If you didn’t know, iCloud has a really neat feature that allows it to act just like dropbox. If you activate the “Document & Data” synching option in the iCloud pref panel, it allows you to sync any file using iCloud. This is contrary to what Apple is selling the service as being just for “Custom” Apps that have the iCloud feature (i.e.: keynote, numbers, etc.).

So here is how you take advantage of this. Once you’ve turned on the feature in the preferences panel, you open up Finder. Hold down the “option/alt” key and from the finder menus choose “Go/Library“. This should land you in your not so secret Library directory. You need to hold down the option key to see this, since OSX Lion hides the users Library directory by default. Now in the Finder window find the “Mobile Documents” folder (and if you like) drag it to the favourites list in Finder (in the left pane). Done. Now whatever file you save into “Mobile Documents” folder from any application will “sync” with all the other mac’s you’ve setup with this feature. You can treat it like your “free” 5GB dropbox account.

Yep, it works. I was kinda disappointed when firmware 4.3 was introduced and the 3GS owners were left in the cold as far as wifi hotspot sharing. Apple only activated that function on the iphone 4. Anyhow, after messing around with the menus a bit tonite, I figured out how to do something similar to wifi tethering (hotspot) of ipad to the iphone 3GS using bluetooth. Here is how you do it:

1. Turn wifi off on your 3GS and ipad device. I’m testing from home so I wanted to make sure I was NOT using wifi.
2. Turn on Bluetooth on both your 3GS and ipad device. This is under Settings/General
3. On the iphone 3GS turn on “Personal Hotspot”.
4. On the ipad go back to the Bluetooth menu and let it scan for a second. You’ll find a Entry for your iPhone soon. Click on the entry and connect.
5. You’ll be prompted on the iphone and the ipad to make sure you see the same code. Just say Okay/Yes.
6. Viola, you’re tethering your ipad to your iphone 3GS using bluetooth. You should see a Blue throbbing menu bar on top of your iphone 3GS saying “Personal Hotspot: 1 Connection”.

To stop turn Personal Hotspot off on the iphone. If you need to connect again, turn Personal Hotspot on (assuming BT is on already) and click on the iPhone entry in the Bluetooth menu on your ipad.

N.B. The iphone can also “share” it’s wifi connection with the ipad using bluetooth. Neato . Oh and that GPS location transfer thing that people are talking about using wifi tethering doesn’t seem to work when using BT…..Oh well, small price to pay.

UPDATE: After a bit of testing here are some numbers. These were done around midnight on Rogers/Fido Network through bluetooth (iphone 3GS on 3G):

• Ping: ~320ms
• Download: 1.53 Mbps
• Upload: 0.23 Mbps

Not bad for bluetooth I guess.

Yep, just like the title says, hauppauge has announced the Broadway, a new “set-top” aimed at iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users. The hardware streams live OTA HDTV to an Apple handheld after first compressing the video using H.264. The resulting media can be delivered locally over Wi-Fi, or to a remote place using any Internet connection. Over-The-Air ATSC signals can be captured using a built-in ATSC tuner, while cable is supported through clear QAM. Pricing is a bit steep at $199 and the box is scheduled for February release.

These were taken a while back, before I moved to the new house. I thought it might be a good visual review of the Hipstamatic and Lo-Mob Apps for the iPhone. Ofcourse there are literally a bazillion combinations of effects between these two apps. The complete set  is on flickr.

Well here it is…..screenshot of page 13 of HTC Droid Eris manual. Looks like Apple got the shaft this time. I guess it was about time .

Well looks like someone had a lot of time on their hands in Taiwan. Really funny though, specially the final solution to the antennagate problem.

Yep, finally, someone is thinking in the Museum of London. They’ve just released their iPhone App Streetmuseum. Through it’s AR interface you can travel back in time and see London as it used to be. Hundreds of images from the Museum of London’s extensive collections showcase both everyday and momentous occasions in London’s history, from the Great Fire of 1666 to the swinging sixties.

Select a destination from the London map or use your GPS to locate an image near you. Hold your camera up to the present day street scene and see the same London location appears on your screen, offering you a window through time. Want to know more? Simply tap the information button for historical facts.

Below are some of the comments from U.K. iTunes users:

What a great app for anyone with an interest in the history of London. A must have for locals and tourists alike. Rediculously simple yet superbly well concieved, devised and executed. Let’s see this one grow with theamed categories like the 1888 whitechapel murders, the blitz, QEII coronation &1977/2007 jubilee parties etc.

Great interface between Google maps and historic photographs and drawings from the Museum of London collections. Your iphone becomes a window onto the past, the Blitz photographs are particularly evocative. Released as a taster for the Museum’s new galleries of Modern London opening on the 28th May 2010, if the app is anything to go by these new galleries are going to be superb. If you are London resident or a City worker get this app, and then go immerse yourself in a particularly good history museum.

Sounds like I need to take a trip to London…oh and a fake U.K. iTunes account .

In this guide I’ll show you how to stream live HDV/DV video to your iphone using a linux box (Ubuntu 9.10) with firewire input running vlc/ffmpeg and a Imac with OSX 10.6.2 running mediastreamsegmenter and apache2.

Start out with the iPhone streaming media overview. Without understanding this document you’ll have a hard time getting things working.

First things first, you need to have a working Ubuntu 9.10 machine. I’m using a small footprint 2.4Ghz Core2Duo machine with PCI firewire 400 card in it. For video input I’m using a Canon HV30 set to HDV mode (1080i/60) connected via firewire.

Next you need to follow the instructions on this page (steps 0-5) to get a working ffmpeg with x264 and aac encoding. Without this working you’re not going anywhere….sorry. If you’re trying this on a different Ubuntu installation follow the other links to get a working ffmpeg setup.

Then install vlc using “sudo apt-get install vlc“. I used vlc as my encoder frontend as I understand it better than ffmpeg. You can use just straight ffmpeg as well if you can figure out how to get it to encode the live HDV stream over firewire.

You’ll also need dvgrab utility. Install it using “sudo apt-get install dvgrab“.

Now we want to make sure the internal firewire module is working so type this command and see if you get a vlc window with the camera output in it (make sure you turn the camera ON and hook it up first).
sudo dvgrab -f hdv -noavc -nostop -|vlc -
You have to use sudo under ubuntu to get proper access to the firewire device. The above command runs dvgrab with hdv format and makes sure that 1394 AV/Device control is turned off (this way you can be in Camera mode and get a live feed). The nostop switch prevents dvgrab from sending stop commands to the camera everytime you stop it via Ctrl-C, which I though was a good thing. The last dash forces dvgrab to output to stdout, which we’ll then pipe into vlc (the dash for vlc tells it to use stdin as input).

Next we need to create a media stream out of our linux box and ship it over UDP to the Imac. The vlc command below gets the job done. Remember you’re sudo’ing and need to provide the password after you enter the command.
sudo dvgrab -f hdv -noavc -nostop -|vlc - --sout '#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=256,venc=x264{aud,profile=baseline,level=30,keyint=30,bframes=0,ref=1,nocabac},acodec=mp4a,ab=64,scale=0.25,deinterlace,width=320,height=240}:duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=192.168.1.97:1234}}'
The IP address toward the end of the command is the IP of the Imac machine receiving the stream. Port 1234 is arbitrary. The stream is comprised of h.264 video @ 256K and AAC audio @ 64K. Those elementary streams are then packaged in mpeg2 transport stream before being shipped to the Imac. This is the standard way of doing HTML5 video (from what I understand).

So now we can go over to the mac and see if we receive the video stream. For that just run VLC for OSX and open UDP network port on port 1234 (udp://). If things are working nicely you should see a 320×240 video from you HDV camera on the Imac.

Now that we have the video on the mac, we need to use the “mediastreamsegmenter” command line tool to create HTML5 video stream out of it. mediastreamsegmenter listens on a UDP port for incoming transport stream chops it (by default) into 10 sec. “mini” transport stream files and writes these mini files to wherever you tell it. This location is important since it needs to be accessible to your webserver. Remember, at the end of the chain (day), the webserver is doing all the heavy lifting of delivering the mini transport stream files to your iphone. mediastreamsegmenter also produces a file of type .m3u8
which is basically a live updated playlist.

Something you might not know is that apple ships standard OSX with apache builtin. All you have to do is use the following command to get it started.
apachectl start
Now point your browser on the mac to localhost and see if it loads a page. Now that apache is working we need to modify it so it knows how to deal with .ts and .m3u8 files. This involves adding a couple of lines to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
AddType application/x-mpegURL .m3u8
AddType video/MP2T .ts
and /etc/apache2/mime.types
.m3u8 application/x-mpegURL
.ts video/MP2T
Next we need to restart apache
apachectl restart
By default OSX apache is setup to load it’s documents from /Library/WebServer/Documents, so I created a directory called “stream” to contain the media stuff (.ts files and .m3u8 file) and put the following into the index.html file in /Library/WebServer/Documents.
<html>
<head>
<title>Video Test</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>
</head>
<body style="background-color:#FFFFFF; ">
<center>
<video width='320' height='240' src="prog_index.m3u8" controls autoplay> </video>
</center>
</body>
</html>
Now that we’ve got all the prep done on the mac, we issue the following command from terminal window to get the mediastreamsegmenter going (details can be found by using man mediastreamsegmenter).
mediastreamsegmenter -b http://192.168.1.97/stream -f /Library/WebServer/Documents/stream 192.168.1.64:1234
Here -b specifies the base of the URL that will be encoded into the .m3u8 file (this is the IP address of your Imac, stream is the folder in /Library/WebServer/Documents/ where the mini .ts files and the .m3u8 file are). The -f switch specifies the output directory for the mini .ts files and the .m3u8 file. and the last IP address:port is from your Linux box.

Now you should be able to open up your browser on your iphone/ipod touch and punch in http://192.168.1.97 (assuming the Imac is reachable from your phone) and see the streaming video (You might have to turn on “Plugins” feature under settings/safari on your device. Mine was turned off and drove me crazy until I figured it out). If Plugins is turned off, the index.html page will load, but no video.

Hopefully there is enough meat here to get you guys started……btw. I hear the following command (or variations of) can be used on linux side (instead of vlc). I haven’t tried it and can’t confirm if it works.
ffmpeg -i <in file> -f mpegts -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 64k -s 320×240 -vcodec libx264 -b 96k -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4×4+partp8×8+partb8×8 -subq 5 -trellis 1 -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_range 16 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -bt 200k -maxrate 96k -bufsize 96k -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30 -aspect 320:240 -g 30 -async 2 <output file>

Some excellent information can be found on Carson McDonald’s blog:

• iPhone HTTP Streaming with FFMpeg and an Open Source Segmenter
• iPhone Windowed HTTP Live Streaming Using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront Proof of Concept
• HTTP Live Video Stream Segmenter and Distributor

One of the original reasons I bought my first ipod (first gen 5 Gig) was that I could hook it up to my mac and use it as a firewire drive. I could literally run around with this in my pocket and boot OSX off the ipod. Well that came to an end with the intro of iPhone/iTouch. Apple took the “disk mode” out. Well that was then, go grab a FREE copy of iPhone explorer and all that USB stick functionality can be your again. Oh, and did I say there is no need for Jail Break either

Features:

• 100% Free iPhone browser for Mac and Windows
• 100% Drag-and-drop interface for easily copying files to and from your iPhone
• Create, delete and rename files and folders on your iPhone or iPod Touch
• Works with all iPhones and iPod Touches including the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G
• Allows you to use your iPhone as a flash drive / pen drive or put your iPhone into disk mode
• Tiny download size
• (Optional) If you jailbreak your iPhone you can access the real root of your iPhone and recover your address book, SMS, e-mails and more.

Hehehe……Nicely done…..

VMware demoed a Nokia N800 featuring its mobile hypervisor at its VMworld Europe conference, showing Windows CE and Google’s Android running at the same time.

In a keynote at VMworld Europe, chief technology officer (CTO) Stephen Herrod unveiled the firm’s mobile virutalisation platform, explaining that phones featuring hypervisors – the technology that allows virtualisation – will have two main functions.

The first enables users to back up their system and data on a virtual machine, so if they get a new phone they can easily transfer contacts and other information regardless of the operating system. “What data is on a device will outlive the device,” he said.

This will also make developing mobile applications much easier, as developers can embed it on a virtual machine with a thin operating system of its own, removing the need to ensure interoperability with different systems.

The second use involves running multiple virtual machines on a single phone. This will let users run two profiles at the same time. “People don’t want to carry two phones – one approved by IT, and one that’s a bit cooler,” said Herrod, who added that this move was another step towards “employee-owned IT.”

This sounds like a great idea….Now all we need is more powerful processors….We’re all looking at you Intel….The “Hz” race is on again

If you’re using Ubuntu and have recently upgraded your IpodTouch or Iphone to 2.x firmware, you might be interested in this detailed tutorial. It basically outlines how you can setup syncing under Ubuntu with your 2.x device. The guide assumes that you have jailbroken your ipod/iphone . There is also a nice section for older 1.x devices.

Well, it didn’t take long for the observant Luke Hutchison to figure it out….It’s all there in the system class files. For all the details check out Luke’s page. Here is the teaser video:

So now that I have a basic OSC receiver for aka.iPhone’s XY controller, I’ve been going through Apple’s Demo Compositions – under /Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Compositions — and adding my portion of the OSC receiver to them. Here is the latest one, akaRemote-Caterpillar, which is a adaptation of “Caterpillar.qtz” under /Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Compositions/Interactive. Again I need to remind you to read the first Article to get started and that these QC compositions are for Leopard/QC3.0 only and require a jailbroken Ipod Touch or iPhone.

I assume you know what aka.iPhone is and what it does. If you don’t please see this article over at Create Digital Motion. I’ve got aka.iPhone 2.1 installed on my ipod touch and while I enjoyed playing around with the accompanying MAX/MSP patch — via the free runtime — I wanted to see if I could get it working with Quartz Composer.

Well today’s been full of good news for developers and users alike. Steve J. announced that the Ipod/Iphone SDK will be released in February 2008 and if that wasn’t enough Nokia announced their next generation Internet Tablet….the N810. It’s basically the N800 on steroids, a slider keyboard plus builtin GPS…..wohoo . From the Press Release….

The Nokia N810 is powered by maemo Linux based OS2008, updatable also on the Nokia N800, the previous internet tablet generation hardware. The Nokia N810 features a highly customizable user interface and contains various novelties such as a Mozilla based browser with Ajax and Adobe flash 9, Bluetooth headset support as well as enhanced video and audio features. The refreshed Video Gizmo, Skype and Rhapsody highlight some most popular downloads available while Boingo Wireless, Earthlink and The Cloud enable Wi-Fi connectivity, across thousands of different locations globally.

The Nokia N810 has an integrated GPS receiver which allows you to pinpoint your position and find a wide variety of points-of-interests using the pre-loaded maps. Upgrade to Wayfinder’s voice-guided navigation for turn-by-turn directions and explore the world on foot or in the car.

So get ready and start saving up. Ipod (or if Rogers gets it’s act together) and Iphone first, N810 with all the sweet tech inside plus the ISDK in Feb…..Next year will be a busy Dev. year

Well they said it can’t be done. They said the secret of the apple sauce was only known to Steve. Looks like Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri has it figured out. 1340 lines of code and you’ve got the Apple’s Ubercool keyboard on the N800…..gotta love open platforms.

Okay, so by now you all know that I kinda hate the iPhone. I think it’s gonna be the big wake up call for Apple/Steve. We’ll see, but in the meantime Nokia has beefed up the N800 with a simple software upgrade. New features include Skype (yehaaa), Flash 9 (wohoo) and SDHC support (upto 8GB), so run and grab it here. This means that you can grab two 8GB SDHC card and have a fully functional linux Computer w/ 16GB of Disk in your pocket. Get some skype-out minutes and you can leave your iPhone at home. All this and battery life improvement as well. My advice to Apple, stick to what you know, make better Computers/OS’s and let the phone makers make the phones .

iPhone, aka. Apple Inc.’s Achilles Heel. Well, just about everyone was waiting for a SDK for the bloody thing. They wanted to rush to the AT&T store on June 29, buy a iPhone and start developing real software for it. You know, the kind of software that is actually useful. Well Apple’s idea of software development is this:

“You don’t touch our phone, you just use AJAX and HTML and design webpages that can be loaded (using wireless) on the phone”. Now I have no idea how this qualifies as a Application development platform, but according to Apple it does.