Mac Daddy World

Due to popular demand, we’ve created a sample application based on our C4 Iron Coder Live contest entry. Here’s what you’ll need to run this:

Required:
1) A jail-broken iPhone, ideally activated.
2) A Wifi connection
3) Knowledge about how to install 3rd-party native iPhone applications.
4) A friend with (1)-(3) above.

Recommended:
5) A periscope mirror that reflects your iPhone camera image 180°.

It should also be mentioned that we cannot provide any technical help with getting this running. If you think you’ve found a bug, we’d love to hear about it.

Privacy Disclaimer:
This application uses a central server to move images between two iPhones, using your iPhone’s phone number as your unique ID. (It’s your “screen name” if you like.) Therefore, if you’re not comfortable broadcasting your phone number and your camera images through our server, this may not be the app for you. (No, we’re not going to call you, distribute your phone number, or spy on you.) Also, there’s no authentication or any way to keep anyone who knows your number from viewing your images.

Oh yeah, here’s the link: squide_app.zip (38K)

Have fun!

in which we make the world’s first useful video phone

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Update: Our demo won first place for Iron Coder Live this afternoon! Thanks for your votes everyone!

Update 2: We’ve added a link to source code at the bottom of the post. We also made a quick video demo in Starbucks today.

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This weekend’s C-4 developer conference features “Iron Coder Live”, a contest in the same vein as MacHack. The event encourages conference attendees to develop creative “hacks”, written in within a short timeframe. This year’s theme, of course, is iPhone.

This was a great excuse to buy another iPhone, install the iPhone toolchain and waste some time! Before we knew it, the iCal told us it was Thursday and we were putting the finishing touches on iPhone video conferencing.

Camera? Oh really?

Obviously we had to do something with the iPhone’s camera. Doing crazy things with cameras is a full time job for us! Our contest entry captures video from the iPhone’s camera, compresses it, and sends it to a web server, where it’s relayed to another iPhone, and vice-versa, resulting in a nice two-way video conference. Need audio too? That’s not our department but simply make a phone call to the other person’s iPhone and put them on speaker phone. Then fire up our program and you’re in business. (Yes, the iPhone makes phone calls apparently.)

Wait for the Clever Bit

Now you’re probably thinking, how do you do a video conference when the iPhone’s camera is pointed in the wrong direction? The iPhone, like every other smartphone that I’ve seen, has a camera mounted on the back of the device, causing most people to dismiss the possibility of video conferencing right out of the gate.

Phuckleberry

For those of you familiar with the Ecamm product line, you may remember that we sell the Huckleberry mirror, a periscope for your MacBook or MacBook Pro. While the Huckleberry II for MacBook Pro doesn’t quite fit properly on an iPhone, that’s nothing some wire cutters and imagination couldn’t fix. Here are some pictures of our homemade iPhone-Huckleberry-stand running a two-way video conference over wifi. As you can see, the camera image is reflected off two acrylic mirrors and re-oriented in software.

(The orientation changes automatically of course.)

Darn

Ok, whoops, we meant to create something useless and fun. Surprisingly, this actually works very well, and might be considered downright useful in some scenarios. I hope that doesn’t disqualify us from the hack contest…

The iPhone Toolchain

The first step after jailbreaking our iPhones (which sounds dangerous but is actually pretty benign), was downloading and building the iPhone toolchain. The toolchain is clearly the result of hundreds of hours of work by a devoted group of iPhone dev devotees. What have they built? In a Nutshell, devs can now write native iPhone apps in the same integrated development environment we use to write Mac apps, in the same programming lanaguage, using almost the same set of APIs. It’s pretty overwhelming to think of the possibilites this opens up. It’s like a tiny little Mac/phone just like we were all promised! Thanks to the folks at iPhone Dev Wiki, and the binutils project, and these two pages for getting us up and running within hours.

Source Code

We’ve decided to post the source code for our contest entry here on the blog. Please keep in mind, this is most likely not going to be useful to you for anything other than illustrating the mechanisms that we used to accomplish our hack. The current app does not support more than two users, and will not just compile and magically work, as you will also need a server and a relay script to send the imagery between iPhones. (We used Perl for that.)

Download here: squidge_source.zip (84K)

Sample App

Next on our list, we’ll be creating an app that will actually let ambitious iPhone users try out the proof of concept. This primarily involves adding a user interface. Check back for this.

Very cool. I’m quoted in today’s Boston Globe. It’s a decent article about the iPhone being closed to 3rd party developers. It’s humbling to be quoted before Bob Borchers, “Apple’s senior director of iPhone worldwide product marketing”.

It’s odd to think of Apple as potentially stifling innovation. Sometimes they seem like the only innovative company around. My point here is that each 3rd party app that could be written for the iPhone would immediately increase the usefulness of the phone. Bray (the reporter from the Globe) asked me “Why do we need 3rd party apps? What kind of apps might be useful on the iPhone?” The answer to this question is that the possibilities are only limited by the imaginations of the developers. That’s part of what makes software development so exciting: The real killer apps are never predictable. You could be vague and say: business apps, creative tools, GAMES! But the real innovative ones will catch us all by surprise; I promise. And you can quote me on that.