Pimp your Picture Frame - part 1

Last week I bought one of those digital I-mate Momento Pictures frames from iBood.
As with most of the stuff you find on iBood, this item is part of some left-over stock because i-mate has decided to discontinue their picture frames service, but for a price of 50 euros, what can go wrong, especially as the frame sports a cool feature like Wifi!
Yep, it claims to load your images right of your local network or from the web.

As some reviews al ready prove to be very negative, I didn't expect much but in the end it's quite alright except for one mayor flaw: the thing doesn't load standard RSS feeds but instead relies on their propriety Momentum Live service to feed the device online content.
I could have lived with that except .... that service is discontinued :-)
Bummer, there goes my intention of having a cheap Picture frame for my mum to automatically show the latest updates pics of the kids ...

There are some ways to get the thing to connect to the web, but it involves tinkering with DNS-servers and mimicking the Momento live service with your own scripts but that's way too much trouble to be useful.

Still, I was intrigued and when that happens I know myself good enough to just pursue the possibilities or else it will be haunting my head for some weeks. Better to just get rid of it :-)

I decided I wanted a picture frame that not only loads pictures from an arbitrary RSS feed but also could show other "sidebar gadget" like content like twitter updates, resource monitors, textual RSS items ...
The momento frame does support Windows Sideshow, which means you can push little info snippets from your (windows) PC to the device to be displayed. This is very easy to setup and is also very easy to develop for, but it's also very limited as you have no control of the layout, the rate of updates or the amount of text that gets displayed.

In fact, the only thing the device does well is displaying jpg images - it IS a picture frame after all !
Luckily, loading pictures over wifi from your network works really well and is very easy to setup.
It works with the "shared media" function of Windows Media player - actually a pretty cool feature.
I hit another snag when Windows Media Player turned out to be notoriously flaky to update its media library when new pictures are being added so new items sometimes took several hours to show up ; so much for fast twitter updates :-)
After some experiments I found the solution: the Momento frame does store some pictures in its cache, but when a network connection is present it always fetches a fresh copy from your pc. Thank god for that as it means that when you update or replace an image keeping the same filename, the new picture get instantly loaded on the frame (the next time the playlist reaches that image)

Great! Now if I had a program that would update the same set of pictures with new stuff coming from my picture library AND the web, I was all set.
I didn't want to spend too much time with rendering textual items to images, after all, that's what HTML is for no?
If a screenshot of a webpage could be feed to the device, that would allow everything we need. 
Witness the birth of a new project: the "PictureFrame-o-matic" !

After some fiddling in Visual Studio I now have a program that

• Can read standard RSS feeds
• Takes any image enclosure it finds in the RSS, resamples it to 800x600 and stores it a folder, numbered with the name of the feed.
• Can retrieve a screenshot of a  webpage and stores it as a jpg
• Can combine 2 images (a webpage and a picture) with some overlay options to render some (web)content on top of the image.

the images are not added to the folder, but the existing images simply get replaced with new ones
the Momento device points to that folder and essentially displays the same playlist over and over again, only with updated pictures.

It works really well !
The layout is completely open as it is just HTML and/or flash content being saved as an image, the content is completely customisable as you can take any webpage or RSS feed as your source (e.g. news items or  Poetry lines, ...) and the rate of updates is instantly.

I'll leave it be for now, but it's certainly a project I want to continue some day.
There still are some drawbacks:

• Webpages that require a login don't work (twitter e.g. so I had to create a custom page that shows my tweets from the twitter API)
• Updates only work when your PC is on and the PictureFrame-o-matic program is running.
  The momento does have a good fallback system: if the PC is off or otherwise not reachable, it displays the last 50 pictures from it's cache.
• it's a bit resource hungry for the hosting PC
• It would be cool to integrate the existing windows sidebar gadgets but I have no idea (yet) how to accomplish that. (apart from taking a screenshot of the desktop and cropping it around the gadget, but that's lame)

Thing to do in the next future

• create some dedicated webpages to be displayed on the device
• create a website to configure each picture frame, setting what content should be displayed (which would allow you to configure the picture frame using your phone) sounds a lot like the interface i did for Tweetshirt.
• post some screenshots
• clean up the source code and post it here.
• Maybe demo it on some barcamp or something (after all - the same engine could be used to feed the tweetshirt)

It's still not a good solution for my mum (as a PC has to be running all the time) but it's a nice gadget and I think this setup really gives a lame half-ass picture frame as the i-mate Momento a huge makeover.

On a technical side, Maybe this is the tipping point that I start liking .net and Visual Studio more then Delphi ... (never though I would say that)
It's just that pulling webcontent into your program, working with xml and juggling images around is soooooo much easier in .net then it is in Delphi. (sure, you can write .net in Delphi too, but let's not go there :-) )
Oh well ...

There, that's out of my system.
On to the next project.

There's no such thing as the best phone

Congratulations to MG Siegler for writing absolutely the worst phone review ever.
What's makes it so bad is that's on Techcrunch, the worlds most read tech blog and honestly, one can expect a bit more insight from writers of this blog ...
MG rants on how it's such a good move HTC killed the physical Keyboard of this supposedly next "iPhone killer"
*sigh*
maybe tech-writers should replace the word "phone" with 'car' in their minds ...
Do you ever see an article boosting the new Mercedes as the "BMW-killer" ?
Of course not: all car brands have their place, it's up to the buyer to pick the right one, depending on his needs, budget and personal preferences.
There's no such thing as "the best car" as everybody will agree to.
Phones are no different.
There's no such thing as the best phone, it's just depends on your needs, personal preferences and budget.
Some might find it hard to believe but the iPhone is not the device that everybody reflects there phone-needs to.
so MG doesn't like physical keyboards? For gods sake, let him buy a phone without one and stop whining.
In contrary, I find a physical full qwerty keyboard a must have feature and will never buy a phone without one.
It's quite simple actually

• If you mainly want to use your phone to read and write emails, manage your contacts and manage your calendar, get yourselves a Blackberry
• If you want a decent and easy phone which main function is a .. erm .. phone, get yourselves a Nokia
• if you want the top in user experience and ease of use, and if you don't mind spending to much money, and if you don't care about things like "open platform", "freedom of choice" or "vendor lock-in", get yourself an iPhone
• if you want an internet device, get yourselves a Nokia N900 or other internet tablet
• if you want a device that does it all, and you can get used to  the resulting added complexity, get yourself a windows mobile device.
• if you're a true geek, go Android

Or if you have some other criteria like low price, or insanely large buttons, or being compatible with your car-kit or whatever ... pick another: you have gazillion of equally good choices.

The term "iPhone killer" was stale 2 years ago, if anybody still cares to use it present day, in my book they will loose all journalistic credibility in a flash ...

TWIIST

Friday I attendend a brand new belgium conference for webdesigners and webdevelopers called TWIIST.be : The Way Internet Is Supposed To Be.

The goal was an affordable one day conference for like-minded web creatives, and boy, did they succeed!
I've been to my fair share of conferences but I must say this was about the best one: the topics where spot on and the speakers were top notch.

It started a bit slow though. The first session by Serge Jespers was OK, but misplaced: an audience of mostly professional webbuilders don't want to sit through a generic talk about Adobe Flash and AIR. I though it somewhat a missed opportunity that Serge didn't dive deep into a place for flash/flex in an open architecture sementic web, but oh well ... it was early and people still had to wake up :-)

Things started to get going with excellent talks about "Transient Semantics and Microformats" by Brian Suda and "Cost Effective Web Development" by Drew McLellan. I didn't fully agree with Drew, but still it was an interesting reminder to keep your common sense in everything you do.

After a HUGE Twunch, the star of the day took the stage: Aral Balkan about "Remember the Magic"
In one word: He was BRILLIANT. Allthough his talk was rehearsed up to the small details and he clearly is a very professional speaker who knows how to play an audience, it absolutely worked: It was the best session i've ever seen.
Honestly, if you ever have the chance to attend one of his talks, don't hesitate, you won't regret it. (apart from that, at the afterparty it turned out he's also an extremely nice guy and fun to hang out with ... man, what are the odds? :-) )

Elliot Jay Stocks had a bit of an ungrateful task to speak after the magical sparks of Aral, but his talk about the imporantce of beauty in absolutely everything was more than OK.
"Experiments in data portability" by Glenn Jones was a bit dry but right into my alley and the awesome Chris Messina did a nice wrap-up of the "The open, social web"

It really was a nice mix between webdesign and webdevelopment and the scale of the event was small enough so that at the very nice afterevent (yeah, free beer by Netlog !) you actually had a chance to talk to all of the speakers.
Apart from the great speakers, it was really nice to meet so many old and new contacts, the after event with DJ boskabout really was the cherry on the pie

I don't think I was the only one who liked it: I've seldomly read such raving comments on twitter about a conference!

All in all Filip Bunkens and Simon Schoeters did a GREAT job organising the event, I think absolutely everybody had a great day and absolutely everybody also is hoping they can pull a version 2 out of their hats sometime in the future.

TWIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIST !!!!

Lo-tech

lo-tech twittering by @sasvangent #twiistbe

(Posted by mobile phone)

And the winner is ... Twoddler !

I didn't win any prizes today at the Inca award ceremony, but that's OK: the 10 finalists are all very fine projects and totally deserve the spotlight.
After much suspense in the final moments, the winner turned out to be Twoddler : an series of Arduino powered twittering Fisher Price toys to keep track of and communicate with your toddlers.
Of course, the combination of Twitter and Arduino is a proven recepy for succes :-)

My personal favorite, Hupskadee, won Silver, as did startcomputer, Tableau and Ikkanhet

Congratulations to all!

I'm very sure my own projects will incarnate in another form one day: the game engine behind Inca - the game will find a place as online emerald mine engine, to play the gazzilion of levels made in the 80's and early 90's at emeraldmines.net.
The technology behind Lopend Vuur has found it's place in a bigger backend framework and turned out to be commercially interesting.
Wamm.be will stay at wamm.be. I'm sure this idea will get picked up sooner or later.

The inca-ceremony was hosted at the iminds event.
iminds was OK, but I kind of expected a bit more: it felt a bit like one giant IBBT commercial - which is understandable and perfectly fine as they organised (and paid for) everything. The interaction with the enterpreneur-centered  audience and the (sometimes) politic speakers was euhm ... interesting by moments :-)
Anyway, it was nice to meet new and old contacts, saw lots of  interesting projects and .... got inspired.

Kudos again to the Inca-team for a very wonderful initiative.
I hope they come up with a second run in some form in the future.

Inca award

WOW - that where some insane last few hours monday night, but big fun!
monday at midnight was the deadline for the Inca award

I first heard about it at barcamp and immediately thought "Hey! that's my cup of tea"!
After all, creating small(-ish) fun web apps is something I do to ease my mind :-)
The competition was open for about a month and you had to build a new application.

I entered 3 apps (yes THREE - that's a bit insane ...)

• Inca - the game (that was just for fun - not very useful in a social way but VERY cool :-) )
• Lopend Vuur: an application to quickly reach the relevant group of people in case of a logistic emergency with your kids (together with Beate from e-zen who came up with the idea)
• Wamm: which was an idea of Pieter Theuns. it's a fun way of nailing an "agreement" between two people for small favours (like borrowing a book etc...)

More on that later, I'm especially fond of my solution to handle the SMS traffic of both Lopend Vuur and Wamm: instead of setting up an expensive external 2-way sms gateway, everything is running from a small GSM modem that's sitting at my home: just plug in a SIM card with heaps of cheap (or even free) SMS credits and you're good to go.
The only drawback is that the throughput is rather small - it can only send 1 SMS each 4 seconds or something - but for most projects that's more then fast enough.

I really liked the Inca contest. Not for the contest itself, but it really created some vibes in the Belgian developers "scene" with lot's of people building stuff just for the fun of it - or to show of - or to build something useful ... but mainly, because they WANTED so, not because a big paying customer (or a big nasty boss) wanted them to.
That "bottom up" approach is exactly the type of thinking Inca was designed to stimulate, and I think they succeeded very nicely: 35 applications where submitted and amongst them some real gems.

My favorites (apart from my own of course):

• Twoddler (cool!)
• Verdwaald vuil (looks absolutely gorgeous)
• TVtweets (good idea)
• Mijn lucht (brilliant in its simplicity)
• Hupskadee (excels in about everything: both design and technical implementation is fabulous: /me jealous!  I think they are heading for the number one spot in the competition)

Again - it's notable how ubiquitous Twitter is ... 7 applications have something to do with twitter in some way, that's 20% !

Anyway ... I'm also glad it's over :-) (back to more sane working hours)
I'm hoping to meet some of the teams at the iMinds conference, 12th of may 

Inca09 - The Game

Talking about the future of applications

At Barcamp Antwerp I was interviewed by the nice people of the IBBT in the light of their Inca Awards.
They asked me what my vision was on the future of application developement.
A though question but my 2 main points seemed to be

1. Make sure you can inject your passion into your project and don't forget to have fun
2. Keep it simple but don't forget the WOW-effect and build something people can relate to

Hmmm, only 10 days left for the Inca-awards deadline ...
Am I going to participate?
Why offcourse !!!
The first project is almost finished and should be released next monday.
Then on the the next one! :-)

E-textile LED matrix - part 1

I finished the first segment of the tweetshirt 2.0 today.

It's a 8x8 matrix of superflux RGB leds stitched to a piece of textile.
Darn! It took me me 4 evenings to sew the 64 leds on the cloth with conductive thread I got from sparkfun.com.


This is the backside - 256 connection points.
The worst part is that the thread frays like mad so you really have to be very careful with the amount of stitches you can make.

This is the front side


It's hyperflexible and very wearable, allthough I'll have to add some insulating layers to keep the thread from short-circuiting (which is harmless with such low voltages and leds)

Next step is to figure out a decent way to hook it up to the Arduino. I could use a Lilypad of course, which is designed for these things, but I want to keep it more modular and simple.
The goal is to have more then one of these patches connected  together to form a bigger display, so I have to figure out some protocol to control multiple matrixes with 1 controller.
Probably I'll attach a shiftregister to each matrix and connect those to the arduino.
It would be really cool if I could manage to make each matrix a bit standalone so I could just chain the next patch with 4 metal push-buttons ... well, that may be one bridge too far - we'll see.

Air installer

Just a quick post in the "please remember this" section.

If you ever have problems installing Adobe AIR applications on Windows Vista because the .air extention is not recognised, do a "open with" and find the executable located in "Program Files/Common Files/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/"

I was suprised this info took me a few minutes to find, especially as this (recently updated) Adobe knowledge base article simply states "This is a known issue on Windows Vista and there is currently no solution"


WTF? that's the most stupid answer ever: there's a solution for EVERY problem.
Sometimes a  solutions might be a bit extreme, or end up being worse then the problem, but not in this case: simply browsing to an executable yourself is just fine.

Launching Twikilist

I'm launching a new little service today: Twikilist
Yes, of course it is twitter enabled, what did you expect ? :-)

Twikilist was created as a simple, open and public registration list for your events.
Why?
i love the open and public nature of community-editable systems like wiki's or blogcomments, but i noticed some drawbacks, especially when a lot of people are trying to get their name on the list at the same time.

Enter Twikilist: create a list, select the features you want, spread the word and don't worry about the rest.
Registration lists are easy to embed in your wiki, website or blogpost, or you can use the Twikilist website itself.

Did I mention I love Twitter? And so does Twikilist
By simply checking a box you allow people to register - or unregister - for your event by sending a tweet, giving extra visibility to your event.
For example, if your event is called "TwikiLaunch", sending a tweet @twikilist #TwikiLaunch I'll be there will get on the list (and @twikilist #TwikiLaunch cancel will remove you)

Twikilist was made because Topanga was looking for a nice and simple tool to take the hassle out of public registration lists (And she bribed me with the most delicious dinner I have tasted in the last few years, so how could I refuse?)
It was wipped up in a few evenings so if you find any bugs, let me know.
A big thanks to cubus for doing the CSS design

It's first use is for the Blogborrel, 30th of May in Antwerp - Feel free to join !

Magical Multicolor Lights