Mac Daddy World

The top secret BT-1 project was finally declassified at Macworld 2009. After so much hard work by everyone involved, it was awesome to be officially recognized when it was awarded the Macworld Best of Show award. On Thursday, we got to show off not only the camera, but our shiny lucite trophy.

If you haven’t read about it yet, the BT-1 is the world’s first wireless webcam. It’s a tiny Bluetooth video camera which can be positioned anywhere around the room and used with iChat, Skype, or for any purpose imaginable.

Although we won’t actually be shipping the cams for a few months, Glen, Ken, Jimmy, Midori, and Neil worked hard all week demoing the BT-1 to expo attendees. MacWorld visitors could see for themselves how great the wireless video looks and feels. The general reaction to the camera ranged from “that’s really neat” to “that’s just what I need, I’ll take three!”

So how does a software company like Ecamm end up selling a ground-breaking hardware product? Making software is about designing user interfaces and moving bits around. Hardware is a whole different ball game, and has a lot of my software friends asking “where did this camera come from?” It helps to be working with a genius hardware engineer. The camera was designed and created by Pico Instruments, with Ecamm Network doing the drivers, and also the sales and marketing.

In four fast-paced days, we burned through more than 3000 flyers and 1000 miniature coffee cups (our signature giveaway). Check out Ken’s Flickr feed for some pictures of Ecamm’s Macworld 2009 experience.

This was our 3rd Macworld, but is this the end of an era?

I guess the last 25 years was just the end of the beginning.

We’re just back from C4[2]. Fantastic speakers and loads of Mac nerdery made for an amazing weekend trip to Chicago. The most unexpected part of the weekend for us was winning the Sunday contest. Having won Iron Coder Live last year, we weren’t planning on entering again—that is, until we found out about the amazing prize package. If there’s anything you can never have enough of, it’s Macs… and software to load onto them. If you weren’t there to watch, the entry is a bit difficult to describe but here goes.

In the spirit of the contest, we procrastinated until late Thursday afternoon and hatched a plan in a Starbucks-fueled brainstorm. (The employees at Starbucks are thoroughly convinced that we have no job.)

We had some Core Location-related ideas, but they would have involved lots of running around Chicago with iPhones, and since Wolf had given explicit permission to deviate from the theme “if the hack was cool enough”, we decided not to go the Core Location route. Once we came up with the stupidest idea on the planet, we headed out to buy Radio Shack’s last four remaining infrared LEDs and some tiny calculator batteries.

Six hours later, we had our hack ready: Using the WiiRemote.framework and some Apple sample code, we created a Mac app which could track infrared light sources using a Bluetooth link to a Wii Remote to draw colorful lines on the Mac screen. We also added an HTTP server using Cultured Code’s Simple HTTP Server Cocoa project. We then created an iPhone application to send HTTP requests to the Mac via Wifi. These requests controlled what kind of “artwork” would be generated by the Mac application. (Line color, thickness, etc.) As a finishing touch, we taped the infrared LEDs and batteries to the front of the iPhone. This allowed for a “digital whiteboard” effect. By pressing button on the iPhone’s cool UI and waving it around in a drawing motion, we were able to paint designs in the Mac program.

Friday was something of a blur and no work happened on the hack. I think I signed up for Twitter at some point. Tweet.

Saturday afternoon, we decided that we needed a “clincher” feature. A new mode was added to the application (using a UITabBarController of course) which allowed for the positioning and stamping of image files. We also added iPhone X-axis accelerometer data to the mix to allow for rotating of the stamped images by simply twisting the iPhone.

The next 24 hours was spent trying to decide what images we would use. We finally decided on Ken and Glen heads, tinfoil hats, nose glasses and fake moustaches, inspired by Josh and Dave’s Mr. Shuffle app, and the “paranoia” theme.

After spending Sunday morning in Photoshop lassoing fake moustaches, the live demo was a complete disaster. We positioned the Wii remote too far away from the Mac for the Bluetooth link to function, and our iPhones randomly jumped from out of our ad-hoc network to the conference network midway through the demo. Much awkwardness was twittered.

In the end, we somehow managed to take first place. Thanks for your votes, and thanks to all of the companies who donated software and t-shirts!

Here’s the source (875k) for our hack including Mac and iPhone projects. You’ll need Xcode 3.1, iPhone SDK and the WiiRemote.framework if you would like to build it. You’ll also need infrared LEDs… and tape…

Known issues: HTTP did not prove to be the best way to send rapid-fire requests from the iPhone to the Mac. The iPhone’s HTTP request system seems to freeze up if we send requests too quickly. Also, the IP address of the Mac server is hardcoded into the iPhone app for extra credit laziness.

One more thing: This code was mashed together in a few hours, and just barely. It contains some nasty bits and should not be used as an example of proper or efficient Cocoa programming!

So will anyone actually try this themselves? Let us know if you do!

To quote from the immortal words of They Might Be Giants:

“Where’s my hovercraft?
Where’s my jet pack?
Where’s the font of acquired wisdom that eludes me now?”

Sometimes it seems like we really are stuck in a World Before Later On, but then, when you least expect it, you realize that it’s the future. The future, suddenly, is now.

Secure Future

Take this comment from deep in the Security framework for example:

/*
... You need to aquire [sic] this right to be able to perform a AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges() operation. In addtion [sic] to this right you should obtain whatever rights the tool you are executing with privileges need to perform it's [sic] operation on your behalf. Currently no options are supported but you should pass in the full path of the tool you wish to execute in the value and valueLength fields. In the future we will limit the right to only execute the requested path, and we will display this information to the user.
*/


I was in the process of debugging something that used to work but had stopped working on a new version of OS X. Suddenly I realized that the future was here, now. It sent shivers down my Spine.

Corrupt Future

Remember floppy disks? Remember colorful 800kb floppy disks? I clearly remember them, and will admit to having boxes full of hundreds of them. They’re filled with everything Glen and I did on a computer for 10 years: From 1988 when we got our first Mac, up until when floppy disks went the way of ADB, built-in modems, trackballs, Netscape, and the Palm Pilot. In fact, as early as 1998, the very first iMac boldly omitted a floppy disk drive. So it’s been nearly 10 years since Apple began phasing out the little suckers.

To get back to my point: I also clearly remember conversations to the effect of, “Someday in the future we won’t be able to use these disks. We won’t have a computer that reads them or even programs that will open the files. Also, aren’t these things only supposed to last about 15 years before going bad?”

Well, I do still have a computer that can read the disks… but all of the word processing files are in Microsoft Works 2.0 format. Guess what? Nothing reads that format anymore. Most of the drawings I did when I was 10 are in SuperPaint 1.0 or CricketPaint. Not sure how I’ll look at those again. You might be interested to know that Preview.app will open MacPaint files. Maybe a running inside joke at Apple?

Oh yeah, guess what else. Most of the disks that date from before 1992 have bad blocks… Yeah… they’re dropping like flies.

The future is now.

Unexpected Futures

With OS X 10.5 due out next month, and likely a team in Cupertino already hard at work on OS X 10.6, somebody in Apple marketing is tossing and turning in their sleep: “How long can we keep raising the number? How many big cat varieties are there anyways? What if we run out of cool sounding species? What happens when we get past 10.9? 10.10? I just don’t think that sounds right. I still can’t even believe they went with 10.4.10. Oh god I think I’m going to be fired.”

Certain Future

If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that the future will arrive.

And I’ll close with some more They Might Be Giants:
You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re older still.

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.

We just finished some marathon coding and are happy to announce iPhoneDrive. In a nutshell, it lets you use your iPhone for file storage by providing an easy file browser interface. Version 1.0 is very functional considering that it was written in about one week. The demo version works just like the paid version but only for a 7 day period.

It supports drag and drop to and from the iPhone. It also supports transfer of entire folders. This makes it easy to move large directories back and forth between your Mac and your iPhone. Since the iPhone uses USB 2.0, the transfer speed is very fast. Now you can put those spare gigabytes to good use. Backup your important files! Your hard disk could fail at any moment! Do it now!

Here’s a screenshot:

Reinventing the Wheel

You can see we used an NSBrowser for the file browser. If you’ve ever tried to use one of these you’d know that they’re not very useful out of the box. Drag and drop has to be implemented manually, and the updating of cell data is very flaky, requiring many work-arounds. Also, they don’t do many of the things that you’d come to expect from the Finder’s column view mode.

All said and done, the interface came out pretty good. I just wish Apple would update NSBrowser to support more of the things found in the Finder column view. Obviously the Finder isn’t implemented using NSBrowser (it’s not even Cocoa for that matter), but it would be nice to have things like elipsification, marquee selecting, and drag and drop in there without having to reinvent the wheel.

We welcome any feedback about iPhoneDrive. Leave a comment here or use the feedback form on the main Ecamm website.