To the left right of this post you’ll see my twitter feed – a stream of consciousness contained within 140 characters or less. I highly doubt there’s a connected person on the planet who hasn’t heard of twitter, especially considering the recent explosion in coverage on television, news mentions and the bloke who sits opposite who keeps telling you about his recent tweets and how @StephenFry once sent him a reply.
I’ve found that I gone through several phases of my twitter-use since signup:
1. Frequent tweeting, obsessive checking of my feed and @replies
2. Searching for ‘celebs’, adding them, and anyone else vaguely interesting
3. Trying out several desktop/iPhone clients, running 2 or three consecutively before settling on one.
4. Realisation that I can’t read the tweets of the 90+ people I’m following, and more importantly realising that I don’t want to
5. Frequency of tweeting drops off significantly, interest wanes
6. Unfollow the unknowns, the uninteresting and the silent twitterers
7. Start approaching a good balance of followers/tweets and begin to enjoy and use the service.
8. Blog about the above
I must admit that I’m fascinated by the mainstream coverage – the related vocabulary that is entering the public conciousness and the fact that @Oprah’s joining resulted in a 43% traffic increase. I knew she was big in the US, but that’s some power – if only twitter was selling ads against her pageviews.
Now to try the Tweetie desktop client: haven’t been able to sign in yet, but I see they’ve released a 0.1 update, so I’ll give it another go…
Apple’s 2009 WWDC will be held, as it is every year, in San Francisco’s Moscone center. And every year, the preceding months are full of rumour, speculation and anticipation as to what new bright and shiny device Steve and his cronies will reveal to the hordes of fanboys, tech-bloggers and gadget addicts in attendance.
The smart money this year is on an update to the ultra-successful iPhone 3G. An improved camera, video calling and higher speeds are all fairly safe bets, and the 3.0 firmware currently in the hands of many developers confirms a lot of this with hidden screens and references to hardware not in the existing handsets.
Perhaps most interesting is the possibility of a magnetometer built into the next device in the iPhone family. A post on the Nokia Blog describes this piece of technology (already in the Nokia 6210) very well:
A traditional compass only works when it is held horizontally. As Paul Coulton recently described in his Forum Nokia Blogs posting, the Nokia 6210 includes a 3-axis magnetometer. Through some calculations, it is possible to find out the absolute direction in which the phone is facing, no matter how the phone is oriented.
So what does this mean? Well, the addition of a magnetometer would allow the iPhone to not only provide an accurate location (via GPS), the orientation of the phone (via the tilt sensors) but also determine in which direction the user is facing. This opens up a vast number of possibilities for the iPhone development community.
For example, we already have street maps accessible on the iPhone, and we can use the touch screen to rotate a 360-degree image of major cities worldwide. The magnetometer could further enhance this by allowing the user to rotate the image by pointing the phone in the right direction. Taking this idea further: you could stand in a street and hold your iPhone up – it would determine where you are, and in which direction you’re facing. Then, using the camera, an application could overlay information on the live image, such as directions, information on the area or advertising from the shops and businesses around you.
The potential applications aren’t just functional either. Augmented Reality, the technology of overlaying 3d images onto live video footage, is already showing huge potential in the gaming industry. This technology was used in the PS3 game ‘Eye of Judgement’ where a combination of the PS3 Eye camera and specially marked trading cards relayed the play area to your TV screen complete with animated 3D characters.
Animator David O Reilly has created a of a simple but effective mockup of an animated character that gives the appearance of being 3-dimensional. This could become reality if a magnetometer is present in the device.
The ability to use this technology in a mobile device is exciting – the National University of Singapore’s Mixed Reality Lab created a live version of Pac Man in the streets of Singapore. There’s no reason this couldn’t be recreated on the iPhone, removing the need for backpack-sized wearable computers as used by the participants in this experiment.
The opportunities are vast, and the iPhone development community has already proven itself to be innovative in its usage of the existing hardware. Let’s hope the Magnetometer is more than rumour and that we see some novel approaches to navigation and gaming applications if it the hardware is present within the next-gen iPhone.
