It has been a little over 4 weeks since I first posted my intentions to attempt creating an application for the PlayBook in 9 days. I figured that I owed it to you guys to post a final word on it, and update you on the last few things.
For those who haven’t followed along, I decided to challenge myself to create an application, from scratch and with no prior programming experience, in 9 days. The endeavour ended up spanning a full 4 weeks, from start to finish, even though I succeeded in coding a fully working application within the 9 day timespan.
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THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN MOVIE-GOING RISK!
It’s not often that a movie that treats an exploding train like a valued member of the cast, and even less often that I go out of my way to see one that does. Don’t get me wrong, I like smash-em-up action flicks as much as the next testosterone canister does, but I like to see a good story and solid characters too. My worst fear was that Source Code would just be an 8minute version of the Bill Murray classic, Groundhog Day. I’m happy to say it was not.
The premise of the film (which oddly enough, while presented clearly in the trailers, was not made clear in the movie until maybe 30 minutes in) is that our hero, Capt. Colter Stevens (played marvelously by Jake Gyllenhall), is being sent into the body of Sean Fentriss, a rider on a Chicago-bound commuter train, a la Quantum Leap. The idea is similar to the show as well, Stevens is being sent in to discover the identity of the person who bombs the train just as it enters the outskirts of the city. The problem is that he only has 8 minutes in which to do it. There are hundreds of people on the train, and our poor friend has to get blown up over and over again to complete his mission. And to make matters worse, in a wicked turn on the “needs of the many” concept popularized by Mr. Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the controllers won’t let Colter stop until he finds the bomber. It seems the same person is threatening to detonate a dirty bomb in the middle of downtown Chicago. I don’t think I need to tell you how bad that would be.
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During my recent crash course in PlayBook development, I spent a lot of time with my nose in books, and exercising every ounce of my Google-Fu to glean as much information as I could. In the process of doing so, I accumulated a large number of bookmarks, and a couple new books that have aided me greatly.
Since sharing knowledge is part of the fundamental belief system here at GSL, and part of my natural inclination, I figured that it might help one or two of you if I collected some of the links I used here in one post. Not all of the links I collected would help in a general sense, since some are specific to what my goal was, so I’ve omitted them. By no means is this a comprehensive guide, but it might serve to get you started when you are staring at your screen wondering where to begin.
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We all love our gadgets, and whether you are doing it out of love or just being conscious of fashion, any gadget lover is going to accessorize. You’ve just gone out and laid out plenty of cash to have that shiny new device, and you want to keep it safe. It doesn’t hurt if it looks great too, because who really wants to carry around a foam rubber brick?
A month ago, the buzz in my twitter timeline was everyone pre-ordering their iPad 2. One thing that I noticed quite quickly, was that almost every single person that said they had pre-ordered was already looking to order a case for their new acquisition. This is before they had even gotten a shipping date, much less had the device in their hands.
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A couple of weekends ago, some of you may have seen me post a tweet about my rear sharing space with Bill Shatner’s rear. No, I wasn’t part of some failed teleportation experiment, and no I didn’t actually meet Mr. Shatner (a lifelong dream, I have to admit). What I did do was sit in the Captain’s Chair of the Enterprise; the ORIGINAL Chair. In fact, given a sufficient amount of time, I could probably point it out in an episode. Apparently, this was one chair of many, each uniquely created to make the chair appear to be more functional than it really was. What surprised me the most was the wooden arm rests. That’s right; wooden arm rests. Even in the 23rd century, in a ship built of Transparent Aluminum and Tritanium and powered by a matter/antimatter reaction channeled through a dilithium crystal, the Captain’s Chair had wooden arm rests.
It’s comforting to know that even in the 23rd century there will still be a need for good carpentry.
Now, this article isn’t about woodworking in the distant future. It’s about nostalgia and technology. The event with the Chair was a Star Trek Exhibition at the Louisville Science Center (it’s going on until sometime in May… check their website out at http://www.louisvillescience.org/). On the whole, it was mostly a display of props, or in many cases replicas of props (really?), that were used in the various incarnations of the franchise. They had uniforms from all the shows and movies, as well as model ships that were actually used for filming (the Enterprise D looked rough). They also had clothing and weapons from the major races on the show, including the Bajorans, Cardassians, Klingons and Borg. Some of my favorite pieces were the Borg Sphere model and the original Type III Phaser (rifle).
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Having been so busy lately, I completely lost track of my calendar, and only just realized that tomorrow is April 1st, also known as April Fool’s Day. I briefly considered making an erroneous post tomorrow morning to catch the unaware, but that really doesn’t suit my style.
Instead of having some fun with our readers, I decided to help our readers have a little April Fool’s fun themselves. It’s a yearly tradition for me to wreak a little geeky havoc in our office, and I have entirely too much fun with it.
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It has been a long 9 days, and I have to apologize that I haven’t been a little more regular with updating you guys. I knew that this was going to be a challenge, but I didn’t fully grasp how much of my time and effort it was going to take up to accomplish. For those who haven’t been following along, here’s the brief synopsis.
Last week, I announced here that I had presented myself with a challenge. RIM was offering up a free PlayBook to anyone submitting an approved PlayBook application by today, and my desire for a PlayBook caused an idea to form. I decided to try my hand at it, and attempt to create an app, despite having no experience with programming or development. I gave myself 9 days to do it, setting today as the deadline, as today is the last day to qualify for the offer.
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Yesterday, I received some feedback on the storybook app comparison post published on Monday. While both were from the respective developers of the iPad apps discussed, they couldn’t have been more different. One was positive and thanked me for choosing to cover their topic. The other was decidedly critical of, not just the discussion of their app, but the article, as a whole. Had the communication been posted as a comment, versus an email, I would have gladly approved it for publication.
First and foremost, let me say that the positive feedback was nice but was neither sought after nor necessary. I don’t write reviews of mobile apps, computer software, or anything else in hopes of receiving kudos or swag. I do it because I test a lot of apps, especially iOS ones, since it’s what I use most of the time. In turn, I like to pass on objective information, to include the pros and cons. I do this in order to help the average user who doesn’t have the time or financial resources to do their own testing. Moreover, the intent is to help them make an educated decision before downloading an app, whether it be free, $0.99 or $3.99. From another perspective, reviews by any tech-related website also help the developer. This last point is the true subject of this article.
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This morning’s tech news was abuzz with the news of the availability of Amazon’s latest musical venture, the Amazon Cloud Player. Hailed by the company as an innovative way to “securely store music in the cloud and play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC,” the news was met with great excitement by many an audiophile. According to Bill Carr, vice president of Movies and Music at Amazon, “The launch of Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web and Cloud Player for Android eliminates the need for constant software updates as well as the use of thumb drives and cables to move and manage music.”
Carr’s statement is part of Amazon’s official press release, which explains how the service works. What are the obvious questions that come to mind? Does it really work? Is it easy to use? What else can I do with it, besides listen to music? Of course, according to a Reuters’ report, Sony was less than thrilled to learn that Amazon had given customers the ability to stream their purchased music, without it granting licenses that extend to music streaming. This raises one last question. Is there a potential for illegal music sharing via Amazon’s service?
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I’ve been quiet for the last few days, dedicating all of my free time to this project as the deadline looms nearer and nearer. I have been living and breathing the development process for almost a week now, and figured I was due to give you an update.
In my last journal entry, I had mentioned that i had been attempting to jump into the coding process, but had found that my knowledge wasn’t quite up to par for the task I was setting for myself. So I took a step back, unplugged, and hit the books.
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