Now the wait. Naturally, I “need” the version with 3G, otherwise what’s the point of a mobile device? That won’t be available for around 90 days. But in the meantime, I am downloading the SDK with iPad emulator from the Apple Developer site, and who knows? Maybe I’ll even get around to developing something for it someday? In my copious spare time, of course.

However, while it is not possible to get the hardware accelleration normally available from the GPU, it is still possible to use vReveal to clean up shaky, low-contrast videos. It just takes longer since it will be processed by the CPU instead of the GPU. Much longer — in some cases it can be up to 20Xs slower on the CPU. But if you have the time, it can be done with just one click of a button.

While investigating CUDA, I was bemused to see a whitepaper in the Nvidia CUDA Zone called “Fast N-body Simulation with CUDA”. If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you may recall an item I wrote about a year ago, called Virtual Worlds Galore, that included a video made by the guys at Genkii in cooperation with the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, or MICA, on this subject. Apparently n-body simulations are all the rage now that desktop computers are capable of displaying them, thanks to virtualization and graphics acceleration architectures like the Nvidia CUDA. They’re a bit over my head, since I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a 3D visualization expert, but its fascinating to follow what’s being done by people who are. And it is more than a little interesting to see how so many of the topics I cover are connected one way or another in unexpected ways.

The problem I was trying to correct is that the video card emulator in VirtualBox 1.5 was not up to handling a high-end graphics task like video editing. Version 3 does a much better job, especially after I read the User Manual (gasp!) and followed the suggestion there to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions, a package of device drivers and applications designed to optimize the guest operating system’s performance. It did indeed do that. Before installing these Guest Additions, I was unable to resize the window where Windows 7 beta was running, and when I clicked the cursor inside that window it was “captured” by the VirtualBox application until I tapped the “Host key” to release it. With Guest Additions installed, I can stretch the display window as large or small as I want it, and the cursor moves smoothly from one OS to the other without requiring a keystroke to release it.

There are a few other enhancements as well, including shared folders, which allow access to any designated folder on the host system, time synchronization between host and guest systems, and of course better graphics support.

So, with all that, does vReveal run? Yes! So, I will be testing it using some videos I’m shooting on my new iPhone 3GS, and will have some before and after examples here soon. It still might not work, because even though the application did open, when I tried to look at a sample video I got an error saying it could not find a compatible GPU (Graphic Processor Unit). Even though the iMac has an nVidia GeForce GT 130 on board, the Windows 7 installation may not be able to take advantage of it if the correct drivers are not available. Cross your fingers!

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:

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.

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!

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.

The ones I found (all prices are in US$) are:

• Color Expert $9.99 by Code Line Communications
• Palettes $9.99 (also has free Lite version) by Rick Maddy
• cliqcliq Colors $2.99 by cliqcliq
• colorSutra $1.99 by Alex Rybkin
• Color Set $2.99 by Corellis

Color Wheel $0.99 by Trevor Gray

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.

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.

Oh, about that alternaCrafts thing. That’s the new epublishing company I’ve started with Suzanne Tourtillott and Susan Huxley. If the blog isn’t live there yet, just wait a day or two. We are nearly ready to let ‘er rip.

Meanwhile, back to the iPhone. The 3.0 software was installed before I finished typing the last paragraph, with no problems at all. The first thing I noticed was a new icon on the home page called “Voice Memos”, and next i realized there are more app pages available. I was counting them backwards from the last one, got to eleven on the home page, but there was one more. That isn’t an app icon page at all, but a search page, and is it fast! Since we had just been through a tornado watch here a little while ago, I did a search for “weather” and before I even finished typing the word it found three instances, two of them application names and the third (actually, first to show in the list) was a record in my Contacts app.

So, I’m pretty impressed, and more eager than ever to see the new phone later this week.