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The iOS platform, consisting of the iPhone and the iPad, has seen most of it’s success thanks to the plethora of applications (apps) available for download. It is without a doubt the platform’s strongest asset and one that, thanks to the continued success of apps like Angry Birds, seems likely to continue for some time. While a lot of time on these devices is spent listening to music, browsing the web, reading e-mails and, let’s face it, playing games I wanted to write up a quick post about some of the other apps that I use on a regular basis. These small, often single purpose, programs make my life easier in their unique way and keep me connected no matter where I am. The following is a list of apps, ordered by how often I use them, that I am currently making heavy use of on my iPhone.

10. VLC

The iOS media player can play a large number of audio and video formats. Unfortunately there are still a few obscure formats, and some that Apple just doesn’t like, that won’t work. This is where VLC comes in. Like the desktop counterpart, VLC lets the device play almost every file type imaginable, from MKV to OGG. It even integrates into the e-mail client letting me view attachments that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. The only drawback is the ridiculous way you have to add media to the VLC library. Sadly this is on Apple’s side of the equation and I doubt we’ll see this changed anytime soon.

Do I have to read a manual first too?

9. IMDb

The Internet Movie Database is an awesome website that tracks almost ever detail of a movie’s production (from actors to directors and more). This app is the iOS version of their website (they actually block you from using the proper website on your device). Thankfully this is also one of the most well designed and easy to use apps I have ever seen. Need to find the name of that actress? No problem. Want to know what else she’s been in? Super simple. This app is a staple that everyone should have installed.

It even gives you movie news and showtimes

8. Corus Radio

There are a number of streaming radio apps available for download from Shoutcast! to those specific to a certain radio station. Corus Radio is one such application. It makes it easy to listen to any of the Corus owned radio stations all from within a single app. From a design perspective this is not a very good app, but its no frills approach makes it sufficient for me when I want to catch the early morning Dean Blundell Show.

No frills but it does the job

7. Convert Units

Have you ever been reading a recipe or following directions and had to convert between oz and mL or lbs and kg? Enter Convert Units. This super handy application lets you easily convert between all sorts of different units for all kinds of situations

Did you know 1 beer = 0.355L?

Convert Units works in all sorts of different situations

6. Netflix

With the recent release of Netflix in Canada I am suddenly able to try out this service from the comfort of my… phone. OK so maybe it’s not the best way to watch movies but it’s still really cool. There isn’t much to really say about this beyond the fact that this is yet another excellent Netflix experience.

I wonder how much data a movie uses over 3G

5. Facebook

Ah Facebook. Whatever your feelings are about this privacy eroding service that enables complete publication of your life you to keep in touch with friends and family, Facebook (the app) is a prime example of how an iOS program should work. It is so simple and feature rich (a rare combination) that I actually prefer it to the full website.

Even better than their excellent mobile site

4. Newsy

Newsy is an interesting app, actually more of a front end to their website, that combines various perspectives of a newsworthy event from different TV news shows, blogs and radio commentators. Their tag-line is “Multiple sources. The real story.” and one that I believe they live up to. If you are looking for a more or less non-bias summary of something in the news I would highly recommend checking out Newsy.

Top stories of the day (videos and transcripts)

3. TweetDeck

There are literally dozens, maybe even hundreds, of Twitter clients for iOS but none are as fully featured (in my opinion at least) as TweetDeck. Taking a cue from their desktop version, this client displays all of the information in a series of columns that you can swipe back and forth to cycle through.

Everything is split up into customizable columns

If you do use the desktop version as well it will automatically sync things between them so you don’t have to constantly update both independently. My only complaints have to do with the lack of real multitasking and the crash happy nature of the in-application browser. Honestly I don’t know how they did it… but they took the perfectly stable browser component and broke it.

2. PingChat!

PingChat! has the dubious honour of being one of the only remaining cross-platform instant messengers in the vein of BlackBerry Messenger. This means that from your iOS device can talk to your friend on an Android device or even on a BlackBerry.

PingChat! also supports group chat

Like BBM, PingChat! shows you when the other party has received a message and runs over the data network, thus saving you from text messaging fees. Another nice feature is the ability to send pictures, video, audio, contact information and more.

The send contact feature is especially useful for quickly sharing information

I highly recommend this application, and not just because the guys behind it are local

1. IM+

iOS has a slew of instant messenger applications but I prefer IM+ to all of the other ones that I’ve tried. A slick interface, tons of features, and a quick update cycle means that this app is constantly improving.

Trust me, it looks better without all of the censorship

You can send pictures, audio, and videos to your contacts, talk on all different types of services (MSN, AOL, etc.) and even configure it to stay logged in on their servers so that (even with the application closed) you get Push notifications when someone messages you. Overall it offers a solid experience that is only getting better and better.

Honourable Mention

Epic has recently released a tech demo called Citadel showcasing the Unreal Engine running on iOS. This is by far the best example of what the iPhone/iPad hardware is capable of in terms of delivering absolutely stunning graphics. Sadly that’s all it is, a tech demo. Hopefully we will see this technology used more often going forward.

Very gorgeous graphics

Windows?? *GASP!*

Sometimes you just have to compile Windows programs from the comfort of your Linux install. This is a relatively simple process that basically requires you to only install the following (Ubuntu) packages:

To compile 32-bit programs

• mingw32 (swap out for gcc-mingw32 if you need 64-bit support)
• mingw32-binutils
• mingw32-runtime

Additionally for 64-bit programs (*PLEASE SEE NOTE)

• mingw-w64
• gcc-mingw32

Once you have those packages you just need to swap out “gcc” in your normal compile commands with either “i586-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 32-bit) or “amd64-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 64-bit). So for example if we take the following hello world program in C

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
printf(“Hello world!\n”);
return 0;
}

we can compile it to a 32-bit Windows program by using something similar to the following command (assuming the code is contained within a file called main.c)

i586-mingw32msvc-gcc -Wall “main.c” -o “Program.exe”

You can even compile Win32 GUI programs as well. Take the following code as an example

#include <windows.h>
int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
char *msg = “The message box’s message!”;
MessageBox(NULL, msg, “MsgBox Title”, MB_OK | MB_ICONINFORMATION);

return 0;
}

this time I’ll compile it into a 64-bit Windows application using

amd64-mingw32msvc-gcc -Wall -mwindows “main.c” -o “Program.exe”

You can even test to make sure it worked properly by running the program through wine like

wine Program.exe

You might need to install some extra packages to get Wine to run 64-bit applications but in general this will work.

That’s pretty much it. You might have a couple of other issues (like linking against Windows libraries instead of the Linux ones) but overall this is a very simple drop-in replacement for your regular gcc command.

*NOTE: There is currently a problem with the Lucid packages for the 64-bit compilers. As a work around you can get the packages from this PPA instead.

It’s no secret that while Java possess probably the most widely distributed, cross-platform, and common user interface libraries, graphical Java applications on the whole simply stand out for the wrong reasons. Whether the GUI comes in the form of the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) or Swing, each can be far from pretty and often do not mesh well with the platform they are being run on. For instance, running an AWT or Swing application can be an almost alien experience, no matter what operating system you are using, because neither uses the native control widgets. Even AWT, being a ‘thin’ layer above the native controls, often looks completely bizarre. On Windows Vista AWT looks more like Windows 3.1 than anything else. Thankfully there is a nice alternative in the IBM created (and now Eclipse maintained) SWT.

The Standard Widget Toolkit, or SWT, passes all GUI rendering responsibilities onto the host operating system. This allows for some interesting advantages like hardware rendered drawing for free (as an example). It also provides for a native look and feel because its actually using the real native widgets. So when run on Windows it looks like a regular Windows application and when run on Linux it looks like a Linux (GTK+) application. It also works on the Mac as well as a few other obscure platforms.

Unfortunately because the application is now creating widgets outside of the JVM you are suddenly responsible for freeing the memory. There is no automatic garbage collection in the world of SWT. It’s not all bad however as freeing a parent object, like a window (referred to as a shell in SWT lingo), automatically frees all of its related child objects as well. Simply call the .dispose() method and 9 times out of 10 you are done.

Another other caveat is that you will still need to package the correct swt.jar file for your target platform. For instance Windows has its own version of swt.jar, as does Linux, and Mac, and so on and so forth. While this is rather annoying it does offer some interesting trade-offs. For instance you do not need to recompile your code just because you want to run it on a different platform; simply swap out the swt.jar file and watch as the exact same code generates completely different native GUIs. I even wrote a simple program that first checks what platform it is being run on and then downloads the correct swt.jar file before launching the GUI. This makes releasing the exact same package very simple.

So how do you start using SWT? Head over to http://www.eclipse.org/swt/ and download the newest stable version for your platform of choice. Depending on how you will be programing, all you have to then do is add the enclosed swt.jar to your class path. If you’re using Eclipse, or a similar IDE, you can simply add the source as either part of you project, or as a separate referenced one, and take full advantage of the auto-complete as well. Perhaps I’ll get around to posting a more thorough how-to guide at some point in the future.

Like most things in software SWT is not perfect. There are still other challenges to overcome, such as creating each individual platforms’ unique user experience to compliment their native GUI toolkits. That said if you’re looking for a way to leverage the widespread nature of Java, while still creating an application that looks like it belongs, SWT might just be what you’re looking for.

There has been far too much iPhone related news lately but I feel as though I should at least weigh in with my thoughts on the new iPhone OS. I have been running iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS since it was officially released about a week ago. Rather than write a lengthy review I figured I would simply add my short comments about the major new features. This should, hopefully, result in a very quick and informative review.

Multitasking

This is the big new feature and honestly the one that you’ll forget about the quickest. What do I mean by this? The multitasking implementation in iOS 4 is so seamless that the new double-tap on the home button paradigm works far better as a quick app switcher than as a task manager. Don’t read this as a negative however; all user interfaces should strive to do as good of a job at ‘hiding’ such a fundamental change to the OS by building it into a user-centric design. Do all the apps on my phone multitask? Heck no, but I couldn’t even tell you which do and which don’t and that right there is the real genius behind this design.

Folders

Far from perfect, folders are a welcome change to the iPhone experience. I was able to cut down the number of app screens on my device from about 10 to only 2. My only real complaint about folders is the fixed limit to the number of apps you can put in each, a maximum of 12 per folder. I would almost prefer to have the option to put all of my games in a single folder and then scroll through them as a list instead.

Wallpaper

The background wallpaper is a nice addition. It’s obviously nothing groundbreaking but it does add a nice personalized feel to the phone. This ‘feature’ will not work on the older 3G model because of the slower hardware. If that statement sounds ridiculous to you then you obviously haven’t played with the update enough to notice the new animations. iOS 4 literally vomits animation at you every chance it gets.

Mail

By far the best part of the upgrade, mail saw the addition of a unified inbox (where all of your accounts can filter into one place) and e-mail threading. I have four e-mail accounts on my device and switching between their individual inboxes was always a pain. But now with the unified inbox I can quickly get all of my updates and respond to all of the messages very quickly. Threaded e-mail is also awesome and is something sorely missing from many other phones and even desktop clients. Once you start using a threaded e-mail client, like Gmail or Thunderbird, it is very hard to go back to the old way of doing things. Now I don’t have to! I only encountered one issue with the new mail app. The first time I ran the app it seemed liked it was indexing all my stored mail which really slowed the app down. Since then however it works like a charm.

Photo and Camera

On an unrelated note I REALLY need to clean my phone's camera lens

There is now a 5x digital zoom for the camera which is so easy to operate a child could use it. Simply tap on the screen and the control appears as a slider at the bottom. Sliding it to the right zooms in, to the left zooms out. Simple, easy, elegant. It’s just a shame that digital zoom sucks too much to be really useful.

Adding focus to the video camera is also nice but this feature might be put to better use on the new iPhone 4G hardware where the video camera is actually worth using.

A new tab for a geo-tagged map overlay has also been added to the photo app which will show you where you took each picture. It’s neat but not really something I think I’ll be using often.

iPod

The iPod app user interface got a bit of an overhaul and it now shows more information in a much more streamlined and effective way. It also lets you manage playlists (beyond the simple ‘on-the-go’ ones) right on the device itself. Music playback has always been one of the great strengths of this platform and its nice to see Apple hasn’t forgotten where their success has come from.

Others

E-mail attachments can now be set up to be opened by any application, third-party or otherwise. This should make the e-mail experience far more flexible and help enterprise deployments open home-grown data sources. I’m also hoping to see a PGP application take advantage of this soon.

Calendar has had a couple of improvements but the biggest change is the addition of full support for .ics calendar entries. This has been a missing feature from day one and it is nice to see that the ability is finally here.

iBooks has been added the the iPhone which should help people who want to read a page or two on the bus to school or work. Other than that I just don’t see this as such a big deal. Afterall who would want to read a whole book on a device as small as a phone?

In both Spotlight (the device wide search) and Safari Wikipedia and your selected search engine will offer suggestions for what you are trying to find. While this feature is nice it does slow down the search results slightly as it tries to retrieve suggestions from the web in real time. If it becomes too annoying you can turn it off.

iOS 4 also brought some much needed security improvements including the option for a full text password (no longer just a 4-digit one) and full device encryption. Again this is a feature that was missing since the launch of the iPhone for no really good reason.

Spellcheck has also been added which offers some nice suggestions when the auto-complete isn’t quite sure what you meant to type. It works in a similar way to copy & paste which makes it instantly accessible to anyone used to the phone.

A slew of enterprise features were added as well but seeing as I’m not in charge of any enterprise deployments most of these additions were lost on me.

Overall

Overall the iOS 4 feels faster in general but not without some slowdown in specific cases, such as mail above. Even with these oddities the update allows you to be much more productive than ever before and so on the whole it is still faster in almost every practical use case. As a computer science graduate I am far more interested in the addition of APIs and tweaks under the hood and from everything I have read or experienced it all looks very good.

Conclusion

The iOS 4, while not completely revolutionary in any way, is a strong evolutionary upgrade and well worth your time. Just be warned that if you are upgrading your 3G it may take a while.

Update size: 378MiB
Time to install: about 10 minutes to update + phone restart + 10KiB carrier update + phone backup ~= 15 minutes total

As a long time Windows user I have had my fair share of dull, gray toolbars, buttons and controls. Prior to Windows Vista, Microsoft’s first real attempt to pretty up the system – sorry XP, making the taskbar blue just doesn’t cut it – I even looked to Mac OSX with some jealousy.

Flash forward to The Linux Experiment and I have been introduced to a whole new set of environment graphics. Some of them are quite beautiful and some are just… plain ugly. On the plus side, the nice thing about Linux is it’s ability to customize just about every detail, including how my desktop looks. But is there really any excuse for some of the horrible themes, colour choices (*cough* Ubuntu *cough*), and graphics that are still present in Linux today? Surely there are some artists out there in the open source community that could be let loose on these problems? Come on people, I know you can do better!

With some ‘leaked’ information about Microsoft’s plan to include brand new IA-128 computer processor architecture in their next version of Windows (8 & 9) it got me thinking about the need for 128-bit CPUs. What’s the point?

Memory Addressing

This is often cited as the reason for needing to increase the number of bits in a CPU. With a 32bit register you can address approximately 2^32 bytes of RAM, or about 4GiB system wide. Windows itself imposes a limit of 2GiB of RAM for user processes and about 3.12GiB for total RAM, which is why there is a such a push to 64bit architecture. 64bit versions of Windows allow you to address far more memory. Except, this isn’t really true.

Physical Address Extension

PAE is an old technique used to address more memory than you should be able to, up to 64GiB on 32bit CPUs. It is similar to bank switching in that it uses the addressing register to split up your total memory into different banks of space which it can then switch into allowing you to access the full memory. There are a number of reasons why this is efficient and safe, and in fact Windows already does it. This is why the 32bit version of Windows server can address a full 4GiB of RAM even though the 32bit consumer version cannot. Well actually you can force it to do that as well.

How much memory do you really need?

Let’s assume that 32bit architecture, without PAE, only lets you access half of what it should be able to, 2GiB of RAM. That means that the maximum amount of RAM you could access in a 64bit architecture would be (2^64 / 2). This equates to 8,388,608 TiB of RAM that you would still be able to access. Most computers being sold today come equipped with 2GiB of RAM total, or 2.3*(10^-10) % of just half of the total addressing space allowed for with 64bit architecture.

Speed improvements

The next argument for increasing the bit size of the architecture is to get speed improvements. By increasing the length of every register you no long have to straddle registers when you are dealing with large numbers. For example, if you are doing math using a 64bit number on a 32bit CPU you will need to use two registers to fit the whole number. On a 64bit CPU you just need one, thus freeing up the second register for something else.

Certainly moving to 128bit CPUs will also improve speeds? Well… sort of. You see a lot of the large number math instructions that a CPU can do already make use of specialized 128bit registers inside of existing 32bit CPUs. I highly doubt there will be a large need for 256bit data types moving forward (super big long unsigned int?), so most of the real speed improvements you will see on a 128bit CPU will be when you are using 128bit numbers.

Another issue is existing software. The vast majority of software currently available are 32bit programs, meaning that they will see very little speed increases on 64bit or 128bit CPUs. In fact 64bit software is only now starting to become common place, with many applications still lacking true 64bit support.

Yes, 128bit registers will be beneficial for some computations such as encryption (128bit-256bit keys) and hash algorithms (some of the SHA-3 candidates keep an internal state of 512-1024bits) but so will the addition of specific instruction sets to make use of the existing hardware.

Progress moves forward

I don’t mean to rain on the 128bit architecture parade, I just merely mean to point out that what has been said so far about it really isn’t that different from what we already have. One day I do expect 128bit CPUs to replace 64bit ones, just as they are now slowly replacing 32bit CPUs. In the mean time I would much rather have additional registers or more hardware functionality because they will actually be taken advantage of.

I just finished up a quick post over on The Linux Experiment about how to share one keyboard and mouse among multiple computers using software, in this case a Windows Vista desktop and a Fedora 11 laptop.

Check it out here: Setting up some Synergy

Some friends and I have decided to give Linux a run for its money. Most of us are experienced Window’s users so we figured making the transition to Linux would be 1) a good thing for the resumé and 2) a pretty easy switch. Boy were we ever wrong about #2… #1 is still debatable

The basic premise is this:

1. Is Linux really a practical desktop computer for the masses?
2. Can someone really make the switch from the far more popular proprietary operating systems and applications to the free and open source alternatives?

The experiment is govern more or less by the following two rules:

1. You must use Linux as your primary computing platform for 4 months
2. You cannot use a distribution of Linux that you are familiar with or have used in the past

Follow us through the highs and lows of getting everything working just right, as we learn new things, and share our user experiences!

www.thelinuxexperiment.com