Tablet and Mobile

I’ve just finished work on my “UberBareBoard” and figures I’d jot something down about another success of the week.

There can be no doubt that the iPad is a wonderful – and wonderfully useful device – I still chuckle at two of my (now retired) professional colleagues who only a year ago told me emphatically that there would be something better just around the corner – and one of them insisted there was no business use for the iPad. I told them they were utterly wrong then – and I along with countless others have been proven right to this day… 2 years after the launch of the original iPad there is STILL nothing to touch this device (and of course the latest update continues to push the bar though not at much as the first two) both for personal and business use (within the limits of a non-Windows device designed for media consumption).

The ONE thing you can say about iPad (and iPhone) that’s occasionally annoying – is lack of USB and general expansion support.

Well, that just went out of the window because now you can meet CloudFTP.

This product is quite impressive – not only in itself but in how it came about – the guys responsible used KICKSTARTER – oh, how I wish this had been around 15 years ago when I was designing home-control kit (which I may yet resurrect). So off you go designing a product, put it on the Kickstarter site along with mockup imagery etc – and convince the public you need X amount of money from them in return for prototypes or whatever… it works. They needed $100k and ended up with a quarter million dollars!

Anyway – there it is on the right – so what IS “CloudFTP”? It’s a small box that fits in your hand, it has a battery inside… and it pretends to be a WIFI access point… You can apply power to it which charges it – but once charged it runs quite well stand-alone – but here’s the thing – you can plug in a USB stick or USB external drive – and it makes that available to your iPhone or iPad wirelessly!  Not only that but as of version 1.1 software, it will stream media such as videos straight from your iPad with no special software at all – just a browser in fact (though personally I use “Buzz Player”).

So – that’s the end of the no USB arguments – this thing fits in your pocket or briefcase and can talk to up to 3 i-Devices at once (I’ve only tested one at any one time).

What can I say, it just WORKS – plug in a chip or disk and it works – end of story.

So – here’s the thing… it’s around $99 retail which is, what, £61 in English… AND it can double up as a handy charger for your iPhone!  So all you need now is a memory stick… or a disk.

Here’s the CHEAP way to get an external disk…   I noticed I had a 2.5” disk floating about the house and wondered how much it would cost to get an external enclosure – figuring by the time I was done it might not be worthwhile – WRONG.  Checkout EBAY and for under a fiver you can get a neat, small USB enclosure for any 2.5” drive you might have floating around from past upgrades…

The enclosure simply connects to the drive – one reason they’re cheap might be that the drive rattles around due to a little space at the end – I fixed that easily with a strip of door insulation foam at the far end – now it’s rock-solid – I have all of my music and there, all my photos, my Spanish lessons and a good number of videos – ALL without putting a dent in the iPad/iPhone’s limited (but not limiting) memory!

Since taking the photos I’ve renamed the unit (which you can do straight from the iPad/iPhone web browser) and put a decent password on it – what more could you want.

Peter Scargill.

Still working on remote control by iPad… while waiting for the first Raspberry Pi to arrive, I’m continuing to work with Arduino clones. I use the name repeatedly just as it’s familiar to those in the field, but essentially we’re simply talking about a minimal ATMEL-based processor board with reset and power components. Having discovered that the Chinese do prototype boards quite cheaply and quickly I figured I’d have a go at doing my own. The Eagle PCB package is free for anyone wanting to have a go up to a certain size board. I’ve used this package over the years but not for a decade so it’s nice to see they’re still in operation and obviously they are very popular with the hobby community.

Anyway, here’s the board so far. This is a “jack of all trades” board as I put stuff in that “might come in handy”.

As you can see, it has it’s own proper 5v regulator (fastened down with some heatsink area) and power connector, standard Arduino-type general connectors and the usual microchip, xtal and a crude 3.6v supply via a couple of diodes. The connectors include the normal programming connector, ICSP and one (lower left) specifically for the cheap Chinese RF modules. ~I’ve also put in a 24c65 socket there as the Atmel chip has only 1k of EEPROM for storing logs etc. and the socket I’ve added lets you add a 24c65 or 24c256 chip for up to 64KB of logging or other storage (can’t use for programs).

The next step is to find out the realities of actually getting prototypes made in China. I looked all over the UK and I might be missing something but there’s no-one here to even remotely compete on prototypes – these work out at around a fiver each for 10-off which means if I’ve made a mistake it’s not going to break the bank – but it’ll be weeks before they turn up – so more information at the time… I’ve jokingly called the board “UberBareBoard”… I’ll find out how super it is (or not) when they arrive.

 

 

On the subject of iPads -  has anyone noticed the utter lack of anything new and exciting recently – same with iPhone – it’s as it people are running out of ideas. A good old fashioned (but not old) adventure would be nice, not one of those silly “guess the hidden objects” but a proper adventure…

This one is for techies only.. and you might ask what it has to do with the iPad?  It was thanks to the iPad that I discovered that sending messages around the web isn’t as simple as it looks. The plan is to have a range of gadgets that I can control from anywhere in the world from my iPhone or iPad.  I have one up and running though I’m not entirely happy with the mechanism, it works. I want a better way however. Read on if you’re technically inclined – if not, I’ll do my best but this stuff is complicated.

I’ve been playing around with a little Atmel microcontroller recently (see on the left – little board with inputs and outputs using a small 28-pin controller chip), using what’s known as the Arduino libraries – specifically using an IDE (PC program that lets you edit code and then send it to a small board) that lets you program the little chip in C++.  In fact that’s a stock photo, I built the stuff up from chips the hard way as it’s a lot cheaper that way and more fun. The standard library for the Arduino has an Ethernet library that lets the devices talk to the Internet – except that it’s not that reliable and the Ethernet boards are not that cheap – hence people have been trying to come up with alternatives for ages and one of them is a board based on the ENC28J60 chip. Suffice it to say they cost around a fiver and make Internet-based projects a practical reality.

Well, that’s the theory. The libraries let you treat the little chip as a SERVER or a CLIENT.  As a SERVER, the Arduino can respond to browser requests for a web page just like the BBC – except where the BBC has trillions of bytes of memory – the Arduino has – erm, well, about  2,000 bytes.  A tad limiting.

This means that handling multiple page requests, multiple users, password protection, fancy graphics are mostly beyond the reach of this device.

I decided there must be a better way. There are 2 main ways for a web page to send information to a server (such as the BBC or Arduino). You can send stuff along with the address… i.e.

www.bbc.co.uk/news.aspx?myname=Pete

See that stuff in purple – well, that’s “passing an argument” – and you can pass lots of them – just look at an Amazon page in the middle of a transaction. The problem with that is it’s messy and makes it relatively easy to screw up. The other way is via FORMS – you’ve seen forms – press submit.. you don’t get to see the information… and that’s what I wanted.

I’m using “myname=Pete” here but you get the general idea, for, say an Internet Thermostat I might want the web page to show the current settings and let me adjust the heating, the fallback temperatures etc… quite a lot of info to send back and forth and that’s done by simply separating the arguments with an ampersand.

?arg1=this&arg2=that&arg3=other    – etc etc

The problem with that is – it’s incredibly hard to get your head around this stuff.  In the above example, this is what the webserver might see…

GET /1/1/news.aspx?myname=Pete HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, */*
Referer: http://www.httprecipes.com/1/1/
Accept-Language: en-us
UA-CPU: x86
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Host: www.httprecipes.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

The only bit you’re interested in is capturing “myname=Pete” and you have to wade through all this stuff – with very little memory to spare this can be challenging ESPECIALLY as the information might occur twice – or part of it.. there’s a field called the REFERER field which depending how you do things could also refer to myname and Pete.

And that’s just getting information FROM the web page TO the Arduino… getting it BACK can be even more fun.

I wanted rich web pages – not stripped down, memory-hungry versions and so decided to enlist the aid of normal webpages and a normal web server. A form would sit on the normal web server (I have a hosting company I use (JustHost)  as do many technical types so creating pages and storing them is not an issue… that page would then SEND form information to Arduino – but because Arduino’s web page creation facilities are limited, I’d have the little board redirect information back to the REAL server… and that’s where I came unstuck – the only way was to pass information on the address line… so firstly the user sees a redirect and secondly they see all that rubbish on the address line.

It works, my thermostat works… here it is on the right. This comprises 2 simple boards, the one that’s boxed already contains a micro – and the Ethernet card – it has a plug-in-the-wall power supply and it talks to a Web page. The little board at the front comprises a 4-line LCD display and a little controller on the back (the panel to the right merely contains 2 lights (power, heat) and 2 buttons (up, down)… all of this will be in a pretty case before long and looking far more impressive.

But I’m not entirely happy about the way it communicates… so I started reading. There is something called WEBSOCKETS that lets a browser and a controller talk directly and continuously to each other – JUST THE JOB.. erm, no, it’s a work in progress and won’t work with the world’s (currently) leading browser – so that’s out.

Then it hit me…

If I make the controller act as a CLIENT – that is, it’s not serving up pages – it’s sending a page request, just as a browser would – with information passed on the command line (except there’s no-one to see this!) to a normal web server…. which returns information in the form of a web page – and you can put anything in a web page – anything that can be easily read and converted into numbers etc… surely this would do.

Well, it turns out that when you request a web page – your normal browser retries over and over if it fails the first time – the packages just don’t get through every time – but you the user don’t notice it as the browser keeps retrying and then either gets success – putting the whole lot together – or fails with the usual message.

So now my little board has to know where the returning page starts and ends…

I hit on the idea of having Arduino talk to a webserver, which would store sent information into a datbase – and send a page back with info from that database… so the Arduino never talks to the end user… the end user talks to a “proper” web page – which interacts with a “proper” server and shares the information in the database. IDEAL.

 

All I needed to do was have Arduino regularly (every couple of seconds) talk to a server and shunt info back and forth.

My first attempt made it look all too easy – the returning page would contain some unique start and stop text. I’d ignore everything BEFORE that and everything AFTER that.

 

<mystuff>something in here</mystuff>

It was all starting to look easy – even if the information came back in 2 blocks  – I could ignore incoming material until I saw "<mystart> and then start storing it away somewhere until I came to </mystuff> – and the look at the bits in the middle to extract what I wanted…

For example

<mystuff>relay1=ON&relay2=OFF</mystart>

Get the picture? Arduino sends out information to say what the current state of things is – which ends up in a database – and the user’s web page also interacts with that database…

But I noticed when sending regular pages back and forth that sometimes there were delays… LONG delays…. so I put an incrementing number in the package so I could watch… and sure enough lots of numbers were MISSING.

Was Arduino not sending out the information or was the reply getting lost sometimes.

To figure THAT out, I simply had the “real” server store the number sent, into a database along with a timestamp.

Sure enough every number the Arduino saw returned – was in the database – it was not lost packages coming back – it was packages FAILING to get out in the first place or being lost along the way.

The solution for THAT seemed easy on reflection.  I’d send out a package with a number from Arduino – and KEEP sending the same package until that number back BACK at which point I’d move onto the next number. Foolproof…

Well yes and no – when I started to write this blog the idea was to lose time while I watched how reliably this worked… see the number… it started at 1000… I’ve sent and had sent back 830 packages reliably – about 2 a second…..except…

It’s CRAWLING right now, perhaps one package every 30 seconds – SOMETHING somewhere is wrong… the packages are not reaching their destination – could it be my router spotting umpteen similar packages from the same device? Could it be the web server (JustHost) objecting.. or is there something fundamentally wrong with this….  sending packages constantly is NOT a problem – I have web pages at work that do jobs and are sending stuff back night and day for months on end….

It’s late – could this be yet another dead end.. or is there something I’m missing….

Something for the weekend? Meanwhile the prototype stat is happily working and talking to the Internet the old fashioned way – been up for a couple of days now – when it’s been running reliably for a couple of weeks – I might be happy to press it into service. We have a rental cottage and whenever we have guests who leave early or cancel etc, we have to go mess with the heating – so you can see this device has potential – better yet we’ve a place in Spain and being able to turn the heating on and off from the car on the way there will be great. Similarly when over there, controllling the heating at home (turning on when we get off the plane coming home)  – as you can see, I’ve a use for 3 of these already which is one reason I’m putting this much effort in – the fact it is very interesting is another good reason… not easy – but interesting.

You may recall the media hype over the launch of iPad – a REVOLUTION – and that it was. Then came iPad 2 with vastly improved speed, graphics, new apps, greatly improved operating system etc..

Well that was in the days of Steve Jobs – you probably also remember in the days of Bill Gates the rush of excitement when WINDOWS 7 came out and I certainly remember a raft of exciting products like Office 2007 etc

All that is sadly gone now, we have Steve Balmer at the helm who to me is not the least inspiring any more than Alan Sugur is inspiring… and I’m not at all impressed by what I’ve seen of Windows 8 or the new mobile operating system from Microsoft. Meanwhile the new fellow to replace Steve Jobs at Apple is so exciting I can’t remember his name…..

And along comes "the new iPad".  No, seriously, that’s what they’re calling it.  It has a retina display – which means nothing to most people but is essentially a development of the iPhone 4 display offering really high res.. but then, most people haven’t noticed anything wrong with the iPad 2 display. It has an improved processor – not a revolutionary processor – and improved camera which is fairly useless as it’s far too embarrassing to hold an iPad up to take pictures for heaven’s sake. No new Apps that I can see, no new gesture controls, no revolutionary new operating system, no USB connector, no external memory….. and it’s SLIGHTLY THICKER (which probably means the cases won’t fit – AGAIN)  – other than that… it’s an iPad.

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in Apple – especially with machines like the ASUS Transformer coming along and Microsoft pushing their new Windows Tablets – what on EARTH were they thinking about?

Will I upgrade? No. Am I disappointed that all that’s really happened is that current iPads are devalued? Yes.

We’re now looking at nearly 2 years since the launch of the original iPad and though the device retains some of the magic, those of us there at the beginning are no longer in awe of the fantastic design that has made so many millions for Apple and changed the way we work and play.

It now seems fairly natural to be walking around with a slim glass-and-aluminium device that’s more powerful than mainstream PCs of just a few years ago – so the only questions is – WHICH tablet should we be carrying?

I recently got my hands on a 7” Android tablet running “Gingerbread” – or Android 2.3.  Since then we’ve seen “Honeycomb” and finally “Ice Cream Sandwich” but most of the cheaper tablets are running 2.3 or lower.

To be honest I would not waste my time with anything LESS than version 2.3 is it’s fore-runners were never designed for tablet use.

Until now I’ve avoided Android tablets altogether for a number of reasons including the absolutely useless “resistive” displays that many of the cheaper ones employ. These are of the old-fashioned variety you have to press on to get any response and they are deeply unsatisfying to use. One of the iPad’s best features is the utterly responsive “capacitive” display which requires no finger pressure AT ALL to work – and so that for me is the minimum I’m prepared to look at.

The Yuandao N12 Fast Tab is one of dozens of 7” tablets out there that runs Android 2.3 and on the surface of it, it’s a mini-iPad..  the 7” format means it fits comfortably into a big hand and you’d expect that to be a big plus compared to the iPad’s rather larger format. In fact there is little apparent difference in weight.

So, in 2012 how to Android and Apple stack up?

The N12 is CHEAP – I’ve seen it at £100 including VAT in the UK so it’s not in the same league as iPad price-wise or feature-wise.

Let’s look at the pluses and minuses of this particular tablet – which is not untypical of the far-eastern offerings available right now..

Minus

• Battery life –claimed to be 20 hours standby and 5 hours video – yes, if you are lucky, more like it 4 hours of use. The iPad has never run out on standby in the time I’ve had it and gets around 10 hours of video NO PROBLEM.
• Microsoft Exchange – The M12 cannot handle any but the simplest of Exchange setups – if the setup won’t work with email and password, there seems to be no way to get into manual setup – this is a MAJOR omission for corporate use.
• Display – fast and responsive but ultimately at 800*480 pixels it’s an overgrown phone and the pixilation is obvious, even watching movies.
• WIFI – the WIFI is very insensitive, picking up less signal than many phones and dropping out occasionally.
• Limited memory – a common Android problem, although the unit has 8GB internally with access to an external memory stick, it seems that even though you can move Apps into this larger space, there is an internal CORE of 512MB RAM (this is a common limit – see specs – APPLE do NOT have such a limit) and even Apps in external memory use up SOME of this 512MB RAM which soon gets eaten up – putting a limit on how many Apps you can install – this is really unacceptable but somehow manages to escape most reviews.
• Speed – not quite fast enough to make good use of Flash – one of the so-called Apple-killer features, the Flash performance is poor.
• Finish – the unit has a nice Aluminium finish which unfortunately has sharp edges – after repeated handling while, say, watching a movie, tends to get annoying. This sharp edging appears to be common among the Chinese offerings
• Reliability – the hardware seems reliable enough but Gingerbread is chocker full of bugs – the language control means that some menu items come up in Chinese no matter what you do and installations can easily be messed up.
• The Android market has some gaping holes compared to Apple, the latter having an excellent PDF reader (GoodReader) and several other business tools missing from Android market.
• Front-only camera which is poor quality and not that reliable – only sometimes works with Skype. No back camera.
• No Bluetooth – yes you heard it  – no Bluetooth (the iPhone 4 and iPad2 reliably handle 2 simultaneous Bluetooth connections – in my car for example the phone is Bluetooth hands-free but also talks to a separate Bluetooth unit to play audio through the car stereo – something the old 3GS could not quite tackle)
• No sign of upgrades available – website is in Chinese, very little English discussion on the web.
• Large border area around the screen.
• 16:9 wide format

Plus

• The 7” format would fit into a large coat pocket and just feels nice
• The screen is bright and responsive
• The Android market has come a long way and although still full of rubbish, there are some hidden gems in there – many of which are free.
• External memory means no limit to movies you can store on the device.
• USB means external keyboard is easy to implement (though Bluetooth would be more convenient)

Summary

Based on the above – for me the ideal would be a 7” tablet with little border area i.e. mostly screen, running a later version of Android which properly handled Microsoft Exchange, on a tablet with at least 1024 pixels wide, rounded corners, 6-10 hour battery life, Bluetooth, sensitive WIFI, at least 1Gb internal working RAM, preferably more.

With current improvements to the Android Market, there is definitely a place for these devices. If you look at the likes of the Samsung S2 phone – slim, incredibly light, super display – think of one of those stretched to 7” or so and I reckon there is definitely a place for such a device provided the price is right (i.e. WELL under the cost of an iPad) – as yet it does not seem to exist, the NOTE being the nearest but still too small.

For now, the iPad is still streets ahead of Android…maybe they’ll keep that lead, maybe not. There is something quite nice about the smaller form factor and lower cost of the Android devices – opens up all kinds of possibilities if only the quality bar was raised…

Unlike previous models, iPhone 4 has a reasonable camera on it – and iPhone 4s even better. Yet time and time again I see people churning our terrible photos and videos using these devices.

The following are just a few tips to ensure you get the best from your iPhone.

Firstly – the deal-breakers:

Lighting – if you know the lighting will be poor, forget it. The iPhones are awful at handling low light, often resulting in blurring and grainy images.

Sound – ever stood in a church or large school hall – that kind of hollow sound (which is related to echo but faster) – the internal microphone in the iPhone suffers from such effects at just a few feet from the mic (like most phones). Get a plug-in external mic – preferably with a long lead. Maplins do a great lapel-mic (though I had to change the plug to make it fit the iPhone  – I’m sure an adaptor is available).

Tripod – no matter how hard you try, holding iPhone by hand is not going to work well – you can remove shake in software but it doesn’t hold a candle to starting off with the phone mounted on a rock-solid surface such as a decent tripod. Look up eBay for suitable clamps. There’s a tripod here but I would not recommend sticking the zoom lens on – pictures look awful..

Dirt and Grease – the big let-down here is the lens – the slightest bit of grease, finger-print, dirt on the lens will ruin the quality because of its tiny size. Don’t even consider taking a video or pictures unless the lens is spotlessly cleaned with a soft, dry cloth (commonly known as an unused handkerchief).

Duration – you should always use the best quality settings to get high quality you need lots of memory – stick with videos segments of a few minutes each if possible or you’re going to spend all day getting the material onto your PC.

Here then is how I have managed to produce half-decent quality video, given decent lighting. I use an iPhone 4.

I purchased a tie-clip microphone from Maplins for under £20 – and this plugs into the iPhone (effectively preventing the speaker working while it is plugged in). The lead is 3 metres long, suitable for interviews. I had to change the plug for the iPhone).

The App I use is called Filmic Pro and It will take video at the highest quality (1280px * 720px, 24 frames/second) at 16:9 format – this ensures a quite reasonable image with no unpredictable changes occurring. Automatic sound level control is turned off.

The image below shows the controls – the one below that shows what they are for. Essentially you make sure the brilliance and focus are right, start the recording, set all 3 controls to ON… and start your video.

And below, the help screen.

The controls are easy – “focus lock” will stop the focus changing if someone walks past the camera. Modern low-cost autofocus systems work the wrong way – if they are just out of focus they go WAY out of focus – then work their way back toward sharp focus. “Exposure lock” stops the camera dimming if light levels change which they do all the time in any moving scene. “White balance” takes a little more thought – the camera wants to compensate for too much of any one colour – to get professional results you have to make sure the imagery looks right at the start – then use the control to LEAVE It that way.

Essentially you then make your recording – then using the normal iPhone lead to your PC, offload the file to the PC – doing this wirelessly might not be a good idea when the file is large. Incidentally the iPhone is probably not your best choice for long meetings or interviews – you will run out of memory – don’t be tempted to chose a lower quality setting. In a test I took a 2 minute video and the file was over 200MB long. So this approach is best for short interviews of a few minutes – or multiple scenes take at different locations.

The App is set to record at the highest setting, 24fps, 16:9 format.. and it outputs MOV files which you can then import into an editor.

Some more setting screenshots..

That’s it, if you want more information, let me know.

I can’t tell you how many photos I’ve seen taken on mobile phones that are WAY below their potential – purely and simply because people are not thinking. CLEAN THE LENS. Mobile phone camera lenses are TINY – the working area is extremely small – and so it doesn’t take much of a smudge or spec of dirt to ruin the image – especially in high-contrast shots. If your pictures look “hazy” there’s a good chance there’s a fingerprint or a load of dust in the back of the phone where the lens is.

Clean the lens before you take any photo. This simple, even trivial trick could dramatically improve your mobile photos.

Other tricks:

Another failing with mobile phones is bad lighting – they just are not that sensitive partly because of the lens size – small lens – not much light – it’s not rocket science. Get the best light you can for your photo. The lower the light level, the more grain and blurring you’ll see – it’s that simple.  It takes a very expensive camera to match our eyes for light sensitivity.

Avoid pointing into sunlight – the glare is likely to make even the slightest mark on the lens result  in bad pictures – and the cameras generally can’t handle the wide range of light levels anyway.

Enjoy taking your photos.

 

The subject of panoramas has always fascinated me – as a kid (I’m now 58) my dad bought me a Pentax camera for Christmas and that was the start of a very long hobby lasting years and taking in DIY film developing, joining a local photo club and generally exploring photography – hell, I even made a pinhole camera and made up large sheets of photopaper from the silver chemicals – try asking for silver halides in Boots today and see what advice you get. I can even remember some of the names of the nasty chemicals which if requested now might land one in a jail for terrorists.

Still, that’s all history and we do this stuff digitally now. I’ve had various cameras over the years from the full-on multi-lens jobs – to using the iPhone – quite an extreme range.

Why would I even class the iPhone as a “camera”? Well, one over-riding reason for looking to take pictures with your phone – is convenience – it simply isn’t convenient to wander all over the place with a large block of aluminium strapped to your neck – especially when it’s hot unless you’re a REAL enthusiast – I find myself doing this less and less – and so without realising it my “proper” camera has been relegated to the background over the last year and I find myself more and more inclined to making the best out of the iPhone.

I should clarify I’m talking about iPhone 4, the earlier models were basically naff as cameras. I’d like to discuss the iPhone 4s but my contract says I’m stuck with the current model for many months yet…

I travel – and my wife Maureen and I have a little place in Spain which we use as often as possible – I love scenery – always have and Spain has it by the boatload – but I think you’ll agree, breath-taking scenes look great to the human eye but once you get them on camera they are often usually a disappointment – normal photos just cannot capture the awe of nature – well, most of the time anyway (Life on Earth/Frozen Planet etc excluded – as Attenborough’s stuff is just, well, stunning).

I think there’s a reason we’re all moving to widescreen TV. Humans tend to look left and right, not up and down – no doubt that’s why the ridiculously wide screen cinema format is so popular. It just “feels right” – and panoramic photos take us one step nearer to capturing the excitement of reality.

Of course – one can go all the way and take 360 degree panoramas – they are just STUNNING – but not cheap to do – take a look at these…amazing.  Better, given special lenses, it’s possible to take all-round VIDEO that lets you turn around and look at different angles in live video… all of this will be common-place some day as now doubt will 3d (I’m just waiting for Apple to realise the potential for putting 2 cameras on the back of an iPhone and record everything in 3d). I prefer something I can stick in a blog.

For now –and for general purpose – I’ve spent some time looking at Apps for the iPhone together where appropriate with some PC-based man-power to help make better pictures.

If you want to experiment at making your own panoramas on the iPhone, I suggest you go grab the free Microsoft Photosynth and get out into the sunshine to have a play. Forget the fact it’s free – it’s brilliant. Look at the link I’ve sent on your PC – you’ll see lots of demos. The APP on the iPhone works a treat and creates pretty much seamless joins of separate images – even helping you to take them in succession.  It’s probably the best App to do the job.

What’s missing right now is a package that combines HDR and Panoramas – what do I mean by HDR? Well, the iPhone has HDR (high dynamic range) facilities – but they’re rubbish – the best I can suggest is that you get hold of the iPhone iCameraHDR app to see what I’m talking about.  Imagine taking a picture of scenery straight into the sun – it just doesn’t work – you get a white sun with no detail, or, if the camera is capable of stopping down, you get almost no detail in the scenery as the aperture has stopped down so much there’s not enough light coming in… you can’t have it all. Take a shot indoors with no special lighting – looking out of the window into bright light – you can have detail INSIDE the house or OUTSIDE – you can’t have both. The idea of the HDR apps is to take 2 or 3 different pictures, at different exposures and “merge” them together to try to get the best out of each.  It “kind of” works and the software can make the difference between a beautiful result or something that looks artificial and, well, crap.  How do we get around it as human beings with our own eyes?  Well, it’s not simple but our eyes do several things – as you look around a scene – your eyes adjust constantly – in a static photo that can’t happen – the whole thing has to be captured at once. Also the sensitivity of any part of your eye can change almost instantly – not as a whole – but individual parts (try staring at a coloured spotlight for a while and move away.. you’ll see the opposite colour because your eyes can de-sensitise even at the individual colour level). Again, cameras can’t do that – and to be honest the result if they could, might look a mess.

So one way around this is to use an HDR App to take several HDR pictures and then use software to stitch these together. It all gets a bit too much… and for PC editing there REALLY is not a lot out there to chose from – many packages are open source and frankly more hard work for less result.   But I have found ONE package, sadly the developers are not working hard on this – but it’s out there and available – Serif PanoramaPlus.  I’ve given you a YouTube link to their latest version but to be honest PanoramaPlus 3 is good enough if you can get it for under a tenner and there’s very little difference. Essentially what this package does is let you drag and drop any number of overlapping images into an area on the PC screen – press a button and…. you get your seamless panorama – and you know what – it just WORKS –  unless you’re really bad with a camera, no colour variation –it just produces absolutely excellent panoramas.

 

But here’s the thing – many panoramas suffer if there is movement because as the images overlap, which they must, if things move in those overlaps – you get a MESS… of course this can be fun – take 4 overlapping photos of a scene and have someone move to each of the areas before you take the shot. You can have all sorts of fun with this – the same person appearing several times in the shot.. but for some scenery it would be nice to think there is an easier way – and there is.  Take a video on your iPhone, grab some overlapping stills – bang them into PanoramaPlus – and there’s your panorama. It works well as long as there is no blurring of the stills in the video. Here’s an example..

The image above was taken in Spain – and covers over 180 degrees. I took a pan of the area with the iPhone  – and brought that image into my PC. I then used PicPICK to grab 4 stills from the video – and then dropped them into PanoramaPlus. All the panoramas BEFORE this (in this blog entry) were put together from stills. The PanoramaPlus is supposed to work with videos directly but it’ll not do iPhone videos hence the screen grabber. Any other method of grabbing stills will work just as well.

What about resolution you may ask?  If I told you that the original of that image you see above is nearly 6,000 pixels wide – is that high enough resolution? And yes, that was done with the iPhone 4 standard video camera.

That little outcrop of white buildings over to the left.. here there are at the original resolution. Not too shabby…

Here (below) is a screenshot of the PanoramaPlus software in action. Incidentally not only can you fire a bunch of left-right overlapping images – but up-down as well.  Standing in front of some great architecture, FAR too close to get the whole lot in one photo? No problem, take a bunch of overlapping photos and fire the lot in any order at this software and it will do the business for you. As you can imagine this is FAR, FAR more than simply overlapping some photos – the images have to be matched for colour and brightness and the software has to warp each image to make them “fit” as a whole – and somehow it DOES – usually in seconds, automatically, no intervention, no problem. I’ve taken 15 or more images of something and fired them into PanoramaPlus and it’s turned out a respectable result.

The software is DEAD easy to use and you have all sorts of control over the output – you can even generate panoramas ready to drop into a web page.  Check out the links I’ve given you and have fun experimenting. And yes, it’s CHEAP.

Here are a couple of other panoramas I made last year with this software (but using a standard SLR camera as I didn’t have the iPhone 4 at the time). Try clicking on these images to see higher-resolution versions….

Enjoy experimenting.

What seems like only months ago I purchased an Apple TV2 box and I’ve never looked back. The Apple TV2 box is a tiny, simple black box that allows you to stream music, pictures and video from your iTunes-equipped PC to the TV, either wirelessly (if you have fast wireless) or via a network cable.

Ok it’s not perfect, videos have to be in Apple format but it works reliably and the quality is superb. A couple of months ago I managed to jailbreak the unit and this was great, allowing the use of non-Apple format videos and indeed breaking free of the need to have a PC operating iTunes – but it came at a cost. Once you jailbreak an iOS4.2 unit you can’t then upgrade to iOS5 without losing the Jailbreak… why is that an issue? Well there are some features of iOS5 that are really good – like piping video etc from your iPhone or iPad to the TV wirelessly.

And so when some time ago the jailbreak failed (as happens – the software is written with the best will in the world by amateurs) I decided to re-flash the phone to iOS5. All was well, I lost my jailbreak stuff but I was back on the official operating system with the benefits that brings (like a guarantee for example!!)

All was well until yesterday, the unit was operating perfectly for ages, but I’m in the middle of upgrading my home network to 802.11n and the wired network to gigabit speeds and in the process I decided to try the AppleTV2 on wireless – I have to say I was surprised at how well it worked… but I had a nagging feeling that running too many things on the wireless at once might affect the smoothness of video and plugged the wired network back into the unit. WELL, that was the end of that, for reasons well beyond me it killed the Apple TV2 unit stone dead. As I’d recently installed iOS5 it certainly wasn’t software that caused the problem.

I’m not daft so I tried all the usual reset tricks before ringing support – nothing. I rang up the Apple store and instead of an Indian call centre (as you might expect with, say, Orange) I got a knowledgeable Irish fellow on the phone who checked the unit out with me and confirmed it was dead.

But don’t you just know it – the unit was 10 days our of warranty – I’d had it over a year… didn’t phase the chap AT ALL. “Don’t you worry sir, we’re not going to quibble about a few days” said he – and off he went for a reference number.  An hour or so later I found myself in the Apple store getting a full replacement unit complete with guarantee. Friendly, intelligent, helpful service – no wonder they’re winning the mobile battle!

And that’s it – I’m back in action, unfortunately it is no longer possible (easily) to Jailbreak Apple TV since the update to iOS5 so I’m stuck with converting videos to Apple format – HOWEVER – a couple of tools you might want to investigate make this very easy – HANDBRAKE and FREEMAKE VIDEO CONVERTER make light work of converting video to M4v format, suitable for Apple TV, iPhone and iPad.

So many in the industry were wondering what happened to the iPhone 5?  Apple have just launched the iPhone 4S – and looking at the specs – it won’t disappoint despite the rather lacklustre new name.   In the same way as the iPad 2 spruced up iPad, the A5 processor (the same one used in the iPad 2) is fitted to the new iPhone 4s – which means the already spiffy iPhone gets twice the processor power and up to 7 times the graphics power.  Better, they’ve improved the main camera with an 8mpx camera! 

Many of the other features are actually IOS features which means they’ll be available to existing iPhone customers when the IOS 5 release comes out – latest theories suggest the 12th of October and I’ve blocked the day out – 200 new features many of which are REALLY useful and this will be available for free to update existing iPhones and iPads.

Apple just seem to be doing everything right at the minute – they’ve now made their new MAC operating system downloadable and the price is something like $29 for the upgrade… meanwhile IOS updates remain free and the new phone will be at a lower price point – which means any advantage the Android models had in that area or indeed in superior performance just went out of the window.

So if you’re planning a new phone the choice is simple… black – or white – and if you already have an iPhone or iPad (or both) – it’s looking like the 12th is the day to watch. To check if the upgrade is available just plug your phone or iPad into your PC running iTunes and lookout for the upgrade message. This is probably the last time you’ll have to do this as the upgrade to IOS5 will mean no more need to sync with your PC.

All exciting stuff and I could write about this for hours – but it’s a lot simpler to just go to the APPLE website – they do a far better job. As anyone with an iPhone or iPad will tell you – we already have the best…and it’s about to get a lot better.