c|rrus blog-o-mat

Mobile software development evolution

2011-05-09T09:02:00.004+01:00

Yesterday was Düsseldorf's yearly Marathon and in good tradition, several runners from Vodafone tackled the full track or the famous relay run.
In 2007 I developed a J2ME application which transferred the current location from each runner to a server, so that the guys at our camp could watch the runners on Google earth.
Thursday evening I decided to implement the same functionality using today's mobile and server platforms (android and Google App Engine).
Long story short: The thing which took 5-6 days of development in 2007 (not inculding several test-runs outside) and which was still very shaky and unstable at the end, was build in 26 hours today.
Why? Mainly becasue server and client development has become so much easier. On the server side a deployment to app engine only takes minutes. In the past I had to set up my Jetty somewhere, re-configure the frontend apache, deploy a new DB to MySQL and create the schema etc...
On the client side android enables quick turn around times and most important: A stable runtime compared to the J2ME implementations which often crashed or looses connections.
The hardware of course is getting better, where in 2007 nearly no phone had GPS, I had to connect to an external one via bluetooth and implement the NMEA protocol, today's GPS location is just an API call away.
The good news: You get way more things done in less time than 4 years ago ;)

Google Fusion Tables

2011-05-04T12:14:00.003+01:00

I played around with Google Fusion Tables today. I tried to use it to visualize data from my android application, in this case an Intensity Map. It's quite easy to get quick results, but I miss customization features for the map.
Anyway I think it's great for people who are not into programming at all, so maybe I'm the wrong audience ;)
I used my default Demo-Data, check the results here:

http://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S189272gOKp

Statistics comparison

2011-03-15T21:13:00.004+01:00

Wow, good timing for my log-file parser, Google just released more detailed statistics on the android market. You can check the device distribution of your app based on installations, so I was curious to compare them with my useage stats.
Here are the results from Google for my app:

Samsung Galaxy S 23.4% (128)
HTC Desire 20.5% (112)
HTC Desire HD 9.5% (52)
Motorola Defy 7.0% (38)
HTC Wildfire 6.4% (35)
Samsung Galaxy Tab 4.8% (26)
HTC myTouch 3G 3.5% (19)
SEMC Xperia X10 3.1% (17)
Motorola Droid 2.0% (11)
Samsung Europa 1.5% (8)

That looks quite familiar, Samsung Galaxy S and HTC Desire the top 2 devices by far, Desire HD on 3rd, then it's getting a bit messy, but in general it meets my expectations.
Will analyze the results more deeply the next days, finally Google shares some of the information they own with us.

The Android Zoo

2011-03-13T17:57:00.003+01:00

I launched a small application on the android market some time ago and today I had the time to gather some stats from the server logs the app connects to.
I aggregated the user-agents to unique devices and to my suprise I found out that I could isolate 78 devices!
That basically means that nearly 100 different android devices have downloaded, installed & run my app. I should say that I have tested it on exactly one device before I published it ;)
I got little complaints so far therefore I expect that it works on nearly all of them. Amazing, isn't it? Compared with my J2ME experience this is just great.
I will share some rough stats with you now, but I hope to get some nice graphs in my next analytics-session.

Top 10 Device stats (request count) for the service lifetime (January 2011 until now):

HTC Desire (28352)
Samsung Galaxy S (24226)
HTC Wildfire (8471)
HTC Desire HD (8181)
Motorola Milestone (3831)
Motorola Defy (3395)
HTC Magic (3393)
HTC Legend (2730)
LG-P500 (2541)
Garmin-Asus A50 (2227)

I will share more details soon, like Android Version, requested data, User-Agent parsing details etc.
Stay tuned.

Google Instant

2011-03-09T08:52:00.005+01:00

Google launched instant previews on mobiles and while trying it out I got curious how they build that. It doesn't feel that you leave the browser when you click on the magnifier which takes you to the screenshots of the pages, but you it also doesn't look & feel like a classic mobile webpage.
So I emulated an android user-agent in chrome and inspected the source. Actually it is a XHTML page with some nice CSS animations and script magic.
Why is that interesting? AFAIK this is one of the few commercial products (Google's mobile search, not a small fish) which uses modern web-technologies providing a user-experience beyond classic web-page browsing.
Well done Google.

Sync, offline, online

2011-01-30T21:51:00.006+01:00

Techcrunch pointed today to a side project of some googlers called Camlistore. Since the weather was great today I didn't had much time to check it out but it looks quite interesting.
As I mentioned in a previous post I still think that it's crucial for a good mobile experience to have content online AND offline availble whithout bothering the user with details.
Google contacts implementation on android is a good example. Your address book is in sync and online while you have full access to it even when you're offline.
Now it's getting of course more complicated when you're looking into things like photos or music where you want only a subset of your contents offline due to your limit storage on your mobile.
Anyway I'm curious how the guys from Camlistore proceed, it looks like the first really interesting open-source sync solution for me.

Google Maps Navigation with roaming

2011-01-04T12:13:00.007+01:00

A short post regarding my experiences with the new google maps navigation client and offline maps.
I took the opportunity to test the praised feature of google to be able to navigate offline with the new google maps client during my latest short trip to the netherlands using my Nexus One

First try: Route to the destination from Germany (home network). I switched data roaming off and entered the destinatation. As expected everything works fine. A few kilometers behind the boarder, mobile lost data connectivity and it still had > 200 KM to go. To my suprise, routing was done perfectly to the end, sometimes map-tiles have been missing, but the routing worked well.

Second (harder) try: Route without data network back to Germany. It turned out that the client needs a data connection to generate the initial route, so I switched Data Roaming on, calculated the route, switched it off again. Again the client was able to route me back without any hickups.

Overall: Pretty good job google!

Useful Android Apps

2010-09-11T11:51:00.002+01:00

In this post I'd like to share my experiences with useful android applications for travelling. My scenario looks like this: We planned a 3 weeks trip to Canada and I wanted to keep my roaming data as low as possible, means 0 if possible, and only rely on cached data on the SD-Card or sporadic WiFi connections.

The following Apps turned out to be very useful and worked well during this time:

Maps: Maverick lite

I tried several Mapping applications which promised to be able to cache Map-tiles on the SD-Card. I also wanted to have support for different map-providers (Open Street Map, Google, etc.) and a comfortable way to generate & download the tiles. To make it short: Maverick lite worked perfectly, and I think I really pushed it to the extreme by pre-loading over 1 GB of tiles to the SD-card with google map tiles for car navigation and Open Street Map tiles for hiking trails in the national and provincial parks. With Mobile Atlas Creator, you can easily batch download and prepare map tiles.

Dictionary: QuickDic

Simple & straight forward, QuickDic puts a 25MB data file on the SD-card and provides english <-> german translations for not commonly known words. Works perfect!

Currency Converter: Currency

Works offline, and does not complain too much if there is no online connection available.

And don't forget to get some casual games for the long flight which also works in an offline situation, my recommendations are:

Some other thoughts on offline / cached data:
Beside the fact that data roaming is horrible expensive and slow, it turned out to be really comfortable to work with offline data as it is incredible fast to access. Due to tha fact that coverage is not always given, your nice online-services will leave you lost in many areas.
No one would rely on an online-only contact list, would you? You'd like to have it synced with an online service, but cached or stored on your device as well.
I hope that we'll see more Apps, especially for maps which supports a smart & easy way to cache data on the phone.

Tourist's view on Hamburg in 4 days

2009-03-22T22:15:00.008+01:00

I've been to Hamburg quite often because I know several people there, but I always missed the chance to do the usual tourist stuff there. So this time, we booked a hotel, bought a tourist guide, and made a tourist trip to Hamburg. It was really great. We had really good weather and spend most of the time outside.
First day we took the train to Blankenese and walked back to Hamburg. Okay, from Övelgönne on we took the ferry boad back to Landungsbrücken.
Second day we visited the Miniaturwunderland (that's a must for everyone who likes model railways), walked through the new Hafencity and the Speicherstadt, climbed the stairs of the "Michel" and had a boat trip in the harbour.
I can really recommend Hamburg, it's worth spending some days there. The northern people of germany are very different and I like their style ;)
Finnally some pictures... enjoy...

DLNA Media Server for my PS3 (update)

2009-01-19T12:35:00.002+01:00

One year ago I came up with a post about my media server installation on the Linkstation for my PS3. I still stick to the TwonkyServer on the Linkstation but just due to lack of mips-support on other servers. For example the PS3 Media Server has some really interesting features for example YouTube, flickr and picasa support, where the YouTube feature did not work for me, but anyway, the project is work-in-progress and worth to have a loot at.

Happy new year!

2009-01-06T15:41:00.001+01:00

I wish you a happy new year 2009, which started very cold & snowy in my home town, duesseldorf. I took some pictures, see here.

Apple iPhone Tech Talk Amsterdam

2008-11-04T14:29:00.004+01:00

...took place in Delft (Dear Apple. Delft is not Amsterdam...) yesterday. Since a nice apple employee told us that blogging, photos, recording, (fortunately not breathing) is forbidden, I will not share much with you. Am I allowed to say something about the sandwiches? Probably not.
Fun is different.

Anthony B

2008-11-03T22:15:00.003+01:00

...concert in the live station, Dortmund, was the highlite of the weekend. Anthony B and the band rocked the crowd with massive sound. I think his dance style is quite cool, he can throw legs and arms in unbelievable ways ;)
We got a good look at the stage from upstairs and enjoyed the sunday evening...

Patrice concert

2008-11-01T13:57:00.002+01:00

... in cologne was awesome. Really. Excellent sound, great atmosphere. What I really like is that Patrice and his band are true musicians. Their live gigs are full of improvisation and peppered with spontaneous elements. This is true live music. Great!

The next generation... fragmentation?

2008-08-15T08:06:00.004+01:00

A lot of people argue about JME fragmentation. And about JME, Symbian, Windows Mobile development in general. Too complex, too time-consuming, too fragmented. I agreed. And it seems like most of the people are looking for Web-style, Widgets like solutions for this. I support that "hype", but only to a certain extend. No doubt, it's nearly 10 times easier building a User Interface on a capable(!) browser using XHTML, SVG, ECMA script, rather then using the paint(Graphics g) Method in JME. Agreed. But when it comes to questions like: "How do I get the GPS-location in the browser-based application?" it's getting interesting.... Currently everyone wants to introduce his own solution in that space. Gears (from Google), Mozilla, LocationAware, OMTP, W3C, OpenAjax Alliance, just to mention a few examples. That's fragmentation at it's best. When people talk about fragmentation in the JME space, they usually mean that there are different APIs available on different devices and that the APIs behave differently (due to bugs or bad Spec). What is currently happening in the "browser-world" is even worse. They will have the same problems like JME (bugs, availablility of APIs cross devices) PLUS they don't even have consistent APIs yet. I hope that people start recognize this, and feed their proposals into a standardisation body to get a consistent API out as soon as possible...

Convergence

2008-08-11T15:53:00.002+01:00

I'm a fan of Sony Ericsson devices as you might have noticed ;) I also like the DLNA media server integration of my Link Station and my PS3. Now the guys from Sony Ericsson did me a favour with their C905 device. It has WiFi and a build in DLNA compliant media server. When it connects to your WLAN, it will instantly show up in the Crossbar of the PS3 and you can view the pictures taken with 8.1 megapixel camera directly on your TV screen. Cool! Really, really cool.

Summerjam 08

2008-07-13T13:11:00.007+01:00

...took place last weekend in cologne bay. we put up our tent next to the lake, stored some beer, a shisha and barbecue stuff there and had 3 very relaxing days on the jam. It was a great and peaceful atmosphere and not as crowded as last year. Even the lineup was not absolutely first class, the music, the sound and the performance was excellent. Stephen Marley, Patrice, Jah Cure and many more...
In my view, Summerjam is the best festival to go to, it's 100% easy going and relaxing with excellent music and jamaica feeling :)
Check out some pictures below or some youtube clips here.

p@rty 3.0

2008-07-07T11:33:00.005+01:00

As last year, conny, marcel and I organized a party for family and friends. I still think that the location of a good party is a very important piece, so we spent some time to spot the right one. This year we decided to rock-a-boat on the rhine river. So we set up our equipment on the top deck of the nautilus boat and had a lot of fun until the early morning. Thanks everybody for showing up there, and let's see where we will rock next year ;)

Motion sensor fun

2008-06-30T11:42:00.003+01:00

I played around with the accelerometer in my Sony Ericsson W910i phone which is accessible for JME applications via JSR 256. I took the physic engine from Marcin Ploska and extended it with accelerometer support. See the results here:

Marathon

2008-05-07T19:53:00.003+01:00

On Sunday I finished my first marathon in Duesseldorf. Crossing the finish line was a strange moment between happiness and exhaustion. Not sure if I will do this again ;)

JSR 226 Demos

2008-04-30T13:25:00.008+01:00

I gave a speech at JAX this year (on the mobility track) regarding JSR 226 and the usage of SVG for the UI of mobile applications. I think that SVG is still a bit underastimated at all. The scalability features of SVG are very useful especially on the various screen sizes on mobile devices.
To show the audience the features of SVG on pratical use cases, I created some demos which I'd like to show you here. Static images can't replace the animations of course, but it should give you an idea what SVG can do for you ;) I should mention that the SVG artwort was created by our graphics team, I'm just doing the java piece :)

Java on iPhone

2008-04-21T07:53:00.003+01:00

It looks like some guys really make progress on this.
JamVM is already available as posted here and here.
SUN announced to port it, and it looks like the guys from the phoneME team has taken this challenge and ported phoneME advanced (CDC) to it.
Cool guys, go ahead, the iPhone is definetly the coolest hardware platform you can run on currently!

Opera Mini 4.1 beta

2008-04-04T09:10:00.007+01:00

...is out and it has pretty cool new features. My favourite is the graphical text-input of URLs including auto-completion and suggests. Very nice. Also the "save page" function is cool for saving time-shedules of trains or something like that. Good job opera!
Go to
http://mini.opera.com/beta/
for download!

How accurate is Google's My Location?

2008-03-19T08:59:00.004+01:00

I've done some tests (with the help of some colleagues) with the My Location service of Google mobile maps. We know that the service works based on cell-id, means that there is cell-id database at google which maps the cell-ids back to coordinates. Question is: How accurate is the database? To answer that, we did some measurements in the 2.5 G network in germany.
We just compared our current location (via GPS) with the result of the My Location service and calculated the distance. We did 132 measures.

Here's the result as a graph:

To summarize, My Location is 707 meters inaccurate on average.
80% of the measures are less then 1075 meters accurate.

So this is (of course) far away from GPS based LBS, and it depends on the use-case of a service if this is sufficient.

on my run yesterday...

2008-02-02T12:14:00.001+01:00

... I took this picture. I wish my mobile would have a better camera, the quality is really disgusting...

Android on Mobile Monday

2008-01-31T12:58:00.000+01:00

I joined the android part of the mobile monday in munich this week.

Nothing really suprising happened there, but I collected some facts from the Q/A which might be interesting for you.

A new SDK is on the way with a complete new User Interface
The first mobile will have a H-VGA display
The D-BUS system will be kicked out in final release
Applications will only be self-signed by the developer
Minimal hardware requirements for an android platform:

200 Mhz ARM 9

64 MB RAM

SD-Card

QVGA or bigger

WIFI/bluetooth

JavaFX Mobile on DevDays

2008-01-24T22:06:00.000+01:00

Unfortunately I'm not able to join the first Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days in Santa Clara but I decided to watch the live stream of the session "Developing Applications for JavaFX Mobile" to find out a little bit more about Sun's mobile operating system.
First of all: The live stream worked really good, and there's also a chat attached to the session you're watching where you can ask questions. I took the chance to dig a bit deeper into the Web-side of the story and asked for SVG and Java PlugIn support of the WebKit based browser. Unfortunately Sun is not implementing this in their first release.... too bad. I'm wondering why they are putting so much effort on their new Java Plugin of the update N release if they don't put it into their mobile platform...
Anyway, the whole JavaFX Mobile operating system is clear competitor for android with the huge advantage that Sun is able to run 100% pure Java SE on it.
Check out the slides of that session, it's really worth it.

W910i review

2008-01-15T12:40:00.000+01:00

I can name a SE W910i my own for some weeks now and I really like that device. I would like to show some pretty nice features I like most. First, the RSS ticker on the idle screen. Really usefull if you have a data flat fee. You can add the news or flickr (or NoseRub) feeds you like and the phone will display the latest news in a carrousel like ticker on the idle screen like this:
Nice. I really like to make more use of the idle screen, so I used the ability of the W910i to create an idle screen midlet, which you can do on many of the latest SE-Phones (most JP-7 and all JP-8 phones). My first midlet just displayed pictures from my picasa web album on the idle screen like. A bit boring over time. Now I use JSR 184 to map those pictures to a cube and do some nice 3D-transition effects like this:

I also checked out the SenseMe function, but I'm a bit disappointed especially by the horrible Windows application from Sony Ericsson. Not useable at all. The Media Player is pretty nice, it rotates the pictures and videos depending of the orientation of your phone. Cool.
Overall a cool phone with only few negative aspects: No GPS, a bit unstable firmware and a plastic cover. Hopefully the announced W760 will overcome those issues ;)

DLNA Media Server for my PS3

2008-01-03T22:33:00.001+01:00

Do you remember this device?

Yes, it's a Linkstation and I never found a very useful job for mine... Until today :) I bought a PS3 some days ago mainly because of all the cool media features. I used my PC as a media server first, but I didn't like the idea that it has to run all day and night long. Then I remembered my Linkstation... The main problem is that it runs on MIPS architecture and it's not that easy to cross compile new software for it. After some research I found the TwonkyMediaServer which claims to support MIPS. And it's true, these guys have ported their software to a bunch of target platforms and architectures. Great! Now my Linkstation has something useful things to do, while my PC can look for more interesting stuff ;)

Find an upate to this post here...

some pics from my run today...

2007-12-16T20:30:00.000+01:00

... pretty nice, I think ;)

still alive

2007-12-14T22:03:00.000+01:00

I haven't blogged for quite a long time, sorry for that. I'd like to write about so many things, but time is currently missing... Anyway, let me bring some light on some web 2.0 services I use...
First of all.... Picasa. I like the client software and the integration of it into the web-albums. Check my public pictures here.
Then... Twitter. A bit useless, but I like it. Check my profile here.
And the one I like the most is: NoseRub. "NoseRub?" you might ask, what the hell is that? I don't want to copy the pretty good introduction on their site, so check it out, it's some kind of meta-social-network. A friend of mine set up a NoseRub server on the Amazon EC2, check it out here. I linked my Twitter and my last.fm account to that server.
Oh, and of course this blog ;)

The big move...

2007-11-18T20:10:00.000+01:00

...took place yesterday!
Many thanks to all our friends who helped us merging two homes into a one new! Special thanks to my parents who supported us during the move.
Check some pictures here, I'll update the album as we make progress......

The android landed...

2007-11-13T22:44:00.000+01:00

... and disperse a lot of dust in the mobile world.

My first thoughts, relatively unordered and not well consolidated...

What a cool SDK!!! Everything you need! Very cool documentation (try the search box), Eclipse PlugIn, working samples, emulator, debugging and logging, everything for free on Window, Linux and Mac. Feel free to compare that with the

WTK for JME (nearly equal)
Symbian S60 SDK (sucks)
Windows Mobile (not free, installs tons of crap on your PC, and so on...)
iPhone SDK? (We will see...;) )

Why have those guys re-invented all the JSRs? The only reason for me is licensing issues. Too bad for the developers.
A pretty cool concept of handling application life cycle whiting the OS.
I like the approach of a generic data model on the phone, I also like the idea that there are no "native" apps on the phone. Everything is Java. Looks a bit like the SavaJe idea (do you remember that?) but in cool ;)
They build in a java - browser bridge! How cool is that?

Let's see where Google drive this game. Many open questions.... How will Google avoid fragmentation? What parts will really become open source? And so on and so forth...
We will see... But nevertheless, this will bring again some action to the mobile world, and changes can't be bad ;)

An android comes from outer space...

2007-11-05T21:41:00.000+01:00

Google announced andriod today. Together with an impressive list of cooperation partners (check the open handset alliance) Google created an OS for mobile phones based on open standards (as they claim) and will open source it. There are tons of rumors out there and less facts, so it's hard to come to a conclusion right now, but somehow I have the feeling that this will be a very big (and good!) thing...
Mobile developers: Keep your fingers crossed, the SDK is coming! ;)

preparing the move...

2007-11-04T09:58:00.000+01:00

...and it's still a lot of work in front of us. We are currently
- searching for a new citchen (that can cost a hell lot of money...)
- buying a new washing machine (see above)
- disassembling furniture (not expensive but a lot of work)
- preparing the "big-move-day"
I will propably write some sentences to the one or other topic, but I'm quite busy with all that stuff ;)

time travel

2007-10-20T15:28:00.000+01:00

Since we will move to a new apartment in November, we started to get rid of electronic equipment (or waste ;)). We found old CRT monitors, old 10Base2 and 10Base-T cards, serial and SCSI scanners, video recorders, tons of cables, analog modems, printers and so on and so forth. It was like a small time travel in the past of computer equipment...

cool runnings...

2007-10-14T17:40:00.000+01:00

Beautiful weather this sunday! It's mid of October and we have clear sky, 17° celsius, no rain, calm winds. I shot some pictures during my training run today, most of them near or from the autobahn bridge near the airport.
Panorama from the bridge:

Run Forrest run!

2007-10-07T14:14:00.000+01:00

Even I'm not as fast as Forrest Gump I finished my first half marathon in cologne. We had excellent weather conditions and a lot of fun. Pictures will probably follow soon ;)

Open Letter to a friend...

2007-10-04T21:58:00.001+01:00

... is the name of the new H-Bockx album. H-Blockx (for those who don't know) is a german cross-over band and was very popular some years ago. Their last albums were very poor, but this is really a big step forward. The more I hear it, the more I like it...

build on sand

2007-09-23T11:46:00.000+01:00

... are these sculptures. We used the sunny weekend weather to visit an exhibition of sand sculptures.

Mr. Bush is also there:

Illumina 07

2007-09-17T08:09:00.000+01:00

This weekend we visited the "Illumina" exhibition around the castle "Dyck" near Duesseldorf. The light installations around the castle looked really beatiful. See additional pictures here.
Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures, my equipment is not even semi-pro ;)

JavaFX

2007-09-12T08:41:00.000+01:00

Here's a good summary of JavaFX and what SUN wants to cover with it. Even that I don't believe that JavaFX Mobile as a full phone stack will be a success, there are good parts of the JavaFX program. For example the Consumer JRE initiative is more then needed now, most interesting part seems to be the Java Kernel idea here.

Bun Rastaman

2007-08-19T20:07:00.000+01:00

... is a good article about the problem of homophobic lyrics in reggae music.
Read here (in german)
Found via Tropige Trauben

Mobile Trail Explorer

2007-08-05T13:00:00.001+01:00

If you do some kind of outdoor sports like running or hiking and you don't have the money for a garmin forerunner you can use your mobile phone and a GPS reciever via bluetooth to track your trails. The mobile trail explorer as a very good software you can use for this. It exports your trails to KML or GPX which you can import in Sporttracks. That's pretty cool because you have all the data collected in on place.
Check that screenshot:

Trail in Burgh Haamstede

2007-07-23T17:31:00.000+01:00

I'm currently on vacation at the beatiful coast of the netherlands and today I took some time to run a 16 KM trail across a recreation area and the beach. That was cool! See the trail here...

Java ME GUI APIs

2007-07-12T14:38:00.000+01:00

This is a very nice article describing the different GUI APIs available in JME. Gives you an excellent summary about the pro's and con's.

Summerjam 2007

2007-07-11T08:46:00.000+01:00

Was great! Even the weather was okay, most of the artists we have seen performed incredibly good and we found a good place for tents. The best artists I've seen: Sizzla, Anthony B and Beenie Man. Incredible performance. Sean Paul's performance was ridiculous, as expected. Anyway we had a lot of fun!

Chemical Brothers

2007-07-03T11:22:00.000+01:00

...concert yesterday was impressive. Excellent sound by l-accoustics systems, beautiful LED projections and something I've not seen quite a long time: A laser show!! That was cool ;)

SUMMERJAM

2007-06-29T22:34:00.000+01:00

Next weekend we will go chillin' and party on the Summerjam 07! Really looking forward to see Sizzla, Beenie Man, Anthony B, T.O.K. and all the others on stage. Keep your fingers crossed for jamaican-like weather in the cologne bay ;)

Placebo Concert

2007-06-29T22:22:00.000+01:00

...was great! Good sound, nice people, a great show. Nothing more to say. I think they had some Martin TW1 on the rig. Great devices!

PS 3 HandsOn

2007-06-25T19:51:00.000+01:00

This weekend we had the chance to try a Sony Playstation 3 and I'd like to share my view on this device.
We connected the PS3 via HDMI to a 40'' full HD LCD TV and the quality of the game graphics and the blue ray movies was absolute impressive. We played the Gran Tourism concept demo and it's really hard to tell the difference between a real race and this game.
After watching three blue ray movies, you don't want to see any DVD again. And switching back to the good old TV signal makes you feel sick.
I also liked the openness of the platform. You can install yellow dog linux on it and you can plug in nearly every USB device.
We connected the PS3 via wireless LAN, and we got demos, trailers and updates for free. Overall the hole concept feels better then the XBOX360. Unnfortunatly I had no time for checking out some BD-J examples (I've seen cool demos on the JavaOne) but I will try that next time. XBOX360 and HD-DVD: Get lost! ;)

New Toys

2007-06-11T09:38:00.000+01:00

Last week I spend some money on fun stuff and I bought the Gyrotor indoor helicopter from Silverlit as well as the X-Twin rc-plane. I first tried the Gyrotor in my living room and it's pretty hard to control. It took roughly three hours training to get a feeling for this helicopter, but now it's really fun to fly it inside. You should have plenty of space in your room, otherwhise you will hit the walls more often then you wish ;)
This weekend I had the chance to try the helicopter and the X-Twin plane outside. It turned out that the gyrotor is a pure "inside" toy. The range of the RC is pretty limited and it's quite unstable to fly outside.
But the X-Twin is a real cool thing for the outside world. It's easy to fly, and the battery is good enough to play up to 15 minutes! I really enjoyed that!!
Upate: Check that heli flying in my office ;)

Interview about JavaFX Mobile

2007-06-04T08:49:00.000+01:00

Here is an interesting interview with Jacob Lehrbaum about JavaFX Mobile. Besides the disturbing background noices, you can find out that Sun really wants to sell a complete integrated software stack for mobile devices to the handset manufactures. Let's see if there's really the need for another platform on heterogenous mobile market....

Street View

2007-06-01T20:56:00.000+01:00

I just tried out Google Street View and it's pretty impressive. I found the diner where I had an excellent dinner as well as the hotel we stayed and many other places in San Francisco. Unbelievable that this runs in a browser without any additional software installation. Excellent job!

Concert in an interesting Location

2007-05-26T16:47:00.000+01:00

Yesterday evening we got free tickets for a concert. Roger Cicero performed with his Big Band. That's definitely not my favourite music. But the location of the concert was very cool. It took place in a huge aircraft hangar on the duesseldorf internation airport. Directly behind the crowd where airplanes starting and landing all the time, the hangar was devided and on the left side was an Airbus 320 parked. Check this picture:

The stage is on the right side, in the center you can see the LTU-Airburs and on the left side there are the open hangar-doors and the runway and rollfield of the airport. That was cool ;)
For more pictures, click here!

P@rty

2007-05-17T16:13:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we had a very good party organized by marcel, conny and myself. 40-50 people showed up and they magically let 17 crates of beer vanish ;)
We had an impressive soundsystem, pretty nice light effects (Martin Mania SCX 600) , good DJs and a lot of fun...
Pictures will be uploaded tomorrow...

Once again JavaOne...

2007-05-12T00:55:00.000+01:00

... is over. And once again I picked up many interesting things; things I will have a closer look on, things to tell other people, things to be observed in the future, and hopefully things I will use in real projects. I also met several nice people there and had interesting discussions. Thanks to SUN for this event ;)

JavaOne and "crisp"

2007-05-10T23:30:00.000+01:00

I've been in several sessions right now and one really good thing I recognized is that terms like "user experience", "user interface", "rich graphics", "crisp", "shiny" etc. are mentioned quite often. Not only JavaFX but several other developments reflects a new thinking in this "gray" java world. People have understood that a good, compelling user experience is mandatory for a good product. Thanks to the iPhone and other products, java will hopefully loose the old image of heavy-weighted, boring, gray and not compelling user interfaces.

JavaFX script...

2007-05-10T08:09:00.000+01:00

...is more then a pure scripting language. Looking at the examples, and listening to Christopher Oliver at the JavaOne today, JavaFX script looks like a combination of a classic scripting language like ECMA script and UI descriptive elements as known from SVG. To give an example you will find things like

Rect {
arcHeight: 30
arcWidth: 30
stroke: black
strokeWidth: 3
transform: translate(10, 0)
height: 300
width: 330
fill: Pattern {
content: picks()
}
};

which reminds me somehow to SVG, as well as things like

operation MotoProducts.doDrop(yStart, yEnd, f(y), delay, bounce) {
for (b in [false, true]) (dur delay linear){
if (b) {
var d = if bounce then 1000 else 800;
var ys = if bounce then [[yStart..yEnd], [yEnd..yEnd -10], [yEnd-10..yEnd]] else [yStart..yEnd];
for (i in ys) (dur d) {
f(i);
}
}
}
}

which reminds me to... mmmmmmm.... ECMA script?

JavaOne and JavaFX

2007-05-09T21:30:00.000+01:00

JavaOne is on the second day and JavaFX is still the "big" thing. To correct my previous post, JavaFX is not just the scripting language, but JavaFX script is the correct term. It looks like JavaFX is mainly the so called F3 project. You can already get demos and source code for JSE 6 here: https://openjfx.dev.java.net/
More infos on JavaFX are listed here: http://java.sun.com/javafx/
Additionally to that, there is the Term JavaFX Mobile. It looks like this is a full JavaOS for mobile devices including a JavaFX script runtime. SUN showed some demos on linux based mobiles. Probably this is based on the SavaJe technology, but this is just a guess from my side.
How JavaFX Mobile is fitting to the CDC / CLDC and MIDP roadmap, and how it relates to JSR 226 and SVG is still a mystery for me. If anybody has ideas around this, feel free to comment!

JavaOne KeyNote

2007-05-08T20:29:00.000+01:00

Just a short note from the JavaOne: SUN announced JavaFX a script language for java based, "flashy" user interfaces as far as I understood.
But there are 1000 of questions open, especially when it comes to mobile devices... I will recap that later.

Marathon Update

2007-05-05T18:10:00.000+01:00

Just an update on the marathon tomorrow: One of my teammates has serious problems with his knee, so I have to run his part addtionally to mine. 19 KM instead of 9. Nice. I'll keep my fingers crossed to survive that ;)
Again, check our runners page to see what's going on!

JavaOne and Marathon

2007-05-03T14:33:00.001+01:00

Next week I will attend JavaOne and I'm really looking forward to this. But right before that I have to finish my part of my relay team on the Düsseldorf Marathon.
You can follow our activities on the marathon on sunday on this page.

SportTracks

2007-04-12T20:54:00.000+01:00

I use SportTracks to log and analyze all my running activities. Great Software! I can strongly recommend it for hiking, running or cycling. Works great with a Garmin ForeRunner, but also accepts manual input.
Pretty nice statistics and analyze functionalities:

Get a free copy here:
http://zonefivesoftware.com/SportTracks/index.html

Firefox extension

2007-04-04T20:44:00.000+01:00

..just a quick remark: I love this Firefox extension, even it's just Windows compatible:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4258
Check it out if you like nice UI-effects ;)

Excellent weather on the 3rd run...

2007-03-31T15:39:00.000+01:00

... of the Nike "Winterlaufserie" in Duisburg...

pro light and sound

2007-03-29T15:23:00.000+01:00

Nice fog effect on pro light and sound fair in Frankfurt

Stockholm at night

2007-03-19T09:53:00.000+01:00

View to Gamla Stan from our hotelboat.

Stockholm

2007-03-16T17:09:00.001+01:00

First day: beautiful weather!

NiN

2007-03-14T23:07:00.000+01:00

Extreme good lightshow!

Handball

2007-03-04T18:16:00.000+01:00

My 1st international handball match. Pretty impressive :)

Bad weather on our run today.

2007-03-03T16:04:00.000+01:00

But we all started and we all finished!

Rainbow

2007-02-28T16:52:00.000+01:00

...from my office in Düsseldorf...

Aerogramme

2007-02-27T00:47:00.000+01:00

Massive sound!

HDTV

2007-02-26T09:13:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I coupled my laptop to a 40'' Samsung LCD Panel with full HD (1080p) resoultion. It's fun to have a desktop with a 1920 x 1080 native resolution.

We watched some IMAX-HD movies and the picture quality is really great! Switching back to PAL signal afterwards makes me feel sick. HDTV to the masses!!

Düsseldorf in 3D

2007-02-21T23:33:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I found out that Düsseldorf is no longer a "plain" field on Google Earth!
See here or klick this link if you have GE installed.

Java

2007-02-21T09:04:00.000+01:00

1st blog entry