Play: Technology, World Traveler and Licensed Helicopter Pilot
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Books:
Lars Brownworth's book on Byzantine History spawned from our 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast:
or get the Audiobook in iTunes