Written on July 3, 2009 by admin
I have a chance to review a new, specialized video editing tool called vReveal, just in time to try to fix up some of the shaky vids I’m making with my new iPhone 3GS. But there’s a catch.
vReveal is a MS-Windows® program. Normally this would not be a problem, since I have Windows XP Pro®, Vista® and even the Windows 7® beta operating systems running in virtual machines on my Mac. I use both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Sun Microsystems’ opensource VirtualBox. But my new 24″ iMac apparently has some hardware not supported yet by either of these VM systems, and it’s possible that vReveal itself does not support my video card, even though it’s made by their partner, nVidia (nVidia GeForce GT 130). Maybe upgrading to the latest version of Parallels will help, too.
So, I have some more work to do before I can try out vReveal. Luckily, nVidia has a nifty tool, shown below, that can help locate drivers for their video cards. By having it here in my blog, I can use it from within the various VMs I have running to see if I can get them optimized to take advantage of the nice graphics I enjoy on the Mac OS side. And of course you can do the same; enjoy! The sound card issue may be isolated to Sun’s VirtualBox, and if that’s the case I’ll have to spend some time on the users forum over there to see if I can resolve that issue. But at any rate, here’s the nVidia widget:
Posted in Computers, MacOS X, Open Source, Operating System, Video editing, Virtual Machine, Windows 7, WindowsXP, audio, drivers, iPhone, smartphones, sound card, video card | Comment Now!
Written on July 2, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
Oh, yes! This one could be really fun for bloggers and their readers, since a window into the world can be embedded in any web page. I’m talking about Metaplace, the latest in a long list of VWs (virtual worlds) I’ve dabbled in.
My account (name: KatLemieux) is only a few hours old, so there’s not much to tell yet, but as soon as enough data has been gathered to make it worthwhile, you’ll see it here. You’ll really see it here as soon as I figure out how to do that embedding thing (and manage to get my island into presentable shape).
Posted in Metaplace, Metaverse, Virtual Worlds, blogs | Comment Now!
Written on June 29, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
I’ve been trying to help a friend troubleshoot her blog’s visitor counter today. She’s using Blogger, which I hadn’t tried before, so to be accurate in my suggestions, I created a dummy blog and tried installing several counters on it.
My results were somewhat mixed. I could not duplicate the counter error she’d seen, but I did enjoy trying out another blogging software. I’ve been using WordPress for several years very happily, but it’s always good to try something new. I don’t think I’ll be switching, but I was impressed with how capable Blogger is these days.
Posted in WordPress, blogs | Comment Now!
Written on June 25, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
I was merrily posting a new entry to my personal blog this evening, when I discovered it had been infected with some malware. When I tried to look at the page, all I saw was the background image, and the status bar in Firefox showed “waiting for banished.ru”. After looking at the files on the site and not seeing anything obvious, I submitted a support ticket to my webhosting service. They got back to me right away. They claimed they couldn’t reproduce the problem, and told me to clear my cache and restart the browser (a pretty standard piece of advice, which I’ve given to lots of people myself). However, I had already done that, and tried looking at the site with a different browser, and on a different computer. They all showed the same problem.
I even tried pulling it up on my iPhone with the WiFi turned off, in case it was something that got into the router. Same symptoms. So I wrote back and the techs put a customer support rep on it. By this time, though, I had decided to start up one of the virtual machines I have on this computer, in this case WindowsXP running on Parallels. Being Windows, I keep an anti-virus program updated on that, even though it’s only a virtual machine, and being too cheap to actually pay for software to run on an Operating System I only boot up once in a blue moon, I use AVG Free. Good stuff, that. As soon as I tried to open the blog, up popped a window announcing that it had detected an infected file on the page.
I logged back into the webhost’s support page to close the ticket, and discovered their rep had also seen a javascript file that was the problem, but didn’t take the time to discover which of many I’d installed in that blog was the culprit. However, AVG Free had already told me the URI of the site that was doing bad things, and I was able to find the link with my blog theme editor. I deleted both lines of code that pointed to the offending site, restarted the blog, and there it was, as good as new.
I never thought I’d see the day when an application on Windows saved me from malware, instead of exposing me to it!
Posted in Anti-virus, Computers, Firefox, Operating System, Software, Virtual Machine, WiFi, WindowsXP, blogs, iPhone, malware | Comment Now!
Written on June 25, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
See update at the end of this post.
A mentioned here earlier, my new iPhone 3GS was activated with only minor problems. Now we have another data point to add to the history. My husband’s new iPhone arrived yesterday, days earlier than promised by AT&T, thank you very much! So, I set about putting to work the lessons learned when establishing service to mine.
Everything went very smoothly, and since I did not follow the on-screen instructions to wait (infinitely) for activation to happen magically, but simply switched out the SIM cards from his old phone to the new one, Phil was up and running in less than 30 minutes, including the time required to download and install the 3.0 OS on his old iPhone, then back up his data and restore it to the new phone. That sounds wonderful, and it is, but we have encountered one snag.
When he decided to call me from his new phone, to make sure everything was working as designed, my phone rang, but we could not hear one another. Very odd. We tried texting, and that worked, and Phil tried calling AT&T’s directory service, which also worked. The voice recognition at the other end apparently heard his request clearly, and he could hear the prompts. I did the same with my phone, with similar success. (It was late at night by this time, so we didn’t try calling a friend to try it out.) I tried calling his phone again, and this time he could hear me, but I still could not hear him. We repeated this experiment several times with the same results. So I am not sure what is going on, but will be calling AT&T or Apple this morning if the phone still isn’t working properly. And yes, we checked to make sure neither of us had tapped the Mute button.
In the meantime, I should mention that in order to use my old iPhone as an iPod Touch (without signing up for yet another phone plan), I had to jailbreak it. This was a new experience for me, but after some heart-in-mouth moments waiting for the EPROMs to be flashed, everything come out just fine. I will not be doing this with our new 3GS phones, but since otherwise the old devices would be useless, and we did fulfill the phone company’s 2-year contract, I see no reason not to do it on them. That will give me a platform for on-machine testing of the applications I’m planning (yes, I’m getting on that bandwagon along with tens of thousands of others), and a machine to use for demos once the apps are published and we start flogging them at shows and conferences. So stay tuned for some deep development geekery as I get into programming mode.
Update
On a hunch, I suggested Phil turn his phone off and on again, then try calling me. That did the trick! We could both hear each other just fine. Activation complete.
Posted in AT&T, App development, Operating System, Programming, blogs, iPhone, wireless | Comment Now!
Written on June 24, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
Some things have been remade frequently because they are fill a useful niche, and someone thinks they can either do them better, or because they want to see them in a new form, or perhaps they perceive a potential money-maker. This seems to be the case with color wheel applications. A quick Google search turned up a page with over twenty of them, mostly for the Windows desktop, and I am certain there are hundreds more to be found with more extensive digging. Even on the still relatively new iPhone platform there are at least six strong contenders.
The ones I found (all prices are in US$) are:
Here’s a few screenshots from the two apps I bought. First, colorSutra:
I generated the “Peachy keen” color using the color wheel, by dragging my finger across the display then adjusting a couple of slidebars to manipulate the tint (amount of black or white added to the pure color) and saturation. I clicked the “Display” icon on the bottom of the screen, which showed it along with coordinating colors. Finally, after saving the color, and giving it a name, I was able to see the hexadecimal value, which is useful for web site design since that is how colors are defined in HTML.
Another way to find colors with colorSutra that I really liked is illustrated here. By selecting the “Camera” button, you are presented the choice of taking a new snapshot with the iPhone’s camera, or selecting a picture already in your Camera Roll. Once an image is imported, you can tap or drag your finger around on the image to choose an individual color, as I’ve done here. Then you save it and display the definition, as above. It is a useful little app for finding exactly the right shade you want.
Then, from Palettes:
Palettes is quite a bit more sophisticated, as one would hope for an app that costs five times as much as colorSutra. This app also has a tool for extracting colors from a camera snapshot, although it does that automatically rather than letting you scrub around the image yourself. What is particularly good about Palettes is the large range of colors you can store in each palette, or collection of related colors — up to 25 — and the way you can extract additional palettes from any color in the set. There is even a function for creating blends from any two colors in the set, with choices of 1, 2 or 3 blended colors along a spectrum from one original to the other. On another menu, you can drag one of the colors from your palette into a “well” at the bottom of the screen, and the app generates another palette of colors, from five to fifteen, based on your choice of controls, selected by tapping little wheel icons. If you want to create not just a color, but a whole color scheme, Palettes is an app you will really appreciate.
So, why do I care? Well, as a website developer, I sometimes struggle to find just the right shade or combination of colors for a page design, and as a jewelry designer I also look for new combinations to generate ideas for new items. Actually, there are dozens and dozens of reasons to use apps like these, but having them on the iPhone makes them particularly useful for crafters and decorators, since having a color scheme with you when you go shopping can be very handy. But there is another reason to use them on the iPhone, and that is the touch screen. Both of these apps I’ve reviewed here use touch gestures to perform actions quickly and easily. This makes them intuitive and fun to use, as well as producing quick results. I will be using both these apps for some time, I’m sure.
Posted in App development, Design, Operating System, Programming, Software, WindowsXP, iPhone | Comment Now!
Written on June 19, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
I should have done this hours ago. Following my instincts, I went ahead and switched the SIM cards between my old and new iPhones, and when I turned it back on the new one was activated! In business!! Why AT&T and Apple couldn’t have just come out and said to do that in the first place, I’ll never understand, but it worked, so now I’m happy.
Posted in AT&T, iPhone, wireless | Comment Now!
Written on June 19, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
It has been roughly six hours since I first powered up my iPhone 3G S, but I am still waiting for the magical activation to happen. A little while ago it occured to me to look up my blog posts from June, 2007, to remind myself of how long it took to get the original iPhone activated. The earliest entry about iPhones in this blog doesn’t help, since it dates from the software 2.0 upgrade rather than startup, but my personal blog has the story. It seems that of the two phones we bought then, on 29 June 2007, one was activated quickly, but the other took three days because of a bookkeeping mix up at AT&T.
I haven’t been keeping up with what other users are seeing (on Twitter, of course) because I was doing school work like a good girl, but now I think it’s time to check it out. I have even followed @ATTNews, all to no avail. One article I read (but have since misplaced) said they got a message in iTunes saying activation could take as long as 48 hours, but I got no such message, probably because my account is already active. I’m sorely tempted to try switching the SIM cards, but might hold off a little longer.
In the meanwhile, I have been having fun playing with all the apps that don’t require the phone service. Since I have WiFi here, that’s just about everything except the actual phone. This puppy is fast! How fast, you ask? Have a look:
Posted in AT&T, Computers, Hardware, Operating System, WiFi, blogs, grad school, iPhone, smartphones, wireless | Comment Now!
Written on June 19, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
It’s here at last. Now, I’m not going to do the “unboxing” schtick — that’s been done. But as I recall from 2007 when we bought our original iPhones, getting the shrinkwrap off was the hard part.
Connecting to iTunes and restoring from the backup I made from my old phone has gone well, but I’m still waiting for AT&T to activate the new phone. I haven’t seen any information about deactivating the old one yet, and it is still working, so I’m not sure what if anything I need to do to change over to the new one. Maybe that will be automatic, but I suspect I will need to switch sim cards between the two phones. I don’t want to mess with that without some instruction telling me to do it, though. If I don’t find some info on the Web about it, I may have to call customer service. Like, I really want to sit on hold for hours, with all the other half-million new iPhone owners also trying to activate their phones!
Although the new phone isn’t activated on AT&T yet, it is connected to my WiFi hotspot. All my apps are installed and updated over WiFi, so I assume next time I sync the old phone any purchased apps will be deleted from that one. I wonder how that will work. Perhaps I’ll have to rename the old phone to avoid confusing their libraries?
Ah, ha! I found the answer. Apple, bless their hearts, have a support page for people who are changing out an old iPhone for the new one. That answered my question. “In the US, iPhone 3G includes a SIM and your original iPhone’s SIM is not needed. Your original iPhone account information will be transferred to the SIM included with iPhone 3G when you purchased it. Keep your original iPhone SIM with your original iPhone.” Oh, and the compass works fine, thank you. So, I just need to wait for activation to happen when it happens. As usual, trying to activate a half-million phones in one day has the system a little bogged down, so I’ll just be patient.
Posted in AT&T, Hardware, Software, WiFi, iPhone, smartphones, wireless | Comment Now!
Written on June 18, 2009 by Katherine W. Prawl
Tomorrow is the day the iPhone 3G S arrives, finally. A couple of hours ago I checked on my order with AT&T, and saw that it has been shipped via FedEx, but there is still no tracking number posted there, so I will just have to be patient and trust. But one unexpected side effect of all the excitement is that I’ve picked up a few followers on Twitter whose only commonality seems to be interest in the iPhone. Yes, I’ve tweeted about it, which is how they’ve found me, or maybe they found this blog with my article about the 3.0 operating system upgrade? Whatever, it’s a welcome occurance.
Posted in AT&T, Operating System, Twitter, iPhone, smartphones | Comment Now!
