When FourSquare came out of location Beta and was available to the world, I was excited to participate in the location sharing app. One of the things that appealed to me when It came out was the leaderboard functionality, it became a game to me to start blanketing the city and creating check-ins for businesses and rack up the most points and try and top the leaderboard every week. Fast forward to 15 months later, almost every location in town has a foursquare checkin.

It was also a challenge to me to become the mayor of the places that i frequented, sometimes making sure I checked in before my wife had a chance to so I could steal the mayorship from her.

Then one day, I changed something. Extremely busy that day, my phone would not stop lighting up due to foursquare notifications. I turned off the notification feature and from that point on, I’ve forgotten about foursquare. I still use if on events that are important to me, but not for my everyday life events. I mean really, does anybody care that I am the mayor of Shopper’s Drug Mart? Shoppers doesn’t. I don’t feel the need to check in when I stop into a store to buy milk, nobody cares, why do I have to document this?

Foursquare notifications became like white noise to me, I didn’t care who was where, I always dismissed them when they popped up, but it was a constant reminder to me that I needed to participate in the game as well.

I think that location based apps are great, and can serve a great purpose to a business owner, but in London, Ontario there are very few businesses if any who reward the mayor with any kind of recognition. So what does being the mayor of Henry’s camera get me… nothing. You don’t care, Henry’s doesn’t care, it was for bragging rights i guess, but I don’t really care anymore.

I’m not abandoning foursquare anytime soon, I’m just going to use my checkin’s sparingly and for locations/events that I want to share that I’m attending.

This afternoon I had a video shoot that started off very well. There was a slight hiccup when we noticed that we forgot 1 half of our wireless lavalier mic across town, but somebody went and grabbed it with 2 minutes remaining before the main focus of the shoot that we were hired to do started.

After two hours of shooting, I looked at the second camera and noticed some green banding across the image…. basically meaning that the footage from the second camera was now unusable. Because of the time limitations of shooting DSLR, for corporate presentations, we run a two camera shoot and offset the start times so we can deliver a seemless video file covering the entire event.

After seeing this image, I was very distressed.

Notice the Green horizontal banding across the image?

So this means that we are going to have to send a camera off to Canon to get repaired, and I’m going to have to work some major magic in Final Cut Pro to deliver this video.

10 Minutes after this, I received a phone call that clouded my head even more.

After driving back to the office, I thought that it would be best if I took the cameras back with me and apply the new firmware update and see if I could resolve this green banding issue.  When loading the camera case into the car, I put my iPad on top of my car.  THIS IS SOMETHING THAT I NEVER DO!!!

Driving home, I heard a rattling noise on my car, and looked out the rear view the and saw something black fall from my car.  It took a few seconds but then I pieced it together….. IT WAS MY IPAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I stopped the car, turned around to pick it up, got out of the car just in time to watch a pickup truck run it over.

It was truly one of those “NOOOOOOOOOOO” moments.  The thought actually crossed my mind about running out in front of the truck, but it all happened so fast.  Hoping for the best… my heart sank as I picked it up, and turned it on to a white screen with coloured lines.

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I honestly think that the iPad did survive the actual fall from the car, the apple case i bought does provide some protection.

The back of the unit is very dented.

So, the perfect end to the day.

I really did enjoy having my iPad, even for 12 days.  I guess lesson learned, NEVER put anything on top of your car!

Since January 27th when Steve Jobs announced the iPad I knew that I had to have one.  Being a developer on the platform now, it is almost a necessity as all of our future apps from RedCat film will be iPhone/iTouch/iPad compatible.

This is the first time that I have directly dealt with the Apple store on a huge product launch, and I do have to say, Apple really knows what they are doing.

We arrived at the Apple Store in Clinton Township around 10:30am on April 3rd and were greeted by an Apple employee.  He asked my last name, punched it into his iPod Touch and found my reservation for 2 iPads.  We picked up 2 additional units, were in and out of the store within 10 minutes.

Now onto the device.  I do have to say that it is indeed a game changer.  I’ve had a Hackintosh Netbook before, but found my use dwindled after the first initial novelty had worn off.  Typing is really a non issue on the device, the keyboard is very responsive and easy to use (in fact, I am doing this blog post using the WordPress iPad app).  Apple really hit the nail on the head with this device.  I really do feel that it is the “In Between” device fitting in with my iPhone and Notebook.

Speed: This thing is FAST!  I cannot believe how fast it is on tasks such as browsing and email.  I will have to go out on a limb and say that the browsing experience is faster than safari on my MacBook Pro.

Build: The first thing that got me when I unboxed it was the weight.  I was surprised on how much it did weigh.  After a day with it, it became a non issue.  The display on this thing is awesome.  Both Photos & Video looks incredible on this.

Battery life has been incredible on this thing.  I’m used to having my iPhone dead by the end of each day.  The iPad has had major use in the first few days, and I finally charged it last night.

Apps:  While the iPad app store is still in it’s infancy as of this moment, I didn’t feel as though there was many “Killer” apps, YET. I am anxious to see what this thing can do after developers have had the unit for a few months.

Surprisingly, all of the offered twitter clients are flawed.  I am waiting for Tweetie to release their iPad version.

iBooks:  I did love the ebook reader on the iPad, but where it does fall short is the iBooks store.  The buying process is easy, but the titles are very limited.  I did buy my first ebook: “Viral Loop” by Adam L Penenberg and did get 60 pages in on my first reading experience.  Apple also bundles the iBooks app with a free Winnie the Pooh book, that I did read 20 pages of to my daughter.  I was pleased that Amazon did release a Kindle app for iPad, and I find that I have been using it as much as iBooks due to the vast selection that Amazon offers in it’s book store.

Along with the unit, I purchased Apple’s soft case.  It’s pretty good, but I’m not sure how it will stand up to day to day use.

Bottom line: This is a device that will be part of my lifestyle for quite a while.  Using it, I have found that both my iPhone and Notebook use has declined.

After each post, I tagged my tweet with the hashtag #rolluptherim.  Turns out, I wasn’t the only one:

From the National Post:

“Each year, the waning of winter means many things to many Canadians: the NHL trade deadline, last-minute dashes to the slopes, and the crisp sound of rolling coffee cup rims.

It’s quite likely that over the past week, you or someone close to you, has participated in the nation’s favourite contest: Tim Horton’s Roll Up The Rim To Win.

In the old days, if your rolling turned up a winner, you’d simply just high-five your buddies, or do some sort of happy dance in the middle of your local Timmys.

However, in these modern times, aside from practicing your rolling skills online you can celebrate your winnings and vent your frustrations via Twitter.

Using the hashtag #rolluptherim, Twitter users across the nation are keeping a tally of their winnings and failures with the contest.”

With this years contest coming at the end of February, I decided that it would be a good opportunity for myself to learn the iPhone SDK and go through the app development process.  I was interested in doing a quick test project to learn some basic functions and social networking integration, as I am about to develop a full scale application that will be a very large iPhone/iPad app.

So, here it is.  RimRoller, my first iPhone/iTouch application.

The idea behind the application, is pretty simple:

Enter you twitter login info
Buy a Coffee
Roll up the Rim
Press either the win or lose button in the app

After this is done, it keeps a tally of your Win/Loss ratio, and posts an update to twitter stating if you won or lost and your current win/loss ratio.

This is a very 1.0 release with a very crappy UI.  I just wanted to get something out to market in time for the 2010 Roll up the Rim contest.  In future releases, I plan on including Facebook connect, and the ability to specify what exactly you won.

Sticking with a quote that i read recently, “If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough” The RimRoller app was conceived, programmed, and released on the App Store in 8 days time.

Download RimRoller here.

Resources i used during the app development:

Unfortunately, Apple does not make a netbook.  The closest thing is the Macbook Air, an overpriced engineering marvel.

This post at Gizmodo caught my attention, so I decided it was time to make my Apple Netbook.  BestBuy currently is selling the Dell Mini9 8GB model for $299 while they make clearence for the Mini10.

Gizmodo’s post states that it is a challenge to install Leopard on the 8GB model…while it took a couple of tries for me, I found an easy way to pull this off.  Here is the way that I was able to get this to work on the 8GB Model

What you need to do this:

• 8GB USB Stick
• Computer running OSX
• Computer running Windows
• 1 hour of free time

1. First download the streamlined OSX install image from here
2. Open up Disk Utility and partition your USB drive (8GB or larger) into two partitions: one 200MB FAT32 (MS-DOS) partition named “TYPE11″ and one with the remainder of the free space formated as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) called OSXDVD.
3. Move to a Windows PC (I know, I know), plug in your USB stick and download Syslinux-this is a utility that will make the FAT32 partition of your USB stick bootable. With the Windows Command Prompt, cd over to the “win32″ subdirectory of the Syslinux directory you downloaded and type the following, where “F:” is the drive letter for the TYPE11 partition on your USB stick:
   

   syslinux -ma F:

   You won’t get any confirmation, but if you receive no error messages, you’re good: This copies a single file named ldlinux.sys (invisible in Windows) to the USB drive to make it bootable. Pop it out and go back to your Mac if that’s what you’re using.

4. Now, unzip the Type11 ISO (instead of burning it to a disk) and copy the whole directory structure to the TYPE11 partition. Do NOT overwrite the “ldlinux.sys” when it asks—you want to keep the one you copied over with Syslinux.
5. To fill up the other partition, mount the streamlined OS X install DVD image that you just downloaded and, in Disk Utility, select it and choose “New Image.” Save it to the OSXDVD partition of your USB drive as “live.dmg” with “compressed” as the type and encryption set to “none.” This’ll take about a 20 mins to rip the DVD to an image, which should weigh in at around 3.4GB give or take.
6. After that’s done, go to Terminal and copy your mach kernel file to the OSXDVD partition by typing this:
   

   sudo cp /mach_kernel /Volumes/OSXDVD

7. And finally, download this zip file, uncompress it and copy the System and Library folders inside to your OSXDVD partition. This is the last bit of magic needed to make your Mini 9 think it’s working with an actual OS X install DVD.
8. On your Mini 9, restart it and enter the BIOS setup by pressing “2″—and make sure legacy support for USB devices is enabled. Now, reboot and select the boot options list by tapping 0 at startup and choose USB Storage. Select the OSXDVD partition to boot from and press Enter. This should load up the familiar Apple and the OS X installer window

Install OS X

While you’re installing and doing initial configuration of OS X, everything will be all warped to 800×600 rather than your Mini’s native 1024×600 res. Don’t worry, this will be fixed soon enough.

9. The first thing you need to do is format your SSD. Bring up Disk Utility in the installer select it at the highest level possible. Go to “Partition” and make it a single Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) partition. Before hitting Apply, go to Options and select GUID Partition Table. Then hit apply.

10. Now, go back to the Installer, and install OS X to the SSD you just partitioned. You will definitely want to choose to customize your install to save SSD space—I would ditch all the printer drivers and language packs you don’t need to save space. If you install with the default options though, don’t worry—all can be removed later. The install will take about an hour, so go fix yourself a drink. You may come back to an Install Error message at the very end (I didn’t), but if you do, don’t worry. It’s normal.

11. Once OS X is installed, it’s still not ready for use right off the drive. On your first reboot, make sure you boot back into the Type11 bootloader on your CD or flash drive, as your new OS X partition is still not bootable without it.

12. So now you boot back into the Type11 CD and choose option 1 (“Install Retail OS X 10.5″) again, even though you’re not installing. This takes you back to the boot prompt. This time, hit Escape, and type the code “80″ for your SSD (as opposed to “9f” for the external DVD). Press enter, and then back at the “boot:” prompt, type “-f” with no quotes before hitting enter again to boot. This will load all of OS X’s kernel extensions (.kexts) to make sure wi-fi and everything works. OS X should boot, and you’ll go through the typical OS X setup process. Notice the webcam and—hopefully—networking are already working!

13. To get the drivers and everything working properly I installed this file, this reinstalled all the proper drivers for the mini9.

14.  The audio would not work for me because the mini9 does not know how to switch from internal speakers to audio-out jack.  I had to install this program.

15. Upgrading to 10.5.6- this was a challenge as it needs 1.6 GB of free space.  I ran Monolingual to clear up 700mb of space.  I also uninstalled most of the unneeded utilities, games and applications.  One thing that helped was uninstalling iTunes & Quicktime (Don’t worry, they can be reinstalled)

16. Repeat step 13 to reinstall drivers.

The one thing that does not work for me is Sleep.  When the lid closes, it turns off the display.  This can be fixed by intalling a larger RunCore SSD.

Now, I very rarely sync my iPhone with my mac.  I sync my contacts & calendar over the air with Google Sync, and add new music to my iPhone once every couple of weeks.  My MacPro is my main source of my iTunes music (over 80GB), so i use SimplifyMedia to access my entire collection over the air, and keep around 3GB of music on my iPhone for quick listening.  So with the bulk of my content being streamed over the air, this was leaving me behind on my Podcasts, or after a few days on the road, I would burn through all of my podcasts quickly.

In iPhone software update 2.2.1, Apple introduced the ability to download Podcasts over the air via the iTunes mobile app.  I was very intrigued by this feature…. then I used it.  First off, It won’t download any podcasts over 10MB, so about 95% of the podcasts that I listen to.  So my next option is to stream the podcast over the air.  Well, after giving it a spin a couple of times, the results left something to be deisired.  I would be 30 mins into a 1 hour podcast, an incoming call would come in and inturrupt playback.  From there, the podcast would fail to resume, or would spend a couple of minutes rebuffering.  Very frustrating to say the least.

Apple's Podcast Player choking on a 2 hour Podcast

Add to the fact that Apple’s OTA Podcast solution does not allow me to bookmark any of my favorite podcasts,  or us my existing OPML file, has rendered this option useless for me.

So my solution now.  Castroller + RSSPlayer.

From CastRoller’s Site: “CastRoller is an online podcast subscription tool. Users can add their favorite podcasts and will receive personalized recommendations for podcasts they might enjoy. They can add their friends and see the podcasts that their friends are listening to and share episodes with them. With CastRoller, you can manage your podcast subscriptions in once place and use the RSS feeds to have the episodes delivered to all of your devices automatically.”

RSSPLayer is a iPhone/Touch application that allows you to listen to or download podcasts on the go by adding their feed location into the app.

I’ve been using CastRoller over iTunes now since it’s launch, and find it a great resource to organize and share your podcasts, but mainly I’ve been using it as an aggregator for all of my podcasts so I have a single feed in iTunes or on my iPhone.

What I love about CastRoller is that I can simply add a podcast, it shows up in my episode feed, I can a keep separate feed for my favorite eps.

Now on the go, this is where CastRoller really shines for me.  This is the situation where I found the value in CastRoller:  I was in Burlington the day after the premiere of LOST and one of the podcasts that I listen to about the show, ‘The LOST podcast with Jay & Jack” publishes their podcast the same night that the episode airs.  I don’t listen to the podcast when the show is on hiatus, so I delete it out of my iTunes.  While I was on the road, on my iPhone, I was able to login to CastRoller, find the podcast and add it to my collection.  From there I opened up RssPlayer, refreshed my feeds and there was the newest episode of Jay & Jack waiting for me.  This was even before CastRoller had added RssPlayer integration.

Now how is RssPlayer at streaming?  Pretty good, but i don’t really care because I can now download my episodes to my iPhone with NO SIZE LIMIT! Over 3G I was able to download a 76MB episode of Smodcast in about 8 minutes.  This is the way that things should be, simple and straight forward.

Smodcast in RssPlayer (Notice that it picks up the artwork)

It is no secret that I am an Apple Fanboy, but they really have a thing or two to learn about how to make OTA podcast work.  Hats off to Will at CastRoller and the RssPlayer team for the excellent work.

My CastRoller Podcast Collection.

The Channel that I have created on CastRoller – Pro Audio/Video Production

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I am going to shoot some video next week around London, here are some sample stills from the camera:

Here is a sample video shot on the Canon: (I didn’t shoot this one)

The Fallen Angel – Canon 5D MarkII from jongin park on Vimeo.

Seven Years ago today, Apple introduced the iPod.  It was around this time that I officially became an Apple fanboy.  I remember thinking that this was the coolest thing ever, and I just had to get my hands on one.

It was also around this time in history that I purchased my first group of Apple stock.  It was shortly after 9/11 and the markets were down, so I thought that I would quit losing money on mutual funds and convert the money into the stock market.  When I purchased my apple stock, the price was $37 per share.  Today, the markets are down again, and my shares are worth $97, a far distance away from the $200 they were a year ago.

Over the years I have owned many iPods.  I have had mixed luck with some, and great luck with others.

Here are my iPod purchases:

1. 10GB 1st Gen.  Died after 1 year
2. 15GB 2nd Gen.  Sold to a friend
3. 20GB 3rd Gen.  Ooh, it had a colour screen.  Died 8 after months
4. 8GB 1st Gen Nano.  I loved the portability, and the elimination of Hard drives
5. 30GB 4th Gen iPod Video.  Nano was stolen out of my car.  Sold after 10 months.
6. 1GB 2nd Gen Shuffle.  Bought for biking with.  Still have it.
7. 8GB 1st Gen iPhone.  The ultimate device for me.  Dropped it after 8 months.  Gave to my wife
8. 16GB 1st Gen iPhone. Needed a phone without a cracked screen. Sold after 4 months.
9. 16GB 2nd Gen iPhone.  My Current device
 
Here is a pic of my 2nd iPod taken at GM Headquarters in Oshawa circa 2003:

For more photos of iPods around the world, check out iLounge’s iPod gallery here.

So yesterday, I posted the screens from my iPhone.  This was done after i upgraded my firmware to 2.1.  Well today, the dev team released pwnage for 2.1, so once again, my iPhone is jailbroken.  This is a more accurate representation of my iPhone, with the inclusion of qik and scobbler.

Just updated to 2.1 unpwned.  Just thought that I would publish my iPhone screens here every couple of months.  I get pretty even use of most of the applications, but I am really on the fence about Super Monkey Ball, I really am starting to hate it.