Arthur Lockman's Blog

It's been a long time since i've made a drastic change on a blog of mine. Now is the time for that to change. As of today, this blog is dead. The physical blog, not the content, that is. I'm moving my blog over to wordpress, and giving it a little bit of a facelift. Wordpress is seemingly much more stable and easy to use than MT is or ever was, which is why i switched.

My new blog can be accessed here, at my new web site. The landing page for this blog will automatically redirect to the new blog, however old entries will be preserved to keep permalinks alive.

Enjoy my new blog, everyone!

The recent hype and hullaballoo surrounding the Amazon Appstore has made me think. Do I ever really want to post any of my apps there? Short answer: No, never. Here's why.

First of all, I am immediately turned off by the sign up process. It says that initial sign up is free, but then after a year it will automatically charge you $100? I see a few problems with that. One, is there a way to cancel my account? I don't believe there is. I believe that, once you sign up for it, you're going to loose $100 to them per year no matter what you do. And secondly, $100? A person can get on the Android marketplace for $25, and that's a once per lifetime purchase. Simply for the money reasons, I won't be signing up.

Second, what's the real draw behind the Amazon AppStore? It says Amazon on it? That's not enough for me. The Android Market comes preinstalled on every android device that gets made. The Amazon market gets preinstalled on no devices, and can't even work on most AT&T droids. I don't see why, then, I should publish there.

Another problem with the appstore, which is a minor one, is the fact that there is no easy way to remove an app from sale. One has to go through an email channel, and plead to have an app removed from sale. Every other appstore has an easy way to remove it from sale, in most cases just a button. Even the struggling AppWorld has this. Seriously, amazon. Get with it.

Lastly, the free app of the day. This is the thing that's been getting the most negative publicity. Amazon, every day, decides to take one paid app and make it free for every Amazon AppStore customer. As a consumer, this is great. "Free apps!!" everyone says. But from a developer standpoint, this is really scary. Everyone will download your app for free. What if 1,000 people download your $1.99 app? You're out a large sum of money. Why? Amazon doesn't give you anything but free marketing, and no profit as a result of being the free app of the day. As a developer, i have no desire to loose all my possible profit for an app I put time into. No way.

In short, i will never put any of my apps on the Amazon AppStore. I see absolutely no compelling reason to do so, and even more reasons to stay far away.

All for now!

To everyone saying that Adobe Edge is a flash killer, i have this to say:

No, it is not a flash killer. Let us first remember what Edge does, and is targeted for. Edge is targeted mainly at advertisers on the web. You open edge, create a new document, and the default format is that of a banner ad. Perhaps, it may cause the downfall of Flash as an advertising platform. In my opinion, that would be a great thing. For no reason should a tiny little banner ad on a website use 50% of my CPU when i'm visiting that site. There's no reason for that. It's not because of flash per se, it's because of terrible flash developers trying to run non-optimized content and deliver it to the user. But i digress.

Also, all Edge can do is create animations and basic interactivity. It is not built to make RIA's or mobile applications in the same way that flash is. It is built for creating ads.

It wouldn't be such a bad thing if HTML5 and CSS replaced Flash in the advertising market. Advertisers would be able to reach people on mobile and devices much easier, without the dependency of flash. That makes sense to me. But, to say that Edge and HTML5 will *kill* flash is a complete falsity.

Flash (AIR) is currently, in my opinion, the best mobile app platform that allows users to build one app on one code base and target just about every major mobile platform out there. One cannot do that with HTML5, no sir. You have to use Flash, or Appcelerator or something. But, out of all of the mobile development platforms that i've tried, Flash is by far the easiest. You can create a beautiful mobile app that  functions with speeds sometimes greater than that of a native app, and you get to avoid all of the Java or Objective-C headaches that might come from native development. Plus, with the advent of AIR 3, developers can build native extensions to give their flash apps the exact same functionality of a native app on any platform they choose. 

In short, no, Edge will not kill flash, nor is adobe trying to kill flash with Edge. Flash will live on for a long time, both on the web and on mobile devices. Edge and HTML5 can never fully replace all of the functionality that Flash has built over the years, and it will never equal it's performance or ease of development.

All for now!

Well, it's been a long while since I've had something new to announce. I apologize for that, school has to take precedence over blogging and fun, unfortunately. But, i come to you today with something new and exciting to announce!

My second app, Simplenote for Playbook is live in the BlackBerry AppWorld!

This app is a native gateway for the popular Simplenote service, which already has apps on all other major platforms, most notably iPhone. I had, for a while, used the Web based site on my playbook for this app, however i decided that enough was enough, and people needed a good native app. So, here it is.

I spent the first few weeks of summer developing it, perfecting it, testing it, and doing just about everything i could to try to break it. Fortunately, i couldn't. So now, it's live!

Everyone who has a playbook should go and download my app. I know it's shameless self promotion, but I made it for the betterment of the platform, and for the enjoyment of all. So, everyone, go and enjoy it!

I do plan, in the near future, to bring this app to android tablets, and maybe to android phones. Keep watching here, and i'll post all news on future updates, and more!

You might remember how I said that in a few weeks time, i'd be the proud owner of a BlackBerry PlayBook? Well, that time has come. I am now using my playbook on a daily basis, for just about whatever i can. Mostly, my uses revolve around school, as that's what most of my time is being consumed by at the moment.

At first look, this is a really sleek machine. The interface is very well designed, all the transitions are smooth, and everything just seems to flow. Nothing seems to be able to slow down this thing. Flash runs beautifully in the browser, as do youtube videos and other such web elements. The only complaint i have is that javascript is sometimes a bit laggy in the browser. Everything seems to render fine, it just is a bit slow. Other than that, it's perfect.

Still though, as many people have complained, it lacks native email or blackberry messenger. I am able to use the tablet optimized version of GMail in the browser, but it doesn't give me push or fetch notifications or anything. That's something i'm waiting for. RIM says it should be out within 60 days, so i'm holding my breath. The did deliver on the video chat application, so there's reason to be hopeful.

The tablet itself has two cameras, both of which take HD 1080p video. The video quality is incredible. It doesn't do frameskips like other devices (Droid X) do. It captures at full 1080p, 29 frames per second, in all its glory. The picture quality is okay as well. It's not perfect, but hey, it's on a tablet.

There are a few applications that are not present at all in the AppWorld for the PlayBook. One is a twitter app. There is no good twitter app in the app world. All that seems to be there are the basic 'twitter trends search' app that everyone got from the Flash Builder Burrito example applications. Everyone is still waiting on developers for this one. Another one that's missing is Skype. I don't know what the status of this one could be, given the recent MS acquisition of skype, but I'm still hopeful. It does also lack a good Dropbox app. It has BlueBox, which is promising, but it is missing the very important upload feature. Currently the only way to access this feature is through the browser. But that is coming soon, and i can't wait to see it. The tablet did come with the documents to go suite, which is nice. It seems to work great, except it lacks a few features that Docs to go on other platforms has. But i'm sure those are coming in an OTA upgrade in the future.

In all, this is a very solid device. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a smaller tablet to enter their life.

I will post some reviews on applications on the playbook in the near future, to give everyone a taste of what's available on this platform.

All for now!

Now that I've officially had my app accepted into the BlackBerry AppWorld for the PlayBook launch, I thought I'd take some time out to talk about my experience on getting my app published.

Let me start out by saying that this whole process has not been easy. From start to relative finish, it's been almost 5 months. What with figuring out the app world vendor portal, flash builder, and the blackberry airpackager and simulator, it's been a wild ride.

Let's start with the beginning. The playbook was announced in december. I began my app development in late december, and submitted it on December 31, 2010. Getting the app packaged up for submission was fairly difficult however. At that point, there was almost no documentation on how to actually package the app and get it submitted to the app world. I had to go off of blog posts and blurry screenshots. But, i got it packaged and submitted.

"Finally," i thought, "I'm done with this." Well, that wasn't true at all. Once the app was submitted, i was always nervous, because i didn't hear back from RIM for the longest time. I thought that my app had been rejected or something, and I hadn't been notified. The vendor portal said only "Waiting on Test House" for my product for a long time. Then, one day, i got an email notifying me that (1): My app was approved, and (2): I had a coupon code for my free playbook.

First thing's first. I ordered my playbook right away. That order is now safely placed, and I still await my playbook's arrival. Second, i was also notified that i would have to re-upload my app with a code signing certificate attached to it. Well, like a good developer, i went right over to the page where i could order up my certificate. Well, i did that, and 3 weeks later, i still haven't received a response. I got a notification yesterday telling me that my product was now rejected, since i hadn't uploaded a signed version. Well, i replied right to that email, letting them know that I hadn't received a certificate. I still await a response on that one.

I believe that RIM could have done much better to streamline this process. For instance, they could have had appropriate documentation, or maybe had the appworld functioning when they started accepting applications. I don't know. This is just me speaking from the perspective of a slightly annoyed developer.

All for now!

This is just a short clip of our 2011 FRC Robot control system Proof of Concept. The main idea here is that the user wears a gauntlet, which controls the manipulator arm on the robot. Here we having it controlling a servo driven apparatus at a much smaller scale than will be on the robot, but we were attempting to see how the whole setup would work.

All for Now!

I thought this was appropriate, as today is the first day of build season.

Well, it has begun again. The 2011 Season of FIRST Robotics has begun. As of today, several thousand teams from around the world have begun work on their new robot, which will play the game that has been called Logomotion. The official game animation video can be found below:

This, to me, looks like a fantastic challenge. I'm really excited to see what my team, the Northern Force, and some of the other teams we compete against, have come up with. Throughout the build season, which lasts until the beginning of March, I will periodically post an update on how we're doing, and occasionally even a little video treat!

If you don't know what FIRST robotics is, head on over to their website to find out a little more about the program. (As I am posting this, the website is having some serious bandwidth issues, so you may have to hold on for a little while before the site works)

All for Now!

The launch of the Mac App Store yesterday morning brought with it many things. The long awaited Tweetie 2 (now called Twitter for Mac), and also Angry Birds, the popular iOS and Android game from Rovio.

Well, like any game loving person, the second app I bought from the Mac App Store was Angry Birds. To my dismay, the app wouldn't open. There was an error, where a file was linked incorrectly or something. Well, I made the assumption that there would be an update soon, and sure enough, there was this afternoon. Finally, the app would open. However, to my extreme displeasure, I was presented with the message that my graphics card does not support OpenGL 2.0

Little did I know that I was not the only person displeased with Rovio for doing this. I checked out the angry birds page on the Mac App Store, and saw that the rating had dropped from 5 stars yesterday, to 3 stars today. Rovio has not made any friends with this update.

There are several other games I have downloaded, all of which have run without a problem. The Incident, Chopper 2, and Flight Control HD work just fine. Why can't angry birds?

I suppose the thing that makes me the most angry is that the mac app store has no method for a publisher to post system requirements. What I'd like to see is the app store warn you when you're buying an app that cannot run on your computer, and not allow you to purchase it. That would be an ideal world.

All I really am asking for from Apple and Rovio is either a refund of my $5, or a fix to make the game work on my Mac. For let's face it, I really would rather have a working game than have my $5 back.

All for Now!