Stijn Spijker.nl

This is a reference to my Animated and transparent GIF’s for iPhone made easy! post. Today (and yesterday) I did a complete rework of the module, incorporating everything I’ve learned since becoming an iPhone developer when I released this module..

The module now works with a shared instance, this saves memory, and gives you the oppurtunity to creates class methods. Getting your animated gif on the iPhone on now simply one line of code:

UIImageView * animation = [AnimatedGif getAnimationForGifAtUrl: url];

Next to being more efficient with memory now, I’ve also implemented loading the Gif from the web, using NSURL* instead of NSString*. The module loads the data after firing a selector, so you can safely call this method from your viewDidLoad: without making the GUI wait. If you want real asynchronous work, you’ll have to do it yourself though ( I thought this was overkill).

Furthermore the module should be fully backwards compatible, and you can still work with the object by just calling

[AnimatedGif sharedInstance]

Thanks for all the feedback, and I hope you appreciate work being put into this module. and no, I still didn’t do LZW compression…

A new website that we at Phonecast Solutions made, Get the Virus, is online! It’s a new campaign by STOP AIDS NOW! and on this website people can start their own actions, take part in actions started by others, and become an SMS donator. When you do any of these three you will immediately appear on the map as a dot, with your data on it. Also available soon is a Hyves widget, but they still have to approve it…

Check it out, and become an SMS donator to help STOP AIDS NOW!

I made some changes to the website, www.stijnspijker.nl now no longer exists, it is a redirect to blog.stijnspijker, because a portal page where you had to choose where to go isn’t really user friendly.. Also, I deleted my entire old photoalbum, Gallery2, since it became to big, and too much work to maintain.

Following the trends, I will start looking at alternatives, like Flickr and Picasa to put up my stuff. I don’t plan on creating entire albums anymore, just continuing the idea of the monthly albums, so the Flickr photostreams are attractive.. For now, I just have a simple AutoViewer flash slideshow on there..

More soon!

No, it’s not your cache screwing with you. No, your didn’t accidentally increase your font size… Google actually made a radical change to their front page by increasing the size of their buttons and the text you type in the search box.

I think it’s actually a really good idea! Now the older people, wearing reading glasses etcera can use Google without their reading glasses, and hey, it wasn’t like Google was actually using the space for something more useful than whitespace.

Accessibility is a really big thing out there, that is often forgotten, we should all use this as a reminder that even the best websites out there can make simple, but great changes.

Location Based Services (LBS) are a new hip thing on the mobile market. Basically, it means that you, as a user, allow applications to find your location through GPS, WiFi, cell phone tower triangulation or anything else for that matter. The problem is standardization. Right now there are different API’s on every platform to find out a users location. Now, if you are developing an application for a single platform, this is not a problem, but if you want something to run on almost every platform, this is stressfull. One way to do it, is to outsource the drivers for every specific platform to someone else, and utilize their API. An example of a company who does this is Skyhook. Skyhook has an extensive database of WiFi access points and their locations. They drive through streets, just like Google does for streetview, but they measure the strength of all the consumer accesspoints without actually connecting to them. This is not a really new technique, since we do the same with cell tower triangulation, but there are several advantages. In the countryside, GPS works great, but once you go into rural area, you get echo’s etc, and it takes a while before you get a fix, and the accuracy goes down.
To get a quick fix, we have cell tower triangulation, this isn’t terribly accurate triangulation though, and that’s where the WiFi networks come in! WiFi networks have a reach of about a hundred meters, and the advantage is, that right where GPS fails, there are thousands of WiFi access points!

Now, we have solved the problem of LBS from normal applications, but the world isn’t prepared yet for one thing. What if I want to get the location of a user from a website?! The only way right now is to trace the IP of the users which is wildly inaccurate, since it just tells you where your ISP is. For example, I live in Gelderland but my IP traces to Deurne, which is in Brabant, about an hours drive away (that’s a lot in the Netherlands).

What we need, is a single standardized interface that we can access from the browser. Javascript would be the easiest way here, I think. Now several companies are already working on this, and some already have it working through small java applets, like Loki (again from Skyhook). Loki works amazingly well, yet it is only available for the desktop, since mobile browsers are not really plugin friendly yet.

What are your ideas on Location Based Services? Will they make your live easier? Think about how GPS changed your live, your ability to travel without worry, and think about finding the stuff your want near you in seconds!