După două zile de butonare a noului meu iPhone, am găsit deja ceva bubiţe, dar şi multe chestii interesante. Haideţi să le discutăm pe rând.

1. Avantaje

• sistemul multi-touch îl face un telefon foarte uşor de folosit, toate treburile se execută mult mai rapid, iar experienţa este cu totul alta faţă de un telefon cu touchscreen simplu şi tastatură. Tastatura on-screen din iPhone e mult mai uşor de folosit (cel puţin pentru mine) decât o tastatură normală de telefon (vechiul meu telefon era un XDA mini S cu tastatură glisantă);
• accelerometrul este o chestie foarte interesantă. Practic, iPhone-ul reacţionează la mişcare (de ex. dacă îl roteşti, comută pe landscape). Există chiar un joc cu o biluţă pe care trebuie să o mişti printr-un labirint, evitând nişte găuri. Şi faci asta mişcând iPhone-ul. Deci este într-adevăr o inovaţie, un mod cu totul nou prin care poţi interacţiona cu un telefon;
• browserul Safari afişează paginile web impecabil, ca pe un pc/mac şi este şi multi-tabbed. Însă are şi ceva dezavantaje, pe care le vom discuta mai jos;
• facilitatea push-mail îl face un telefon excepţional când vine vorba de recepţia e-mail-urilor. Este ca şi cum ai avea Outlook în telefon, dar un Outlook mult mai light, clean & fast.
• în materie de muzică şi video, este excepţional, sunetul e impecabil, claritatea video la fel (ecranul are 16 milioane de culori, la fel ca un monitor de calculator), nu face frame-uri la redarea video (normal, doar are un procesor de 600 MhZ, în timp ce XDA-ul meu avea 200 MhZ), într-un cuvânt e un full-featured iPod;
• având abilităţi Wi-Fi şi 3G, e excelent pentru internet (eu consider că e cel mai performant telefon până în ziua de astăzi, referitor la navigarea pe internet);

2. Dezavantaje

• Primul dezavantaj este şi nu este un dezavantaj :). Nu îi poţi extinde memoria cu carduri de memorie.  Însă, când ai un iPhone de 16 GB, nu cred că mai e nevoie să-i extinzi memoria (eu unul, nu am nevoie);
• Browserul Safari nu recunoaşte Flash şi nici Java (dar Apple lucrează la asta, şi sper că se va rezolva la următorul update de firmware);
• Nu are funcţie de Copy-Paste, ceea ce poate fi chiar annoying de multe ori, însă, după zvonuri, Apple lucrează şi la asta şi e posibil să fie disponibilă funcţia asta la următoarele update-uri;
• Cea mai mare bubiţă este că nu ai acces la sistemul de fişiere, prin urmare nu poţi downloada orice tip de fişier şi nu poţi naviga printre fişierele din iPhone-ul tău. Asta este un major drawback, însă există câteva şmecherii care pot fi făcute, până când Apple rezolvă şi treaba asta (hopefully). Din fericire, aplicaţia de Mail salvează attachment-urile local, prin urmare, dacă vrei să salvezi un pdf de exemplu, ţi-l trimiţi în mail şi downloadezi attachmentul din iPhone (lame, dar asta e).

Prin urmare, există multe avantaje, dar la fel de multe bubiţe care trebuie rezolvate de Apple până când iPhone-ul va putea fi cu adevărat revoluţionar :D. Oricum, eu sunt foarte mulţumit de el şi nu-mi pare rău că am aruncat atâţia euroi la Orange :)

touchEarth Preview

FL_Earth Preview

A brief information about the two applications, touchEarth is a Nasa World Wind TUIO gestures based MT application developed in C#. It contains all the regular gestures to zoom/Rotate/tilt and pan using various 1, 2 and 3 finger gesture combinations.

FL_Earth is a Flash AS3 based application currently it only supports 1 finger inputs but 2 finger zoom and rotate are being added in.

read more | digg story

I use a MacBook Pro circa Summer 2008 with a Multi-Touch enabled trackpad.  Usually I don't find a lot of use for it, as the more complex gestures are only available in Apple Applications, such as the iLife Suite and Safari. You can find videos of the various available Multi-Touch gestures here.

Tip 1:

These gestures, besides the standard two-finger multi-directional scrolling, are not available in Firefox, but it's interesting to note that you can still use the trackpad to scroll along your tabs bar.  Simply point your cursor over the tabs bar, and swipe with two fingers in either direction to see the rest of your tabs scroll across.  (Note: this only works when you have too many tabs to be displayed in the standard display.

This is really only terribly useful if you commonly use 800,000 tabs (or more).  However, Safari is on board the Multi-Touch Train (obviously because Apple is the MTT Conductor).  You can, for instance, swipe with three fingers to go forward or backward (instead of hitting command-right or left arrow).  It's too bad you can't swap between tabs, by, for instance, swiping four fingers, or holding a function key of some sort.

Tip 2:

Enable double tapping to right click. By going to System Preferences>Keyboard & Mouse>Trackpad and enable all the options you like. Double Tapping for Right Click is useful, especially if you're like me and and you like to open multiple tabs (from RSS feeds), this can be useful, especially if you're too lazy to reach away from the Trackpad.  SImply place two fingers on the pad and tap with both.  But, it's also useful for being on the road.  Of course, if you're going to do any kind of intensive work, you probably will want to use an external mouse.

Many of these Multi-Touch gestures don't quite translate as well from the iPod/iPhone environment over to Mac notebooks, but that's all right, because it's not as necessary. In the future, I'd like to see swiping supported in multiple application environments (or better yet, system-wide) as a way to swap between windows or applications. (Three or four finger swipes-maybe even palming the trackpad?  Perhaps I'm getting too complicated, command-tab works just as well)

There are several more Multi-Touch gestures available, including ctrl + two finger scroll for zoom (system wide, literally makes everything bigger), pinch & zoom for photos and icon sizes (it will also enlarge the page when you're using Safari).

The more that you use them, the more they'll become a part of your daily repertoire of Mac usage.  I scroll with two figners very naturally now (and it's become a habit of mine to try it on non-Mac laptops.  Some have side scrollbars on their trackpads, but it's not the same.  On the Mac, the entire pad is your canvas'.  Before my Mac I was known to tap once on trackpads to click, only to find that some people don't have it turned on.  It drives me nuts).  Multi-Touch is a taste of what could be the new way to interact with your computer besides the standard keyboard + ps/2 mouse (*shudder*) setup.

Although, I really do prefer to use the mouse as little as possible-keyboard shortcuts and basic Terminal can help you get there-it's very fast, and requires little extraneous movement.  Once you've learned it, it's fairly natural.  The new Apple keyboard layout (with iTunes controls at your fingertips) is helpful for that (or you can use QuickSilver).  At any rate, anything you can do to streamline the computer process, especially on the road, is a good thing.

So, I started looking into C++, and I found several IDEs which worked on my computer and were nice to use. I grabbed a copy of C++ for Dummies (Stephen Davis, 5th edition), and started reading. It is a well written book, but not without its errors, some of which are acknowledged on the author's website errata page. I have programmed in BASIC before, so some of reading I did in the early chapters was familiar to me and easy to understand. I am chugging along in the book-haven't reached graphical object oriented programming yet, but I am getting there.

The two IDEs which I liked best were Dev-C++ (Bloodshed, recommended by Davis in C++ for Dummies) and Microsoft Visual C++ Express 2008. Both have their upsides and downsides-Dev C++ seems to be a more lightweight, easy to use environment, but Visual C++ is more polished. Anyways, I am working with both of them, but primarily Dev-C++. While the last release of this software was in 2005, this doesn't seem to be a problem for me.

Some screenshots of the two:

In the last tutorial we made a really useless example, where every time each TUIO event happened, it would print out "Something left the table", "Something moved on the table", or "Something was placed on the table".  We are going to further extend this program to print out where it happened.

So, get started by firing up your editor and opening hellomt.py.  If you are particularly fond of your first program, you can copy it and name it hellomt2.py, or whatever you want for that matter.  No explanation of this program is needed, because you wrote it:)

If you noticed, common between all three callbacks is an argument that gets passed call blobID.  blobID itself in an integer, which contains the blobID of the blob the callback is referring too.  On every print line you wrote in the last tutorial, add this to the end:

+ str(blobID)

Now cd into the directory where the program lies, and run the program:

python ./hellomt.py

Now when you touch the surface it should print "Something was placed on the surface 1".  And every time you touch that number should increase.  The blobID is the index of a list called blobs.  You access blobs through the Observer.  In this program the Observer is instantiated as 't', so you would access it as t.blobs.  t.blobs is a list of TUIO2DCursor Objects.  If you were to print t.blobs, each entry would look something like this:

<touch.Tuio2DCursor object at 0x823f36c>

If we poke around TouchPy a bit(or just pass t.blobs[blobID] through the dir() function, we can figure out that it has the following attributes:

['Height', 'Width', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__doc__', '__getattribute__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__module__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__str__', '__weakref__', '_event_stack', '_get_handlers', '_raise_dispatch_exception', 'blobID', 'dispatch_event', 'event', 'mot_accel', 'move', 'oxpos', 'oypos', 'pop_handlers', 'push_handlers', 'register_event_type', 'remove_handler', 'remove_handlers', 'set_handler', 'set_handlers', 'xmot', 'xpos', 'ymot', 'ypos']

The only ones we really care about right now are xpos and ypos.  In other tutorials we will get to more of them, such as Height, Width, xmot, ymot, and probably others as well.  So, how do we get the x and y position of a blob?  Like this:

x = t.blobs[blobID].xpos
y = t.blobs[blobID].ypos

If you understand this line then skip this paragraph.  Otherwise, if you are still unclear(like I always was when I started Python), read on.  This line accesses the List "blobs"(which is a list of TUIO2DCursor Objects, or pretty much its a list of blobs), that is inside the observer(named 't').  Because its a list, it has an index, and the index of the blob we want is blobID.  That returns a TUIO2DCursor Object, which we take the xpos attribute of.

So, to print the x and y position of each blob, lets do this:

Replace your print line in touch_up with:

x = t.blobs[blobID].xpos
y = t.blobs[blobID].ypos
print 'Touch Up at ' + str(x) + ' , ' + str(y)

Replace the print line in touch_move with:

x = t.blobs[blobID].xpos
y = t.blobs[blobID].ypos
print 'Touch Up at ' + str(x) + ' , ' + str(y)

You should be able to figure out how to do the last one(touch_down).

When you run this program, each line should look like this, substituting Touch Up for the right event:

Touch Up at 0.478175550699 , 0.86176776886

If you look at those coordinates, evidently they are not pixel locations.  To get decimal coordinates, multiply each x coordinate by the width of the screen, and each y coordinate by the height of the screen.  Because I am anticipating people reading this guide will be running many different Operating Systems, I will not show any specific way to get the screen resolution, and have people hard code their screen resolution into the program.  Make a global constant-tuple at the top of your program(anywhere before the callbacks is fine) with your screen dimensions.  Mine looks like this:

screen_dimensions = (1280, 800)

Then in your callbacks on the lines that you calculate the X value, add this to the end:

*screen_dimensions[0]

Which is simply, multiply by the screens X dimensions.  Do the same for the Y calculations, except multiply by the Height of the screen.  Run your program, and observe the output.

Each line should look like this, substituting the correct event:

Touch Up at 832.000045776 , 49.9999940395

Now you have More accurate pixel coordinates, but you can't really put a dot half-way through a Pixel.  Solve this by int-rounding each calculation.  int-rounding is the name I made up for the process of rounding to the nearest whole floating number, then making this an integer.  You do this by passing your calculation through int(round()).  The X calculation would look like this:

x = int(round(t.blobs[blobID].xpos*screen_dimensions[0]))

Do this to all of the calculations, both x and y.  Now running your program should yield results similar to these, substituting the correct event:

Touch Up at 922 , 492

Congratulations!  You can now get X and Y position of events! In the next tutorial we will write a small program using Clutter to draw circles over all the blobs.

These tutorials assume basic knowledge of Python, and at times may use some obscure feature of the Standard Library.  If you have any questions regarding something you don't understand, or anything else about Python Development and such, feel free to email me at xelapond @ gmail . com, or PM me on nuigroup(username xelapond).  I also usually hang around IRC, #nuigroup, username xelapond.  I am happy to assist you with any problems you are having, and I would love feedback on how well this tutorial goes.

NOTE:  A lot of this is going to change soon with the release of Python-Lux.  Lux is a multimedia framework tuned for Multi-Touch Multi-Model interactions.  Once it is released you will not need to use the TouchPy callbacks for 90% of apps.  They are still nice to know though, for any application you don't intend on using Python-Lux for.

NOTE 2:  Wordpress appears to have killed the indentation on the code snippets.  In your code, follow standard Python tabbing and you should be fine.

This guide assume you have the following:

• Working TUIO Source(TUIO Sim, Touchlib, tbeta)
• A working TouchPy installation.  Though there are many great TUIO parsers for Python out there, my favorite is TouchPy.  I think it is the most capable, and easiest to use in a client application.  It requires no knowledge of how TUIO works.
• Python 2.5.2(I Haven't tested it with any other version, let me know if it works)

This guide was written from a GNU/Linux Standpoint, but most(if not all) if the code should work on Mac OS X or Windows.  I do not know if it is possible to install liblo(needed for TouchPy) on Windows, so if you managed to do it please let me know how:)

So, lets get started!

cd(or use a GUI if you like) into your TouchPy directory.  If you deleted it after you installed, no big deal, just check it out again.  If you do have one laying around, make sure it is svn revision 65 or later.  Copy(not move) the skeleton.py file to wherever you would like to keep your Multi-Touch programs.  I usually put programs I write as the result of a tutorial in ~/Programming/Practice.  But that is a matter of personal preference, it doesn't matter where you put it.  Name it hellomt.py.

So, looking at this file, what do we see.

#! /usr/bin/python -u
'''
This is a Skeleton file.  It provides a
template to be used when writing a new
TouchPy application.
'''

from touch import *

class Observer(object):
def __init__(self, subject):
subject.push_handlers(self)

class touch_up(Observer):
def TOUCH_UP(self,blobID, xpos, ypos):
#Do something here

class touch_down(Observer):
def TOUCH_DOWN(self,blobID):
#Do something here

class touch_move(Observer):
def TOUCH_MOVE(self,blobID):
#Do something here

t = touchpy()
tu = touch_up(t)
td = touch_down(t)
tm = touch_move(t)

try:
while True:
t.update()

except (KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit):
del t

Some of this should already make sense to you, but I am going to explain it line by line anyway.

from touch import *

Imports the entire TouchPy library into the local namespace.

class Observer(object):
def __init__(self, subject):
subject.push_handlers(self)

You can safely ignore this for now.  We will get to it in later tutorials.

class touch_up(Observer):
def TOUCH_UP(self,blobID, xpos, ypos):
#Do something here

This is the code that will run when a blob is "upped", or removed from the surface.

class touch_down(Observer):
def TOUCH_DOWN(self,blobID):
#Do something here

This is the code when a blob is "downed", or placed on the surface.

class touch_move(Observer):
def TOUCH_MOVE(self,blobID):
#Do something here

This is the code that is run when a blob is moved.

t = touchpy()
tu = touch_up(t)
td = touch_down(t)
tm = touch_move(t)

This code is there so that with one command(t.update()) you can dispatch any changes in blobs to the appropriate callbacks.  It will be explained in more detail in later parts of the tutorial.

try:
while True:
t.update()

except (KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit):
del t

This code pretty much says, "While the program is running, keep tracking and reporting blob data.  Otherwise, delete everything and exit".  There are many different ways to do this same chunk of code, and in later parts we will change this to a gobject.timeout, and many other scheduling techniques.

Now that you [hopefully] understand at least some of the TouchPy front end, lets get coding!

In the touch_up callback, delete the comment and add:

print 'Something Left the Table!'

in the touch_move callback, delete the comment and add:

print 'Something Moved on the Table!'

and in the touch_down callback, delete the commend and add:

print 'Something was Placed on the Table!'

Now open your TUIO source(Touchlib, TUIO Sim).  Open a terminal, cd into the directory with hellomt.py, and run:

python ./hellomt.py

Then touch the surface.  If all goes well it should display each message when each event happens.  If IPv6 is enabled on your liblo installation, then it may take a few seconds to start up.  Give it at least 15 seconds before deciding it doesn't work.

Assuming all went well, now you have written your first Multi-Touch application in Python!  Its not terribly useful, but its a great basis for more useful apps.  In the next tutorial(probably going to be posted tomorrow), we will get into blobIDs and coordinates of where touch events occur, then write a program using Clutter to draw circles on each point.

There are the 10mW 780nm Lasers from Aixiz.

Truly,
Mr. Echo

1) Bateria tine putin. Ei bine, normal ca tine putin daca nu stii sa economisesti. Daca tii toate chestiile deschise, asculti si muzica si intri si pe internet, se duce in cateva ore. Dar daca inchizi GPS-ul, 3G-ul, bluetooth-ul cand nu ai nevoie de ele si deschizi display light management, o sa tina bateria mult mai mult. Asa ca, economiseste inteligent daca vrei sa nu se duca bateria .... Cei de la Cnet au facut cateva teste. Va voi prezenta rezultatele cu 3G si Wireless dezactivate: muzica: 31,4 h, video: 3.5, vorbit la telefon: 8.1 ore normal, 5.3 prin 3G. Cu 3G si Wireless, rezultatele sunt mult mai mici.

2) Nu are Java, si Flash. Java? La ce iti trebuie Java la iPhone? La telefoanele obisnuite, Java folosea doar la rularea unor programe si jocuri luate de pe internet, si bagate in telefon. la iPhone, toate aplicatiile vin de la AppStore, si nu necesita Java. Asa ca de ce ar mai baga Java? Are doar JavaScript la internet. Cat despre Flash, desi nu este integrat inca, mai mult ca sigur va fi disponibil cu urmatoarele update-uri de soft.

3) Memoria nu poate fi marita, adica nu exista slot de card. Raspunsul meu? Cat de zgarcit poti sa fii?!!? 8 GB nu sunt de ajuns? 16GB NU SUNT DE AJUNS? Sa fim seriosi, majoritatea telefoanelor din ziua de azi au maxim 4GB asa ca 8GB sunt mai mult decat de ajuns.

4) Camera este de doar 2MP, si nu exista inregistrare video. Recunosc, 2MP nu e asa mult, insa calitatea pozelor este foarte buna. Despre inregistrarea video, probabil stiti si voi ca niciun telefon nu inregistreaza bine filme.

5) Nu are tastatura fizica(butoane adica). Nici nu comentez asta in detaliu. iPhone-ul in sine este definit de ecranul MARE cu multi-touch. O tastatura fizica ar fi facut telefonul banal.

6) Nu are copy-paste. Asa o fi, insa probabil va fi disponibil la urmatoarele update-uri de soft. Daca nu va fi, obisnuiti-va, nu mai fiti asa lenesi, lol.

7) Nu are stereo prin bluetooth. Adica, atunci cand folosesti un handsfree wireless, prin bluetooth, nu ai sunet stereo. Si ce? Daca vrei muzica, folosesti naibii castile se aude mult mai bine iar daca vorbesti cu cineva, de ce vrei sa il auzi stereo?

8) Nu are MMS. Si? Cine foloseste MMS. E prea scump si inutil.

9) GPS-ul nu ofera directii "turn-by-turn". Adica, desi are GPS, si poti sa te iei dupa el ca sa ajungi undeva, nu iti ofera indicatii la fiecare strada, ca un gadget GPS adevarat. Oameni buni, este totusi doar un telefon. Folositi GPS-ul care il are, e destul de avansat, nu fiti asa fitosi.

10) Nu poti sa trimiti un SMS mai departe. Il scrii iar si rezolvi problema.

I bought it this morning, only to arrive home and find out the bulb works!  I don't know how much longer it will last, so I am going to wait until I am ready to mount it in my table to play with it(excluding the image warping).

A while ago I saw that openFrameworks demo where he uses openGl shaders to warp a playing video onto a white board.  I could not find the code anywhere, so I used "The GIMP" to Perspective Transform an image.  I achieved the same effect, and was able to get a picture of the earth onto a piece of paper.  Video below:

da Folha Online, fonte no fim do post:

As telas sensíveis ao toque, queridinhas do mundo tecnológico e apontadas como sucessoras do mouse, têm causado problemas nas transmissões da Olimpíada na Globo. A emissora usa o recurso para mostrar dados de atletas e a programação dos jogos, mas é comum a tela "dar pau" e não responder aos comandos do apresentador.

Segundo a Globo, a tela "multi-touch" foi utilizada pela primeira vez em uma edição do "Fantástico" no dia 3 de agosto, antes do início da Olimpíada. Pelo sistema, é possível ampliar, diminuir e girar imagens na tela --várias pessoas podem fazer isso ao mesmo tempo. O apresentador também pode escrever sobre a tela.

A mesma tecnologia é utilizada pela rede de televisão norte-americana CNN no noticiário sobre as eleições nos Estados Unidos. O sistema foi desenvolvido pela empresa Perceptive Pixel, de Jeff Han.

A expectativa é que outros programas da Globo passem a utilizar telões com telas sensíveis ao toque. A emissora carioca afirma que incidentes como esse são previsíveis em transmissões ao vivo. Segundo a Globo, os problemas técnicos não chamaram a atenção do telespectador.

Apontadas como um dos principais fatores de sucesso do iPhone, as telas sensíveis ao toque se disseminam para outras áreas. Há rumores de que a Apple vá levar a tecnologia para os laptops. E a Microsoft já anunciou que seu próximo sistema operacional, chamado internamente de Windows 7, terá interface sensível ao toque, contando com sistema "multi-touch".

Fonte: Folha Online - http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/informatica/ult124u435347.shtml ]]> http://magicseby.wordpress.com/?p=376 Sun, 17 Aug 2008 11:20:53 +0000 magicsebi http://magicseby.wordpress.com/?p=376 Partea a doua a acestui post.

Sa enumeram pe scurt primele avantaje ale iphone-ului: iPod de dimensiuni decente-8GB, 16GB (in viitor 32); Internet Wireless, GPS, aplicatii multe. Sa vedem acum si alte avantaje si chestii pe care le are iPhone-ul.

Desigur ca pe langa celelalte chestii, e si un telefon foarte bun. Nu are MMS, dar nu cunosc pe nimeni care foloseste aceasta functie. In schimb poti vedea toate sms-urile date si primite de la o persoana, in timp ce scrii noul SMS. Aceste mesaje apar in bule de dialog, ca cele din benzile desenate. Cand vorbesti la telefon, si pui telefonul la ureche un senzor de proximitate inchide ecranul pentru a economisi bateria. De asemenea calitatea sunetului vocii este superioara, mai ales cand vorbesti cu cineva care are tot iPhone. Se pare ca datorita touch screenului, puteti sa scrieti voi ce litere vreti, atata timp cat exista, astfel ca veti putea sa scrieti in limba voastra materna, cu litere chinezesti, japoneze si probabil ca are si diacritice d-ale noastre (nu prea cred, lol).

Aplicatii ale telefonului foarte utile. Acestea sunt cateva aplicatii care le primesti odata cu telefonul - Bursa, Meteo, Calculator, calendar. Calculatorul poate fi transformat din unul clasic intr-unul stiintific, prin simpla intoarcere a iPhone-ului la 90 de grade. Calendarului ii puteti adauga tot felul de evenimente, intalniri, zile de nastere, acesta devenind o agenda de lucru.

iPhone-ul are o camera integrata de 2.0 megapixeli. Din pacate nu are setari pentru ea, insa are functie de "geotagging". Ce inseamna asta? Pai, cand mergeti la munte de exemplu, activati GPS-ul, iar atunci cand faceti poze, iPhone-ul retine imediat si locatia unde a fost facuta poza. Astfel stiti exact de unde e poza si nu va mai incurcati.

Tot GPS-ul de la iPhone poate fi folosit si ca un aparat GPS real, datorita functiei de harti, si a functiei care va da informatii despre trafic.

Cateva lucruri Hi-Tech ale iPhone-ului: GPS, 3G (viteza mare adica, de pana la 1,7Mb/s), Multi-Touch, Accelerometru, Senzori de lumina si de proximitate.

iPhone-ul va fi lansat pe 22 august de Orange in 6 magazine, si ulterior in toata tara. Pretul este inca necunoscut, urmand a fi anuntat oficial curand. Estimez ca va fi maxim 300 EUR pt cel 3G de 8GB.