Hardware Hacking for iOS Programmers Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

This post was originally published on Josetteorama.

The arrival of the iPhone changed the whole direction of software development for mobile platforms, and has had a profound impact on the hardware design of the smart phones that have followed it.

Not only do these devices know where they are, they can tell you how they're being held, they are sufficiently powerful to overlay data layers on the camera view, and record and interpret audio data, and they can do all this in real time. These are not just smart phones, these are computers that just happen to be able to make phone calls.

Alasdair Allan demonstrating an Augmented Reality application

The arrival of the External Accessory Framework was seen, initially at least, as having the potential to open the iOS platform up to a host of external accessories and additional sensors. Sadly, little of the innovation people were expecting actually occurred, and while there are finally starting to be some interesting products arriving on the market, for the most part the External Accessory Framework is being used to support a fairly predictable range of audio and video accessories from big-name manufacturers.

The reason for this lack of innovation is usually laid at the feet of Apple's Made for iPod (MFi) licensing program. To develop hardware accessories that connect to the iPod, iPhone, or iPad, you must be an MFi licensee.

Unfortunately, becoming a member of the MFi program is not as simple as signing up as an Apple Developer, and it is a fairly lengthy process. From personal experience I can confirm that the process of becoming an MFi licensee is not for the faint-hearted. And once you’re a member of the program, getting your hardware out of prototype stage and approved by Apple for distribution and sale is not necessarily a simple process.

However all that started to change with the arrival of Redpark's serial cable. As it's MFi approved for the hobbyist market it allows you to connect your iPhone to external hardware very simply, it also allows you to easily prototype new external accessories, bypassing a lot of the hurt you experience trying to do that wholly within the confines of the MFi program.

Another important part of that change was the Arduino. The Arduino, and the open hardware movement that has grown up with it and to a certain extent around it, is enabling a generation of high-tech tinkers to prototype new ideas with fairly minimal hardware knowledge.

Every so often a piece of technology can become a lever that lets people move the world, just a little bit. The Arduino is one of those levers. While it started off as a project to give artists access to embedded microprocessors for interactive design projects, I think it’s going to end up in a museum as one of the building blocks of the modern world. It allows rapid, cheap prototyping for embedded systems. It turns what used to be fairly tough hardware problems into simpler software problems.

Turning things into software problems makes things more scalable, it drastically reduces development time scales, and up front investment, and as the whole dot com revolution has shown, it leads to innovation. Every interesting hardware prototype to come along seems to boast that it is Arduino-compatible, or just plain built on top of an Arduino.

Controlling an Arduino directly from the iPad

I think the next round of innovation is going to take Silicon Valley, and the rest of us, back to its roots, and that's hardware. If you're a software person the things that are open and the things that are closed are changing. The skills needed to work with the technology are changing as well.

Alasdair demonstrating an Augmented Reality application

At the start of October I'll be running a workshop on iOS Sensors and External Hardware. It's going to be hardware hacking for iOS programmers, and an opportunity for people to get their hands dirty both the internal sensors in the phone, and with external hardware.

The workshop is intended to guide you through the start of that change, and get you hands-on with the hardware in your iPhone you've probably been ignoring until now. How to make use of the on-board sensors and combine them to build sophisticated location aware applications. But also how to extend the reach of these sensors by connecting your iOS device to external hardware.

Blinking the heartbeat LED of a BeagleBone from the iPhone

We'll look at three micro-controller platforms, the Arduino and the BeagleBone and Raspberry Pi, and get our hands dirty building simple applications to control the boards and gather measurements from sensors connected to it, directly from the iPhone. The course should give you the background to build your own applications independently, using the hottest location-aware technology yet for any mobile platform.

The workshop will be on Monday the 8th of October at the Hoxton Hotel in London at the heart of  Tech City, and right next to Silicon Roundabout. I'm extending a discount to readers; 10% off the ticket price with discount code OREILLY10. That makes the early bird ticket price just £449.10 (was £499), or if you miss the early bird deadline (the 1st of September) a full priced ticket still only £629.10 (£699).

Monday 8th October 2012

Hoxton Hotel, London

Early Bird Price: £499 (until 1st Sept.)

Normal Price: £699

Save 10% with code OREILLY10

Stack Overflow Dev Day Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Stackoverflow.com is a free collaboratively built and maintained programming Q&A site, and if you haven't heard about it already, you should have done. It's pretty much my first call now for those obscure programming questions that come up from time-to-time, and the community that's grown up around the site is pretty solid.

I'm currently down in London for the the day to attend the first UK Stackoverflow Dev Day. The conference is in the Kensington Town Hall, somewhere I haven't been since the London ADASS meeting back in 2007. Although I do remember there is a really good Lebanese place around the corner...


Waiting for the #DevDays to begin...
Along with the the intriguingly entitled talk "Humanity: Epic Fail" about half way through the day, we're covering topics ranging from Python to Android, and Qt to the iPhone.


Joel Spolsky
I's going to be a lot of fun, and you can follow along on Twitter...

Enroute to OSCON Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm currently holed up in the Renaissance London Heathrow on my way out to OSCON 2008 being held in Portland in Oregon, at the Oregon Convention Centre.

Unlike last year the journey was fairly pleasant, just over two and a half hours in a straight run down the east coast main line from Leeds, where I was watching my wife graduate with her doctorate, instead of a torturous seven and a half hour journey across a flood torn west country.

However I've got a four thirty am check-in tomorrow morning, so right now it's time to get some sleep. More from me when I hit Portland...

Update: We took off late from Heathrow due to the late arrival of the equipment, we lost more time in the air due to adverse headwinds, and yet more time racked and stacked over a fog-bound O'Hare. So while I'm now on the ground in Chicago, I'm here two hours later than I should have been. Fortunately, for various values of fortunately, my trip through US immigration was relatively unscathed, and my onward flight turns out to be just as delayed going out as I was coming in. So I'm now camped out in the newly rennovated Red Carpet Club near B18. I'll let you know how things go when, or if, I make it into Portland later today...

Update: Finally made it into Portland. My connecting flight out of O'Hare was delayed, delayed again, and then delayed again. Then suddenly moved forward by an hour without warning, to a slot only a few minutes away. Apparently our plane was still sitting in Toronto, and United had decided to give us a different one at short notice. Presumably some other people were now without a plane, however...

This meant that I had to run across the terminal. Although I made it onto the flight ahead of most people, who no doubt had retired to the bar, or just taken a nap secure in the knowledge that had at least another hour to wait.

I also made it onto the plane before the flight crew, who took another hour and a half to arrive after we'd fully boarded. The cabin crew were looking distinctly nervous towards the end...

Once the flight crew arrived, did the safety check and the pre-fight, we'd closed the doors and started to pushback, one of the cabin crew noticed we had an extra passenger. The plane was full, every seat was taken, but there was still one poor guy still standing in the aisle clutching a valid boarding pass, but without a seat. After a brief discussion about whether he could sit in a spare jump seat, they finally decided that they just weren't allowed to do that anymore, he had to go...

So we had to find ourselves a new ground crew, return to the gate, and offload the guy. At this point we were getting close to the point where our flight crew were about to go illegal. We didn't pushback, for the second time, much ahead of the point where they'd have had to find us a new flight crew. Considering they probably couldn't do that the second pushback, and subsequent take off, was expedited. I was listening in on to the tower chatter on channel 9, and from the sounds of things we ducked in ahead of a fairly big queue, and rolled almost without a pause directly from the gate to the end of 32L and into the air.

That said, I arrived into Portland only two and a half hours later than planned, and I got to take a minor supporting role in an excellently produced farce. You can't complain too much...

There went the iPhone? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

As predicted, yesterday's special event saw the UK launch of the Apple iPhone. Surprisingly it left me unmoved, and from the reactions I've seen elsewhere I'm not alone. In fact I've been left with a certain feeling of disappointment...

CREDIT: Engadget

Comparing the iPhone specification to the Nokia's current flagship product the Nokia N95, the iPhone doesn't really measure up very well. Crucially it lacks that 3G magic we're used to in the UK, and the absence of an onboard GPS has always puzzled me, but perhaps the thing that's going to surprise Apple is the reaction they're going to get to the crippled Bluetooth functionality. The iPhone can only use it's Bluetooth to talk to a headset, we're used to more. I doubt I could even find the data cable for my Nokia N80. Having to sync my phone by plugging it in with a wire is so last century.

The deal with the Cloud is interesting, but not amazingly useful. The places people want to use WiFi such as train stations, airports, coffee shops and book stores, are mostly using T-Mobile in the UK. The Cloud on the other hand seems to have most of its hotspots located in pubs. I don't know about you but I've never taken my laptop out of its bag in a pub in my life. I don't think I've ever seen anyone working on a laptop in a pub either. I've never figured out how the Cloud made any money. I'm presuming there are other hotspots, but I don't think I've ever run across one.

With estimates that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of early adopters have hacked their iPhone, either by installing third party native applications, or by unlocking it, it looks like there is a lot of suppressed demand for both. I'm guessing that the UK market isn't going to take well to a locked iPhone either, again we're used to being able to unlock our phones. In fact we're so used to having unlocked phones, it'll probably confuse quite a few people that they can't just put one of their pay as you go SIM cards into the phone from the outset. It's interesting that Apple have gone with Carphone Warehouse, their normal policy is to sell all their phones unlocked.

Of course the big stumbling block is price, like most Brits I was guessing that Apple just wouldn't be able to persuade a UK network to sell the iPhone without a subsidy. It's totally alien to the way the UK market works, I've never paid for a phone and I've always had high specification phones. It's also interesting to see that the O2 contract is for 18 months. Lately, driven by the uptake in 18 and 24 month contracts in the US, the networks have been trying to push these fairly hard in the UK. They aren't popular, I'm on a 12 month contract and wouldn't sign an 18 month one under any circumstances.

I guess that I expected better from Apple, and I'm part of the mounting back lash. That said, just as soon as someone manages to jailbreak the new iPod touch I'll be picking up one of those. For me at least, it's pointless getting one unless I can use third party applications. Although the lack of any Bluetooth at all is puzzling. I know that in the US Bluetooth never really made a big impact, but in the UK, and Europe, Bluetooth is everywhere. Virtually everything electronic I own talks to each other via Bluetooth. It'd be weird to own a pice of kit that doesn't...

As for a phone, I'll stick with my Nokia for now. Maybe the next generation iPhone will tempt me when it arrives early next year. But unless they fix the crippled Bluetooth at least I'm not so sure, even then I wouldn't buy a locked phone.

Update: At least according to the New York Times (via TUAW) it isn't as if they don't have the margin to offer the subsidies we were expecting either...

Here comes the iPhone? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Reports are coming in (via TUAW) that Apple has announced an invite-only event to be held next Tuesday at the Regent Street Apple Store. The invite is pretty cryptic, even for Apple, but like almost everyone else I'm presuming that the tagline "Mum is no longer the word" is hinting at a UK release for the iPhone.

Update: My main objection to the rumours that O2 were Apple's chosen partner for the iPhone in the UK seems to be disappearing as, despite having a perfectly good 3G network, they appear to be rolling out an EDGE network across the UK. That more or less both confirms that Apple are going to be the shipping a 2.5G iPhone in the UK, and that O2 is their chosen partner. There really isn't any other reason for O2 to do this...

Update: I'm going to be presenting in a conference during Apple's announcement, so if you want to follow along you'll have to make do with Engadget's live coverage.

Update: My comments on the release of the iPhone in the UK.

Enroute to ADASS Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm holed up in the Renaissance London Heathrow yet again, this time on my way out to Tucson in Arizona for ADASS. I've got a distinct feeling of déjà vu here for some reason..?

Update: So I'm still enroute, and stuck in LAX...

Update: Finally managed to get out of LAX at ten past eight at night, about two and a quarter hours later than planned. Which put me into Tucson too late to do anything useful, but still too early to go directly to bed, despite it being around seven o'clock in the morning in the time zone I woke up in when I started the day.