Chamber of Commerce & Trade Networking Event in the Clarion hotel on Thursday 25th Feb @ 7pm

Title: “Disruptive Technology? – the future of mobile devices and your business”

The Blurb:


The mobile phone has quickly become a necessary piece of everyday life but the mobile in your pocket and in your customers’ pockets is increasingly becoming smarter. It is no longer simply a mobile “telephone”, it is a mobile information system, permanently connected to every other computer on the planet and able to know “where” you are.

Increasingly, people expect to get their information “immediately” and their mobile is the most immediate way to access that information. What is happening in this market, how is it affecting (or disrupting) other markets and how can businesses in the Carrickfergus area be informed and be ahead of the curve in utilising the new mobile technology?

I hope that the evening will inform Chamber members of what is happening in the mobile devices market using the iPhone as an example, give examples of how businesses are beginning to utilise this technology and to discuss how traders in Carrickfergus could use the technology to their advantage.

About Richard Johnston

Richard Johnston BTh, MTh Cert PFS is a qualified Financial Adviser with Sydney Johnston Financial Services. He recently formed “Astute Labs Ltd”, an iPhone software company developing applications for the iPhone. He has a background in software having written, developed and sold software for Financial Advisers, accounting software and bespoke database software for a London design company. He lives in Carrickfergus with his wife and two girls.

About Objects were the company that provided the training and for anyone interested in iPhone development the approach of C, Objective C then iPhone I can now stand over as a great way to learn something that will be a lasting skill. The full course schedule is here. Check their website for a new European partnership (but I notice they don’t offer the C course yet).

I’d say anyone without programming experience should do some sort of C or other course to get back into the programming groove as the pace is fairly hectic.

We raced through the entire scope of the language features in about an hour then delved back into Xcode to start writing.

On our first day we hit the ground running, creating two different classes of objects with their inherent data structure and functions (we had Persons (with data firstname, lastname, age etc. who could laugh and display their data) and Dogs who really could just bark, laugh or display their data). Having done the C part we were very comfortable creating the data structures and methods for each of the Classes of Objects.

I thought things were going to go beyond me when by lunchtime Jonathan, the trainer, was setting up an array of a mixture of these objects:

NSArray *array = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:fred,
[[Dog alloc] init],
[[Person alloc] initWithName:@”Sue” age:45],
[[Dog alloc] init], nil];

Already in C I would have been bogged down in the debugger but we were shown the beauty and power of ObjC as we looped through the objects in the array asking each Object to “display” itself and do what it means by “laugh”.

for(id currObj in array)
{
if([currObj conformsToProtocol:@protocol (Laughing)])
[currObj display];
[currObj laugh];

}

Clearly depending on the object a Person does that differently to a Dog. This concept immediately clicked with me in terms of how Objects are used in the UI. My software has no idea what I’m going to throw at it. If I ask my software to cut something (imagine a collection of mp3, image, text in a file) this process shows that my software can easily determine the methods permissible in each type and doesn’t really need to know how they do it but just asks them all to “Cut” themselves, however that happens.

We added a further level of power by creating protocols and testing each object for its conformity to a set of protocols (ie. methods or “functions” that are shared among the various classes of objects – Dogs and persons all can laugh and display themselves). This meant that we weren’t asking objects to “laugh” that had no method of “laughing”.

The obscure “self” and “super” I had seen in the various ObjC books I had attempted to interpret for myself now also made complete sense.

I’d say the benefit of the course to me has been that I understand every line of the code above and more than that I appreciate what is going on behind the scenes in terms of the underlying C structures and functions and the position of each object in memory. Understanding is a wonderful thing.

Day 2 (a Saturday wow!) starts in 90 minutes, Looking forward to it then one day’s sightseeing and back on Monday for 5 days straight into iPhone. The guys from Flipside 5 are coming in to assist Jonathan with that.

Max O’Malley – seeing the beauty in the logos

C really is just a brief step away from machine language and I’m benefitting from at least having played with Assembly language on the Amiga nearly 20 years ago (wow!).

When our trainer first mentioned that C uses a “pointer to a pointer” (**p) some of our heads exploded but then as we did some labs with them it all made sense.

Tomorrow is the beginning of the Objective C section of the course and all that we have done so far in C has been deliberately chosen to speed up our work in Objective C. Going to have an early night to night.

I know a lot of people just don’t get the appeal of programming but its like “building” something new every time you write software. You are creating an entity that has its own logic, ways of dealing with information, ways of outputting information all of your own design. The elegance is not just in how you handle information given by the user but how elegantly you create the inner workings that handles that information. For me, I love it.

Max O’Malley – aware of how wierd some of that sounds.

I completed the first day yesterday and have been impressed by the quality of the training material and Jonathan’s delivery. It is a mixture of presentations, discussions and step by step lab exercises on the supplied iMacs. Already I feel confident that I will be able to manage at least the basics of C since I haven’t looked at it since hobbyist dabbling with NorthC back in the Commodore Amiga days. Having dabbled recently in Objective C I can see what Jonathan means when he says that learning C is an essential base if you really want to “get” Objective C. Things I’ve looked at in Objective C already make more sense and there have been a few “Aha!” moments.

The C class is small (all their courses try to average 8 people) but as we progress towards the iPhone workshop we will have a full 9. We have class members from the local area and Venezuela and Strasbourg. The international 3 of us had a great Italian dinner last night after an obligatory trip to the newly opened Apple Store (I feel my credit card shivering in fear).

Max O’Malley – enjoying himself

The @o2 twitter was flooded with questions, tweets on #o2 and #iphone flocked. Eventually disappointment became #o2fail trend as the sheer cost of having to get out of an 18 month contract early to get a phone that is updated every 12 months became apparent. Of course these phones cost money to make but so many were hoping for a deal.

Then the Daily Telegraph did a piece early this morning in a rising trend of “twitter” opinion journalism. What better way to do a popular opinion piece than simply read the twitter feeds and form an article giving the views that transpire?

I phoned poor o2 customer services this morning and they obviously haven’t been fully briefed yet. Overnight a product was launched, discussed, o2 tariffs investigated, quizzed, condemned and a newspaper has written up the whole story from twitter feeds.

Max O’Malley – sometimes he blinks and misses everything

Let me describe the beauty of my setup.

We have two main rooms in the house with the following equipment:

1. The Main Lounge with a Samsung 40″ HD LCD Television and Apple TV with version 2 software installed

2. The Playroom with an iMac with 2GB Ram, 500GB Hard drive and EyeTV 400 plugged into aerial socket

Here’s how it works:

EyeTV with software version 3 allows me to use various “smart” guides to sift out the shows I want to watch. So, I want to watch all new episodes of “Torchwood” that are not repeats. A simple two line smart guide sets this up for me. I select the option for exporting to Apple TV format and walk away knowing eyetv will confidently record the show when it is on and immediately export it into Apple TV format and drop it into iTunes for me. This is smarter than series link because you can set up in advance eyetv to record things you don’t want to miss. I know “Doctor Who” will be on TV again at some stage… I just set up a smart guide to find it and as soon as it appears in the listings it will be recorded for me. I want to catch the film “Tombstone” if it is ever on – no problem a smart Guide will sort it for me even if it isn’t in current listings.

The system I have means that in either room I can watch either live TV using Eyetv on the iMac or the built in Freeview on the Samsung LCD but I also have access to all my recorded shows on BOTH systems, in both rooms. All content I have on iTunes on the iMac is available at the far end of the house be that music, podcasts, photos, movies or TV shows. My kids can be watching Shrek for the 100th time using front row in the playroom whilst I access the same iTunes library in the front room and watch the latest purchased Lost show from iTunes or a DVD I have ripped from my collection with Handbrake and added to iTunes. Or of course we can watch the same shows but in different rooms.

The result is seamless availability of all my recorded media and the ability to have live TV in both rooms.

I’m also impressed with the new ability to purchase directly on the Apple TV. We decided to rewatch the West Wing this week and purchased it directly from Apple TV on the big screen. The download was slow but that’s my crappy 1Mb (out of the possible 8, yes 8 I’m supposed to get) broadband’s fault. The next day I noticed that all the new episodes also showed up in the playroom on the iMac…without me having to do anything.

I heartily recommend an iMac as a central media server, combined with the power of EyeTV and Apple TV makes me something my friends might never expect: Satisfied with the number of Apple products I own.

Shocking, I know!

Average WiFi 800 kbps
Average Edge 210 kbps
Average Speed 520 kbps

Bizarrely, in my own tests I’ve been getting average wifi of 450kbps and today average GPRS of 283kbps!! Something might be off there in the speed test methods but the square box (for GPRS) was showing on the iPhone, not the blocked E for Edge.

Read the rest of this review at www.dotphone.net

Saturday after the MAGNIFICENT LAUNCH PARTY – iCal

Chatting to some friends in Belfast’s wonderful, St. George’s Market, we discuss a possible lad’s night this coming week. I consult my iPhone and notice that the Thursday evening is free. I add it to my calendar there and then before it can be stolen from me by other members of my family. At home it syncs and by the magic of .mac my work computer has the same information the next morning in its calendar.

Thursday arrives

I’m at work and I want to check train times to Belfast for this evening. I check them on my office Mac, take a pic of the results (a simple CMD-SHIFT-4) and drop them into a Note in the new Leopard Mail. I know that i will have access to this note on my iPhone as it syncs everything – images, pdfs using my .mac account.

Leopard Mail integration

Sure enough I get home and begin negotiations with my legally and spiritually bound female, my wife. I secure a lift to the train station. En route I open up the iPhone to check the times again in case I could make the earlier train. Sure enough my notes are synced – train time image appears – and we have EDGE here and its not wifi but its fine. Even if they hadn’t synced I could open up the web browser and check them again live on the website. I’m the sort of person who forgets something the minute I see it that’s why I take pictures.

Music and Phone Calls

I get dropped off at the train station and try out the iPhones handsfree headphones for listening to music. As I enjoy the latest Sigur Ros live offering the music dips in volume and a ringing tone in my ear indicates a phone call. I push the sleek mini button on the headphones and I’m speaking to a friend who is trying to organise his own public transport to our combined destination. The sound quality is good and I don’t have to repeat myself. [NB As we chatted text messages were coming through by my other friend, these appeared with the full text on the iPhone screen - I like that - better than "you have 1 message"] The big plus about the headphones is that because it is, to all intents and purposes a set of iPod headphones, wearing it makes you look more like a cool muso and less like one of those Dads who have a mobile phone on their belt buckle and a permanent bluetooth headset attached to the ear whilst shopping with their wife in As Qmonkey has stated these people have such technology in place “just in case”. These people do NOT work for the CIA and have been watching too much Spooks. With the iPhone headphones / iPod combination you spare yourself some scorn.

Fumble-Less Technology

I’m standing by now in a drafty train station on a chilling November evening in Northern Ireland. Several phone calls and text messages take place but all seamlessly on the one unit whilst listening to music, my iPhone. I am the sort of person who tries to put a train ticket in the exact same place every time so that when asked I can find it without fumbling. Yet every time I need to get the train ticket I have to fumble around in every possible pocket (2 front and back on jeans, at least another 2 on jacket or coat) because I have forgotten again. With the iPhone I am decreasing that amount of fumbling. One device, one set of wires.

Train Home

After a great night of banter, steak and beer I get the train home; I ritually check facebook (which has its own iPhone friendly webpage). A friend wants to know what I think of the iPhone – I tap a response directly into facebook’s regular mail section “I’m writing this on a train from Carrick to Belfast, its easy”. The fact that I am doing that is testament to the ease of use of the iPhone. Somewhere along the train route the signal differed from GPRS to EDGE and back again. It didn’t matter, the software just handled that for me in the background.

The Morning after

Friday morning in work I check my emails on the the iPhone – several discussing the night before, the ones I have already read at home on my mac before leaving appear but without a blue “unread” dot. I am so used to SMTP emails in perfect sync across many computers I forget what it is like to go to POP accounts where you have to wade through already read mail! I can immediately see the new mail no matter whether it is on my home laptop, my work iMac or now my beautiful iPhone. Easy.

in short:

- effortless syncing of calendar, address book, web bookmarks, music, podcasts
- Leopard integration lovely
- iPod to iPhone seamless integration. Music dips, text message chimes, phone rings, single click of headphones and we are chatting clearly.
- its the REAL web, my emails using .mac are my real NEW emails, my calendar is my ACTUAL calendar synced across two home macs and a work mac.

iLove her

*Max O’Malley realises that to live the sort of experience he has had this past week one needs :

1. Mac(s)
2. Leopard (Max OS 10.5) installed
3. a babysitter and/or permission from his wife for the night out

The experience can be mimicked with lesser equipment but you are on your own there.

With thanks to Apple and Lilytodd for providing all of the above services.