Archive for 'Hardware'

Autograph Library

So you got an application you need to capture actual signatures for? Release form, shipping delivery, that kind of thing? Well, here’s a licensable library to make that easy:

Ten One Design Autograph iOS Library

  • Simple integration with any UIView, or just call the built-in modal view.
  • Customizable stroke color and width, and signature size.
  • Advanced stroke smoothing for accurate signatures.
  • Velocity sensitive stroke width for biometric verification.
  • Customizable message. Show your customers what they’re signing for.
  • Three-finger swipe to undo/redo strokes.
  • Optional inclusion of date.
  • Optional unique security hash watermark for each signature (for tracking purposes).
  • Freely available demo version allows you to try it out before committing.

Handy if you need it, as we say. Check out the free Autograph app that makes your device into a signature capture pad to check it out, along with Mac and Windows helper apps to do something with those captured signatures.

Now, you thinking to yourself “Dude, I don’t sign my name with my finger”? Why no, no you don’t, and these Ten One people make a capacitive stylus “Pogo Sketch” for any device or the “Pogo Stylus” specifically for iPhone/iTouch to help you out with that. Or any other kind of drawing/writing etc.:

Drawing Applications: The Pogo Sketch is an interesting alternative to expensive graphics tablets, and a lot more portable. On a mobile device, the Pogo Stylus makes sketching a lot easier.

Taking Notes: TThere are some incredible note taking applications for the iPad and iPhone. They’re all great companions to the Pogo Sketch.

See our recommended iPhone/iPad applications here

Okay, we definitely have to check some of these note takers out. This stylus just might make the iPad actually better for our preferred scrawling style of note taking than paper, it looks like.

And to finish off on another note completely while we’re looking around their site … want an analog joystick for your iPad? Well look, they’ve got just the thing!

h/t: MacNN!

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AirPlay Emulation

So you’d like to put AirPlay support in your app, but hardware to test with is inconvenient (or completely unavailable in your country)? Here’s a couple ways to sort that out:

Banana TV – $7.99

… Banana TV lets you use AirPlay for your Mac as well – play video or images from your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch running iOS 4.2 or higher directly onto any networked Mac. It runs directly on your Mac, and is a great tool for showing off pictures or video on your Mac’s monitor, at a friend’s house, or the office. Even use your iOS device photo library as a presentation tool…

ShairPort – open source

… This program emulates an AirPort Express for the purpose of streaming music from iTunes and compatible iPods. It implements a server for the Apple RAOP protocol. ShairPort does not support AirPlay v2 (video and photo streaming) …

Any other AirPlay development helpers you’ve found of assistance, Dear Readers?

h/t: iphonesdk!

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Cypress Expansion Board Kit

Ooooh, this is really really nifty: Ever had any desire to do an iPhone hardware accessory? Well, looks like doing so just got a lot easier:

CY8CKIT-023.jpg

The easy-to-use PSoC-based development platform enables highly-integrated modular design of functions such as capacitive touch-sensing, LCD segment drive and much more for traditional iPhone and iPod accessories such as audio docks and speakers, chargers and automotive products. The platform also opens up a new realm of accessories that can leverage the 480 x 320 touchscreen display and many other features of the iPhone and iPod touch for a myriad of markets and applications, including health and wellness, point-of-sale, RFID, and diagnostics and instrumentation tools. Details on the new kit and a video demonstration are available at www.cypress.com/go/cy8ckit-023

Almost enough to make us wish we knew anything about hardware design!

h/t: MacSurfer!

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Review: Wifi Body Scale

And today something we don’t get to do nearly enough around here; play with a new toy! Specifically, soon as we found out that there was such a thing as a wifi-enabled weight scale with an iPhone app — no, seriously, a wifi-enabled weight scale, with an iPhone app, you read that right –

wifiscale.jpg

– well hey, we just had to order that sucker immediately. So you get it in a couple days, the Withings people are good with their shipping, and — ooh! It’s shiny! — snap in the batteries and connect it up with the USB cable and go to their website, and it downloads a little native application that fixes your shiny new scale all up for you:

updatingscale.png

There’s just something intrinsically hilarious about a dialog that reads “Restarting the scale…” isn’t there now? Ah, the marvelous cognitive dissonance of our increasingly wired world. Oops, we mean, “wireless”, because the included USB cable mentioned above is only for the initial setup apparently, once you’ve sorted it out with the target wifi network apparently you don’t need it again. Surfing around the web we saw some complaints from people who claimed it wasn’t so good at connecting, but certainly we haven’t had any trouble getting started; found a place for it, hopped on, waited a few seconds for the little fat-measuring bar to dance across, and yeppers by the time we got back to the computer there it was on their web dashboard. You can even have it tweet every measurement, if you’re like extra narcissistic or something; but we figure that for pretty much everybody in the world except ourselves knowing the exact fat content of a troll would be way way into the TMI category.

And, of course, the defensible motivation for getting this shiny toy was to check out the iPhone app integration,

iphonescale.png

which is quite nicely done indeed. About the same information as in the web browser interface, but very dextrously adapted to the iPhone, particularly the very natural feeling way they use swiping and orientation changing to get the various graphs displayed. Nice job all around, and worth taking a gander at if you’re designing any kind of horizontally charted data displaying application, we’d say.

XPilot

So there you go. If you’re really obsessed about tracking your weight/fat composition comprehensively, or if you just dig cool toys, we quite thoroughly recommend picking one of these up! At least judging by our exactly one weighing so far; but hey, how cool is it to say “there’s an app for that” about your weight scale?

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More Accessory Development

Here’s a few more handy links for hardware accessory development outside the official program to go along with the headphone connector modem we mentioned earlier:

iPhone/iTouch Serial Port Tutorial

Dock Connector Breakout Board

A Portable User-Space Bluetooth Stack

Let us know if there’s any other happy hacking stuff floating around we could list here!

h/t: iphonesdk!

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Hardware Connectivity: H4I

Now here’s something a bit different for this neck of the woods: how to develop hardware iPhone products. Yes, indeed, hardware products … that do not use the ExternalAccessory framework for Apple-blessed accessory connectivity development:

Progical Solutions LLC is targeting an audience of iPhone professionals in the software and hardware industries currently unable to bring their accessories to market.

Now just how do they do that, one wonders? Well, get this, they turn the audio jack into a modem. Yes, a modem. Seriously.

The H4I program has evolved from the initial work done by Alex Winston. Although this work was groundbreaking at the time there wasn’t an easy way to support developers who might adopt this technology. However with the release of the iPhone SDK 3.0 Apple also released the External Accessory framework. With this framework as the model Progical Solutions LLC has implemented these interfaces as a standardized means to integrate apps with external accessories through the 3.5mm audio jack. At speeds up to 19.2K baud, serial data can be programmatically sent and received by the iPhone and iPod.

Must admit we’re not 100% clear on why exactly you’d want to go this route instead of through the official method; but hey, it’s an impressively geeky achievement nevertheless!

h/t: MobileOrchard!

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Review: Sonic Impact i-F3

So already in our fledging Cocoa Touch programming career we’ve noticed an issue that is rather obvious once you think about it: It’s rather hard to do a group demo/review with one of these devices. Particularly when your projects are things like games or media players that involve, you know, sound.

But, while we were checking out the Vancouver Apple Store grand opening this morning, we stumbled across on their display tables a wonderful way to address this problem, which has a number of other benefits as well: the Sonic Impact i-F3 portable iPod clock radio! Here’s what it looks like:

(more…)

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