Develop for Windows, Mac or even Linux? That’s hardly the question asked anymore. We want to know iPhone, Android, Blackberry, iPad, or other mobile device. There are solutions for delivering to all devices plus the traditional desktop. In this session we will walk through how to achieve cross-platform deployment of Rich Internet Applications. Thanks to [...]

For the Iona Group’s company demo, we wanted to feature the iPad. But not just one iPad, we used 3. And we didn’t just put the same thing on each one but we used the Game Kit framework and Bluetooth for peer-to-peer communication between the iPads. Enjoy.

The time came to renew our cable subscription (promotional period was ending) and we decided our usage did not justify keeping the television portion of our cable bill. We also receive our broadband through the cable company and so we debated other broadband offerings but as in most places, the options are limited to cable [...]

We have driven our friend Rovio with custom controls, viewed his video, and detected some objects and now it’s time for Rovio to go home. Here’s how we got him back to base: First Rovio needs to know where home is. To do this we use the beacon on the base station and optional extender [...]

With the newly acquired robot eyes, we were left with the question of what distinguishes the objects from each other? Shape and size: Using these characteristics and constructing custom object (similar to facial) recognition using opencv and haartraining the different objects could be “seen” by the rover. This ended up being a balance of accuracy [...]

Now that we can move the robot, we need to be able to see where we are going. To give our robot eyes within flash, I first tried a series of images using the still image command from the Rovio api (/Jpeg/CamImg[value].jpg). This produced stuttering, unreliable quality video. I needed to get at the video [...]

A year ago I published a post about widgets coming to the television. A year later I have widgets on my TV. Now that I have experienced the widgets first hand, there is not much change to my feelings about the basics of the previous post. There is still no bridge between the cable content [...]

Using a keyboard to navigate a virtual space; be it the internet, a game or some other format, is familiar to most adults and older children. The Wowwee Rovio (rover) can be driven by such keyboard controls or mouse clicks with the built-in interface. Couple of problems with this however: The interactive needed a custom [...]

Over the past months at work I have been taking a consumer mobile webcam (robot) and converting it to custom interactive experience. Over the next couple of weeks I will be talking about some of the finer point of taking an off-the-shelf WowWee Rovio (which comes with some fine built-in features) and transforming it into [...]

I was recently putting together a test plan for some interactives that we are deploying in the next couple of months. As I was putting the pieces together I was realizing that software testing is very similar to something I had previously done, writing educational goals for children with disabilities. I guess I have a [...]