Techno Babble

Its fitting, on the day of general availability of the iPhone 4 in the UK,  that you can take a look inside.

iFxit provides full details of their iPhone 4 teardown at

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4-Teardown/3130/1

The High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB) is a barcode system developed by Microsoft Research.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/hccb/

It’s not a brand new technology though, having been under development for some time – you can read a news item about the technology (dated 19 April 2007) on the BBC website at

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6570871.stm

It has become more prominent, however, following the recent release of Microsofts second application for the iPhone – Microsoft Tag.

This application is available for a range of mobile phones including the iPhone and allows a user to take a snapshot of the barcode (tag) with the camera. The tag is then decoded to produce a unique ID which is sent to Microsoft servers and  interpreted to provide an action assocated with the tag such as opening your phone’s web-browser at a specific web address. 

The process is intended to provide users with the ability to easily connect to information related with the placement of the barcode. For example on product literature,

Microsoft Vista Packaging + Tag

Another example would be enabling a  user to automatically upload contact details to their phone by simply taking a snapshot of the tag placed on a business card.

From the publishers point of view, Microsoft provides analytics that show which tags are being read and  when and where they’re being read.

Find out all the details, and try it for yourself at 

http://www.microsoft.com/tag/

or use the following Microsoft Tag … 

http://www.microsoft.com/tag

Other Related Technology

DataGlyphs from Parc Research

http://www.parc.com/research/projects/dataglyphs/

QR code

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code

http://www.denso-wave.com/qrcode/index-e.html

Following on from the recent announcement of a deal between Nokia and Microsoft to run Silverlight on its handsets. There are rumours that Microsoft will build a version of Silverlight to work on the iPhone.

Microsoft is aiming to take a share of the RIA market from Adobe Flash and this approach would certainly provide another push. Their aim is to provide Silverlight across all available mobile platforms, not only for Windows based devices.

It is unclear exactly how the proposed pricing plan from Apple would affect downloads of Silverlight to the iPhone would Apple charge for each download of Silverlight from iTunes?

However, this is unlikely to be much of a problem considering they do work together occasionally. This was demonstrated by the recent collaboration between Apple and Microsoft in providing ActiveSync technology for the iPhone that allows e-mail to be pushed directly to Mobile devices from Microsoft’s Exchange Server.

The telekinesis project at Google Code, allows you to access your Mac through a collection of mini web applications, on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Although still a developer prototype, which is intended only as a demo, it is available to download from the project home page at

http://code.google.com/p/telekinesis/

This provides an application iPhone Remote which you install and run on your Mac.

Then you can connect to the installed machine through its name, or IP address, in the Safari web browser on your iPod Touch, or iPhone, as follows:

https://NAME OF YOUR MAC HERE:5010/

and you are presented with a screen display similar to the following

Amongst other applications, as well as being able to see what is happening on your Mac screen (using the screen application) there is also an application which allows you to use the iPod as a remote control for the Mac.

I also came across another useful write-up on this topic at

http://www.sipedia.co.uk/mac/ipodwifistream.php

The unofficial Apple Weblog

http://www.tuaw.com/

The iPhone Dev Wiki

http://iphone.fiveforty.net/wiki/

Inside the iPhone

http://www.eetimes.com/news/design/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=200001811

iPhone Framework Documentation updated to version 1.1.2

http://ericasadun.com/iPhoneDocs112/

A number of related articles including

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/07/13/iphone-os-x-architecture-the-mach-kernel-and-ram/

The Apple iPhone dissected

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3026

A document describing how to create native iPhone applications

www.lucasnewman.com/phonedev.pdf

Discussion about various topics at ajaxian

http://ajaxian.com/by/topic/iphone/

various code samples

http://thebends.org/~allen/iphone/

Files2Phones is an application that allows you to access your desktop PC (or Mac) directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

http://www.myf2p.com/

It is not necessary to install anything on the iPhone or iPod Touch, all the functionality is available through the Safari web browser.

The software installs the Files2Phones Access Server on your desktop PC. During installation a web address (for example, yourname.my2fp.com) is created for your computer and this is what you use to access your desktop computer.

You can determine which files and folders are made available and Files2Phones provides multiple security options to protect your data and access to the desktop. Public, Private and Guest areas are available.