iPhone Publishers Meetup: an Augmented Reality special

Last night Chilli X went to the November iPhone Publishers Meetup: an Augmented Reality special, and had a great evening.

The venue was suitably cool (great lighting, touch sensitive tables etc) and the talks were brief but interesting. Ravi Damani from acrossair talked about getting started, their future plans for their Augmented Reality engine and their views on competition.  Mark Cummins from PlinkArt gave a fascinating talk about their visual image recognition system. It’s not available on the iPhone yet (Android only so far) but the potential is enormous.

We’ll be watching with interest to see where these technologies go. Personally I’d like to see some open standards that everyone can plug in to, rather than everybody developing their own different solutions. For example Plink’s image recognition works only on images that have been entered into their database – they already have competition of a sort in the form of Kooaba. I’d hate to see a future where images from some companies are exclusively held in one database so can’t be recognised by a competitor’s software.

The virtual augmented reality future only looks bright if everybody plays nicely together. I don’t want to be standing in London holding a phone in front of my face looking for a restaurant only to find that Wagamas are exclusively licensed to one app and Burger King another…

Augmented Reality FAIL

Last weekend The Times was running its first augmented reality campaign, as part of a sponsored supplement to promote the DVD release of the family film ‘Night at the Museum 2′.

Was it just us or did the hype surrounding the ‘first augmented reality campaign’ spectacularly fail to live up to the reality?

Apparently The Times was going to include a pull out supplement in the Nov 6th edition so, being huge AR fans, we all dashed out and bought copies only to find that the promised supplement was going to be in the Nov 7th edition instead – FAIL #1

So, the next day we wasted more time and money on The Times. By the time I got around to looking at it my better half had already thrown the tacky looking insert in the bin. Much verbal banter ensued as we trawled through the rubbish bin to find and uncrumple it.

Next we visited www.nightatthemuseumcomestolife.co.uk (haven’t they heard of short urls?) and downloaded the required ActiveX plug-in (which the small print assured me was going to work on my Mac running Snow Leopard). Then we quit Safari, installed the drivers and eagerly booted up again waiting to see the tiny miracle of some sort of living T. Rex on my desktop.

Pressing the big red ‘See Rex’ button bought us nothing but a big black rectangle to stare into. We waited and waited… and waited some more. Maybe there’s a problem with the web cam? So we opened up Photo Booth only to find that the web cam was dead – no signal at all… Damn, reboot the computer, check that the web cam is working now (it is) back to Safari, back to the site with the really long url and… nothing. Again. FAIL #2.

By this time we’ve invested enough time and money into this to really want to see this bloody dinosaur cavorting around on my desk. Maybe Firefox will work? Download the latest build, install, reboot everything again just for good measure and back to the site. Now things are looking more promising – there’s a progress bar in the black hole where something interesting should be happening. But it’s stuck at about 20%. Nothing’s happening. Has it crashed? Restart Firefox and a new progress bar appears and says ‘Initializing’. The bar fills up and then… fills up again… and again. After filling up about 10 times Firefox crashed. FAIL #3

So, we re-launched Firefox which gave as a very cute ‘well, this is embarrassing – something seems to have gone wrong’ dialog. I couldn’t have put it any better myself…

We still haven’t seen any augmented reality dinosaurs and the whole sorry thing left a bad taste – I’m just glad we didn’t have a bunch of disappointed kids to deal with afterwards…

On last gripe – I’ve now installed a bunch of useless ActiveX drivers into my browser which will probably do more harm than good and cause all sorts of problems in the future. Guess what, the installer didn’t have an ‘uninstall’ option either… FAIL #4

Did anybody get it up and running and if so, was it worth it?

RandomPlay – update

A lot of you have been waiting patiently for RandomPlay so we thought we’d better give you an update.

 

RandomPlay - interactive visual playlists

Apple rejected the current build – but for once they were really helpful. They told us exactly what the problem was. The only trouble is we can’t reproduce it… Their feedback was specifically that it crashes on an iPhone 3G running the latest operating system. If it it been the original iPhone running OS 2.0 that would have been more difficult to test but the 3G is what most of us at Chilli X have and RandomPlay seems to work perfectly well – we use it for hours on end here in the office.

So, we’re a bit stumped – we’re doing more testing and looking really carefully at the code to try and find a problem. It’s not like we don’t know what we’re doing – we’ve already got two apps that play music (PlaySafe & Playlist Alarm Clock) and RandomPlay is, if anything, simpler than those.

In case any new readers are wondering what the hell RandomPlay is:

RandomPlay is a great visual way of creating a playlist from the music on your iPhone or iPod touch. When you launch the app you’ll see a grid of 12 album covers like the one above (we filter out the tracks that doesn’t have cover artwork). Then just tap any one to play it, double tap to delete it or shake to get a whole new selection. It’s a great way to see what’s coming up and to discover tracks you’d forgotten about.

We’ll keep you updated here and on our Twitter feed…

 

PhotoFrame wins iLounge Top 100 Apps Award

We’re really pleased to announce that PhotoFrame has just been included in iLounge’s Top 100 Apps list!

The list has just been published in this years edition of their iPod + iPhone Buyers’ Guide. If you’ve not come across it before it’s well worth downloading a copy of the pdf. It’s the definitive word on the state of the iPod & iPhone covering everything from a complete overview of the current range to the best docks, headphones, cases and of course, Apps (we’re on page 44).

We’re very proud to have been included – thanks guys!

If you’re not familiar with PhotoFrame then now’s the perfect time to pick up a copy. Here’s a brief overview:

PhotoFrame turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a beautiful digital photo frame. We’ve included some pictures to get you started, but you can easily customize these with favorites from your own photo albums.

PhotoFrame also acts as a digital clock by clearly displaying the time and date beneath the photo. PhotoFrame overrides your auto-lock setting so your slideshow will continue for as long as you wish. This makes it ideal to keep running while your device is docked and on charge.

Other settings allow you to vary the length of time each picture is displayed and select either 12 or 24 hour time display.

PhotoFrame has a very clean, simple interface – just tap on the clock area of the screen to access the settings screen and change the photos. Tap on the main photo to advance to the next picture if you don’t want to wait for it to change automatically.

November Calendar Wallpapers

They’re a day late but here are this month’s free calendar wallpapers.

Here’s two more wallpaper calendars for your iPhone or iPod touch. As per usual they were created using our MyCal app whose sole purpose in life is to allow you to create gorgeous calendar wallpapers like these. You can change the style of the calendar and choose the background picture from the built in library or use your own.

Read all about it here or buy a copy here.

TimeDevice 01 out now

TimeDevice 01, our collaboration with internationally renowned designer, illustrator and typographer, Rian Hughes, has just appeared in the App Store.

We’ll blog more about this one (and Rian) when we’ve got a bit more time – suffice to say, TimeDevice 01 is a beautiful and stylish clock for your iPhone or iPod touch

Juiced 1.1 out now

We just thought we’d let you know that Juiced 1.1 has just appeared in the App Store.

Juiced. Tapping the screen toggles the more detailed info on and off

 

 

This release brings compatibility with the latest models of the iPod touch – now you should be able to see all the stats on the info screen. Let us know if anybody is still having any problems.

 

Juiced. Rotate the screen for a detailed battery status report

 

 

Done 2.0 – new Heads Up Display

This is the fifth (and possibly final) post talking about the forthcoming update to Done, our iPhone & iPod touch To Do list app.

The current version of Done presents you with an easy way to delete all your completed items – just rotate the phone into landscape mode to get the big ‘Delete all completed items’ button. Done 2.0, available shortly, takes this to the next level…

Now, when you rotate your phone you’ll be presented with our new HUD (Heads Up Display) which gives you three choices: Delete all completed items, Email your list to yourself or others and Wallpaper – save your most important items to your Camera Roll so that you can set them as your wallpaper.

The fact that the HUD works on a list-by-list basis gives you fantastic flexibility and means that you can email any list or combination of lists to yourself or create a wallpaper of just the top items from any individual list (the current version of Done creates a wallpaper based on your combined list).

Done 2.0 will be available shortly.

Done 2.0 – manual sorting

This is the fourth post talking about the forthcoming update to Done, our iPhone & iPod touch To Do list app.

The current version of Done allows you to shake your phone to sort your list of items by either priority or date order, depending on your settings. When Done 2.0 is released shortly, you’ll also be able to arrange items manually.

Done 2.0 allows manual sorting of tasks

One of the many things users really like about Done is its simple, uncluttered interface and we’ve tried to keep that in Done 2.0. So the challenge was to find a way to add new features without adding loads of new buttons. Because Done is developed exclusively for the iPhone we always wanted to take full advantage of its capabilities – if the phone can detect a shake, why not use that to sort instead of adding a sort button?

We’ve carried this thinking through to Done 2.0 - so to enter manual edit mode you simply hold your finger on an item for a second then release it. A sound will confirm that you’re now in edit mode and the drag handles and delete buttons will appear. Now rearrange your items to your heart’s content and tap the screen to exit edit mode.

Item’s dates and priorities will change as you rearrange them, so dragging a priority 1 item down the list past a priority 2 item will change its priority to 2. It all works exactly as you’d expect and is incredibly useful in fine-tuning your list of tasks.

Done 2.0 will be available shortly.

Done dates – help

One of our Done users is experiencing a strange problem that we’ve never seen before (hi Edward!).

Occasionally some of the dates on his dated items slip by one day – Christmas on the 24th December for example. Nobody else has ever reported this happening (in fact, Done is probably our most smooth running app) and we can’t replicate it here no matter how hard we try.

So if anybody out there has had the same problem, please let us know and give us as much info as you can – device, time, date, region settings etc. Thanks.