The App Store opened up a whole new and exciting world for software developers to flex their digital muscles and see where the wind could carry them.  I have only recently begun my trek into the world of app development, but in these few months, my eyes have truly been opened to the monetary value of digital media.  Now I am careful to say “monetary” value, because many things can have value, but only certain things have monetary value.  And by value, I mean what someone would be willing to trade for the product or service, monetary value … obviously, money.

The Internet brought out the pirate in all of us.  Moving songs from one computer to another … it really didn’t feel like stealing … it was just like moving the files of a group project from a classmates computer to yours, simple.  Record labels fought it, lawsuits against individuals (sorry I don’t have the references right now, I may fill them in later).  But iTunes saw the problem and countered with a solution instead of a push back.  Offer individual songs for an affordable price!  Amazing…

Years pass and the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad come to life and the App Store is born.  Apps on sale for $9.99 and selling well.  Competition drives the price down.  Apps sell for $4.99 and sell well.  Competition drives the price down.  Apps sell for $0.99 and sell well.  No where to go but free…

An interesting thing happened.  For the price of an impulse purchase candy bar at the grocery check out counter, one could purchase an app of any sorts that would keep them entertained and fixated for hours.  But where one would not think twice about that impulse purchase that gave them pleasure for the car ride home, they would spend an hour looking for reviews and YouTube videos on whether or not this piece of appware was worth their $0.99 (+ tax).  And of course I include myself in this audience.

Why do people feel the need to be so stringent on their $0.99 app purchases while a candy bar is so much easier?  Is it for the mere fact that an app is not (well sorta) tangible?  Is it that there are too many choices on the App Store to really make an impulse purchase?  Is it the presentation of the App Store?  Is it that you are only making a $0.99 purchase while the candy bar is just a percent of a fraction of the groceries in your cart?  Should we be selling app specific gift cards at the checkout counter?

I’m no marketing genius.  I wish I were.  I wish I had the answers to these questions, but I don’t.  I think the answer is probably a little bit of ‘yes’ to most if not all of them, though.

But from the other side, now I am a developer of apps.  I see the thousands that enjoy and endlessly praise my apps while they are free but refuse to touch them as if they were a plague when they cost $0.99.  I see the negative reviews people leave complaining that they have to pay for additional functionality in an already fully functional FREE game.  I see the faceless users belittle my hours and days of late nights and weekends by saying, not worth four quarters.  I know … I’m whining.  But it fascinates and frustrates me to no end because I don’t understand why the dollar holds such a high value in the App Store.  The consumer has every right to do all the things I have mentioned in this paragraph.  I as the app developer, work for them.

What it really comes down to is this though … whoever can take the app store aisle of a grocery store and turn it into an impulse purchase at the register type of experience … those will be shoes worth walking in.

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There won’t be too many posts on here, my personal blog, regarding announcements for the company, we have a separate blog over on http://www.pawapps.com for that.  This is just a quick note out to let the great Internet know what I’ve been up to lately.  Obviously you can see that in the past year or so the regularity of posts on pwlk.net has drastically decreased.  It’s ok though.  I have no plans of stopping this blog, but for the time being, most of my efforts are being spent elsewhere.

So check out http://www.pawapps.com for all the latest and greatest from Paw Apps LLC.  Look forward to seeing you there!

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I wanted to put together a quick post of issues I have had with the update and the way the issues have been fixed in case anyone else is getting the same headaches that I’ve been getting.

First, I do believe it is relevant to give some details on my MacBook because it is getting up there in age … I guess.  Things are starting to slow down.  No comparison to the days of having to reformat Windows at least once a year, but things are starting to slow down.

13-inch Late 2007 Processor 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Memory 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM Graphics Intel GMA X3100 144 MB Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7 (11A511)

Desktop Freezes after logging in

I downloaded Lion from the app store just fine, ran the installer  just fine, it took about an hour for the full install.  Upon reboot, I log in at the fancy new login screen and my Desktop shows just fine.  But that’s it… I quickly realize the seconds on my clock are no longer ticking and I can’t click on anything.  The cursor still moves around, but nothing is responsive.  Strange… I rebooted.  Same issue.  I do some searches online and come up with nothing.  It is about 11pm so calling Apple support is not an option at this point in the evening.  Finally I decide why not and reboot again.  Magic of all magic it works!  I know this isn’t the fix you were hoping to hear … but I have rebooted a few times since and I have not had the issue with the frozen Desktop since.

Installing Xcode

This really rubbed me the wrong way.  They released Xcode 4 for Snow Leopard and charge $5 for it.  Then when Lion comes out they just open it up for anyone to download for free?  What?!?!  I’m all for free, but what the heck, Apple?  Why charge $5 if you are just going to open it up for free a few months later?  Ugh…

Anyways… So I try and run Xcode as one of the first things after installing Lion and get that message about needing to update Xcode because my current version is not compatible with Lion.  Ok, fine … where is the update?  Maybe it should have been intuitive that the new Xcode was a new app in the App Store, but since I already bought Xcode from the App Store I would have thought that it would have updated in app or at least been in the updated apps section of the App Store.  But neither was the case.  I did find it in the App Store as a brand new app and started the download.  I then kicked off the installation and got the “To continue installation please quit: iTunes”.  I had seen this issue in the ratings of Xcode and wasn’t too surprised when I saw it popped up.  So I went into Activity monitor and killed the iTunes Helper process.  Nothing changed.  I had left the install to work overnight so who knows how many hours it had been sitting on the quit iTunes prompt, so I decided to kill the installer and reboot.  I re-kicked the Xcode installation again (#2) and went about my business.  I made it all the way to “waiting for other installations to complete” and got stuck again…

Well, thanks to an article on TUAW, I deleted the lock file and rebooted:

First, hop into Terminal and change directories over to /private/var/db/mds/system. Then remove the mds.install.lock file (you’ll need to sudo rm, so be prepared to authenticate as root). Finally, reboot your system (sudo reboot).

(via TUAW)

I thought that the install had completed and tried to launch Xcode but was greeted with this popup:

When will it stop?!?!?!

Ok, fine.  I re-kicked of the Xcode installation again (#3).  Keep in mind that this installation is not a short process… it keeps dying at the end.

This time around I have made it all the way to the Updating Files… screen and it has been sitting there the entire time I’ve been writing this post.  I was hoping it would complete so I could finish off this post with a happy ending, but it doesn’t look like it is going to be the case.

I’m very frustrated with this entire process.  I haven’t spent much time in Lion yet, but I am yet to see anything on the surface that is a real big improvement over Snow Leopard.  If anything, the computer is slower and choppier.  Maybe I’m just in a bad Apple mood right now, but I don’t see why so many issues have come to light.  If it has to do with my late 2007 MacBook … well that is a shame and rather unnacceptable.  Ok, I’ll give my end rant tag </rant> and get back to work at trying to figure out what the heck is happening to my computer.

Best of luck in your upgrade to “the world’s most advanced desktop operating system” … eh

*Update: Xcode problem solved

I did a big no no in the world of problem solving.  I consciously changed more than just one variable and then repeated the test, so I really am not completely sure which was the cause, but they might even be related.

There is a pdf /Developer/About Xcode.pdf that I opened up and started reading to see if any helpful hints could be found.  It mentioned that the entire /Developer directory was created with an Xcode install.  So I decided to rename the current /Developer directory and give it another go, hopefully starting from fresh.

But I also…

I also decided to look more into the previously mentioned TUAW tip and tried it again.  I removed the lock, but this time after rebooting the OS, I checked to make sure that the lock file was still gone.  To my surprise it was not!  mds.install.lock had been retouched at a timestamp of when the computer was restarted.  I don’t know exactly what mds does, and someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it deals with indexing in Spotlight.  And I did notice that spotlight was still indexing (pulsing dot in the magnifying glass or click the magnifying glass to see the status).  I decided to wait until Spotlight was done indexing before kicking off the Xcode installation once again.  I didn’t have to way all too long.  When the indexing was complete I checked for the .lock and it was still there.  I did a quick remove but this time did not reboot.  I went straight into Xcode installation (#4).

Slow slow slow … but eventually, I heard the nice tone that for some reason Apple decided to double as installation complete and iPhone message tone.  Installation complete!

What I took away from this process was that Xcode installation is finicky.  And the best way to go about it is with a clean slate.  Reboot your machine right before attempting to install.  Make sure no other applications are running while you try and install.  And if something does go wrong… try and wipe everything (sudo mv /Developer /Developer-old).  Thankfully, that seemed to work for me.  Yay for getting back to code!

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After taking some time off to play with the dog, I came back to it still buzzing loudly.  I checked my iStat Menu to see what processes were taking up the most resources and saw ‘cupsd’.  Google told me it was related to my printer.  But I couldn’t kill the process for the life of me.  I tried killall, kill -9, and the activity monitor.  Nothing.

In activity monitor I saw another process Inkjet9 that was taking up even more resources.  And there were two of them!  Google didn’t have anything to say about Inkjet9.  I couldn’t killall or kill -9 this one because it didn’t show up in my ps -A.  I was able to kill it in Activity monitor, but it just respawned.  And to top it off, restarting my computer didn’t help either.

Uh oh … I’ve been hacked.  At least that’s what my initial thought was.

What I did find with my ps -A was a few print jobs that I had sent off this morning to my wireless HP printer.  Yup, and they had never printed.  I was able to kill all the specific print job related tasks and that took care of the rest of the runaway processes.

It is a good thing my aging laptop didn’t fry after running hot for some 8 hours.  Eh, then I could’ve bought a new one… hah.

Anyway.  Since nothing showed up for my Google on Inkjet9, I wanted to write a little post incase someone else had the same random problem I did.  It makes me scratch my head why Inkjet9 showed up in iStat Menu and Activity Monitor but not in ps -A.  I have no idea.

Hope this helps!

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I don’t want iMovie telling me what I am and what I am not allowed to use in my trailer, especially when I didn’t really have enough video to cover all the clips.  After a quick search through the interwebs I found that it is a problem that lots of people have complained about.  I came up with a pretty simple workaround, though.

Step 1: Create a new iMovie project and drag all your photos that you want to use into it to make a slide show (make sure photos last at least 5 seconds)
Step 2: Export the slide show as a movie
Step 3: Import the movie back into iMovie

And there you go!  You now have all your pictures available for use.  For the slide show I suggest going through and making sure all the Ken Burns or whatever other effects you might want to use are there and looking good.  The Ken Burns looks nice since the still will be coupled with videos.

Here’s the trailer I made, enjoy!

Download Video: MP4
HTML5 Video Player by VideoJS

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If you would like to make visit my static apps page on Toshimote, head over to: http://www.pwlk.net/apps/toshimote

AND click here to view a hands on (non-working) demo of the site (best viewed from iPhone).

Resources

• Toshiba Satellite M55-S325
• Ubuntu 10.10
• xte
• Apache2
• PHP5
• iPhone

Overview

There are really two main parts to this project, (1) web applilcation and (2) server applications. All the website is doing is sending commands to the server to be executed with the TV as the display. Immediately below is a video demonstration I put together showing how this all works. It might be a good idea to give it a quick view so you have a mental image of what’s going on when I go through the sections below.

Server

The very first item that needs to be mentioned is how you redirect output to the physical monitor attached to the server, in my case, the television. The global variable DISPLAY stores what display is being used. Typically the change to DISPLAY is so that you can execute X11 programs from the server on your local machine. But this time we want to redirect a little differently.

export DISPLAY=”:0.0″

I believe this value is typically consistent, but you can double check on your server by seeing what the value of $DISPLAY is.

echo $DISPLAY

The server apps are extremely simple thanks to xte. Xte is an application that reads arguments to execute key strokes and mouse movements. All I did was write a shell script for each individual command I wanted to execute and stored the script in /usr/local/bin. Here are a few examples of some scripts I use.

#Ubuntu menu

#!/bin/bash

xte ‘keydown Alt_L’;
xte ‘key F1′;
xte ‘keyup Alt_L’

#Move mouse to the left

#!/bin/bash

touch /home/jason/flags/mousemove.flag;
while [ -f /home/jason/flags/mousemove.flag ];do
xte ‘mousermove -2 0′
done

#Stop mouse movement

#!/bin/bash

if [ -f /home/jason/flags/mousemove.flag ];then
rm -f /home/jason/flags/mousemove.flag
fi

Keep in mind that this is where lots of modification would need to be done. I opened up the keyboard shortcuts application in Ubuntu and used that as my resource for writing all the scripts.

The last thing that I’d like to mention about the server is in the Apache setup. I couldn’t in a short amount of time get the web user (www-data) to either execute commands or change the DISPLAY value (I can’t remember anymore). To solve this I took a step that will make most everyone cringe. I modified /etc/apache2/envvars and changed the login to the one and only real user of the box, ‘jason’. You probably noticed that I had my flag for mouse movements hard coded to /home/jason. I know that ~ does not work but I never checked ${HOME}. As I am only developing this application for myself, I took the easy/lazy way out and rounded a few corners. As for security, I basically tossed it out the window. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that they could do some serious damage to my files with this web app, but the site is hosted locally on the server that is behind the router. And if someone were to spend the time … it is just my media server, nothing important is kept on that box.

Web App

The GUI is simple. A three column and infinite number of rows table. Oh yes I did. Tables are still alive and well in my world. Honestly this is the most perfect use of an HTML table that I’ve ever used. There really is nothing complex about the GUI.

AJAX is our friend in this app. We don’t want the remote to reload every time we click a button. Especially when we use the mouse and have to click twice (once to start the movement of the mouse and once to stop the movement). When a button on the remote is clicked, the name of the script is sent through to a PHP script that executes that command. Yes, I know, as I said above, security nightmare. But that’s really all there is to the web app side. Here are a few code snippets:

runScript.php

$com = $_REQUEST['com'];
$run_command=’export DISPLAY=”:0.0″;’.${com};
exec($run_command);

Javascript function

function doCommand(command)
{
if (command==”xte_mouse_left_go” || command==”xte_mouse_right_go” || command==”xte_mouse_up_go” || command==”xte_mouse_down_go”) {
// show the full screen banner that user clicks to stop mouse
document.getElementById(“banner”).style.visibility=”visible”;
document.getElementById(“controls”).style.visibility=”collapse”;
document.getElementById(“banner”).innerHTML=”[less than]a href=\”#\” onClick=\”doCommand(‘xte_mouse_stop’);\”>Click to stop mouse[less than]/a>”
} else {
// hide the full screen banner that user clicks to stop mouse and show buttons
document.getElementById(“banner”).style.visibility=”hidden”;
document.getElementById(“controls”).style.visibility=”visible”;
}
xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
{
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200)
{
document.getElementById(“myDiv”).innerHTML=xmlhttp.responseText;
}
}
xmlhttp.open(“GET”,”runScript.php?com=”+command,true);
xmlhttp.send();
}

Where next?

Realistically what I plan to do with Toshimote is to just add more buttons whenever the need arises. I will zip up all my code and post it on the site here as a resource to any that want to set up something similar. But for further development towards a public easy to use release, eh…

What should happen if I were to continue this project is mainly secure it up. I would make one single script that is the middle man between the web app and the actual commands being run on the server. It would take arguments and execute the proper script based on the arguments. That way, commands that aren’t xte scripts couldn’t be executed.

I would also put more effort into getting the default www-data user up and running and/or do a little more research on how things are suppose to be run on the server from the outside world.

Those are really the two main things that come to mind right off the bat. I’m sure I’ll come up with many more things that I want the remote to be able to do while laying in bed trying to fall asleep, though. If you have anything that you’d like to see on the Toshimote, either contact me or leave a comment here.

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Some 2 1/2 years ago I made the switch from Windows to Mac and I haven’t ever even teased the thought of going back.  But I have one major complaint about OS X, the Internet browsers are all terrible!  Maybe it is just me, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t….

Mozilla Firefox

Not too much wrong, love the plugins and the community.  The killer is the load time!  I just opened up Firefox on my machine and the icon in the dock bounced a total of 47 times!  That is totally unacceptable.

Apple Safari

Safari on the other hand has a fantastic load time.  This is mainly the reason that I keep going back to it.  But the one major annoyance with it is its lack of ability to move on in loading a page after it gets stuck on an ‘item’.  For example, I point the browser towards some page and the status bar starts going and tells me X of Y items loaded.  All appears to be fine, but then it just hangs.  The status bar will say something like 67 of 72 items loaded (3 errors) and it will just wait there.  Below is a screen shot of the status bar from a tab that has Google Reader.  The tab has been open for over a 1/2 hour and just sits there.  Some images on the page won’t load because they are one of the remaining items left to load.  I know the images work because I am able to right click and view the image in a new tab.  Also when I try and load the page in Firefox, everything works fine.

Opera

I haven’t played around with it too much yet, but it seems like the page loads are fairly slow.  Also the load time of the application was pretty slow.  This might be cause it hasn’t been used too much and is still working on starting up the application efficiently.  But it is my last hope.  I’m intrigued by the Opera Turbo, but I’m skeptical of the whole application because it is not nearly as mainstream as Firefox or Safari.

If anyone else has had these issues and has a fix, I would be amazing if you could help me out.  Computers are so frustrating sometimes.

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If I am on YouTube or some other Flash intensive sites, my battery will die very quickly.  Flash sucks.  But if I limit the amount of Flash use in conjunction with limiting the brightness of my screen, my 2.5 year old battery will easily last me 4 or 5 hours.

With this thought process, one can easily manage their battery life.  But is the ‘normal’ computer user knowledgeable enough to know what really affects battery life?  I propose that a new power management system be implemented.  I don’t know at what level the power management system in different operating systems needs access to in order to implement this idea, but I might have a look sometime in the future.

You know how your battery will tell you how much longer it has until it is dead?  Most operating systems now-a-days have this feature.  The way this works is, it takes a measurement of current computer usage and assumes that you will continue using the computer in the current manner until the battery dies.  This is why, when watching movies or something else that requires to computer to process lots of information, the battery life will be shorter, but when you stop watching the video and go back to editing a text document, the amount of time left on the battery will jump higher.

Well, what if instead of the battery life remaining reacting to your computer performance, your computer performance reacted to the battery life remaining?

Let’s say I get to class at 9am and know that I have class on and off until 1pm.  There should be a way for me to tell the battery that I want it to last until 1pm.  Then, in order for this to happen, the performance of the computer will make cutbacks in order to save battery life.  The screen might dim itself to save battery and the graphics may not render as smoothly.  This won’t make the user experience as pleasant, but if the priority is for the battery to last the full time, then it is worth it.

Of course there would be lots of details for user preferences where they could set priorities on what gets downgraded, whether screen brightness, graphics rendering or something else, but that would be of course for more of the power users instead of the ‘normal’ user that just wants their computer to stay on throughout the entire school day or work day.

You might also question, “Well if a person wants their laptop to last as long as possible, then why don’t they downgrade everything already?”  The answer is simple.  The purpose of this power management system is to give the user the best possible performance for the given time.  In the example above where I get to class at 9am and need my laptop to last till 1pm, I could set the screen at the darkest possible, squint all day long at my screen, and sure my laptop would last beyond 1pm, but the user experience would be terrible.  The goal would be to schedule the computer’s performance so the battery would die at the exact time you schedule it.  Best possible performance for set battery life.

I think it is a good idea.

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Let me explain…

In his PCWorld article he quotes Phil Schiller as saying: “When [the DS and PSP] came out, they seemed so cool. But once you play a game on the iPod touch, you think ‘hey, these things aren’t so cool any more’.”  He then connects this to his own statement: “Does [Phil Schiller] think those of us presumably ‘un-cool’ enough to enjoy games that last more than a few minutes a go are some sort of endangered species?”  First off Mr. Pecham, that sentence makes no sense.  Second, in what world did you hear Mr. Schiller say that the people who play the DS and PSP are ‘uncool’, the only statement he made was about the actual console.  You are starting to sound like a Microsoft commercial making accusations that “I’m not ‘cool’ enough to have a Mac.”

[Game Over Pecham]

But beyond Matt Pecham’s poorly written article and apparent bias of his own, let’s actually talk intelligently about the iPod Touch / iPhone as a gaming console.

In Apple’s ‘Special Event’ yesterday morning (afternoon for us in the MidWest), it did sound like Apple is selling the iPod Touch as a gaming console.  While this is a good plan, I personally think they are over-exaggerating the potential market.  When comparing to Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, Apple talks as though the Touch could be a replacement of those systems.

Now I am no gamer.  I have never played any game on the PSP nor the DS.  I rarely play any video games at all, but I know from playing the occasional game on my iPhone, that there is no way that the Touch, as a standalone console is going to be replacing products like the DS or the PSP.  Playing complex games is more than just pushing is certain locations, but it is about feeling the buttons underneath your fingers.  How are you going to fit the complexity and vast number of buttons from an XBox controller on to the screen of the Touch and still have clear vision to play a complex 3-Dimensional rendering game smoothly?

In contrast, I believe Apple should be marketing the iPod Touch much as the Nintendo Wii was marketed, a different type of game console.  The Wii was revolutionary with its controls.  How could so many games be played with so few buttons and a wand?  Well look at the success that is the Nintendo Wii.  Apple should not be attempting to take over the hand held game console market, but add to it in an innovative way.  Hardcore gamers will not be dropping their other hand held consoles to switch to a standalone Touch anytime soon.

Now once there are controllers and a variety of attachments available to be tethered to the Touch … then we’ll have to revisit the topic.

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Yes, I know. You just read the title to this post and you gave a shudder. Well let me ruin the ending for you now, and say, my iPhone has fortunately returned to its normal self, and has climbed a few rungs of respect in my book.

Yesterday, after returning from scuba diving down at the Scuba Shack, I was carrying a tub upstairs that had our still moist buoyancy compensators upstairs from the car. Still wearing my swim trunks, I didn’t have any good pockets, so I placed my wallet, keys and phone on top of the BCs. After getting upstairs, I started to take the BCs out of the tub, forgetting that all my usual pocket trinkets were still sitting on top. Needless to say… they took a dive. There were a few inches of water that had accumulated at the bottom of the tub from the BCs, just enough to fully submerge the iPhone.

Panic!

I nearly dove into the 2 inches of water after the phone, taking it out, carefully examining it. I took the plastic case I have off of it, and dried it off as best I could with my shirt. Luckily the phone was still on, however, I was getting the famed “The inserted device is not recognized”, meaning the phone thought something was plugged into the headphones, but I the only possible plugged in device… was water. Oh no! So this meant that no sound was coming out of the speakers because it thought I was trying to plug something into the headphone socket.

I took a hair drier briefly to the iPhone. No luck. So I kept the phone off, took out the SIM card, put it in my pocket and went on my way.

About 5 hours later, I took the phone out again, which had been turned back on from being in my pocket. I slid to unlock and I heard the magical sound of the iPhone click. The sound works! I was very excited. So I took the SIM card out of my pocket and put it back in the phone. In all my excitement, however, I had forgotten that the SIM card goes in a tray. That’s right, I just stuck it way down into the phone. Far from the reach of a paperclip. And only later, when talking with my roommate, did the thought even cross my mind to use tweezers… eh.

So I went to iFixIt and went to town on getting the iPhone apart. I was over at my girlfriend, Melissa’s, parents house at the time, and through group effort, we were able to get the screen off. Bingo! The SIM card was right there and I was able to push it out just fine. Against all my curiosity I put the phone back together, put the SIM card in its tray and slid it in. The phone seemed fine. It wanted to be activated through iTunes again, but that was ok. After a quick drive home, sync with the computer, my iPhone has an even strong place in my heart.

PS. If you are an Apple repair technician about to tell me I voided my warranty, let’s go with that I made this entire post up in a moment of creative and imaginative genius. Thanks.

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