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Thuraya SatSleeve for iPhone

Posted by Unknown Jumat, 19 April 2013 0 komentar

Application: iPhone 4, 4S
Function: Satellite/iPhone communications
Rating:****
Cost: App Free, sleeve $499.00

Wow, there is a new way to stay globally connected with you iPhone 4 or 4S. A new device called the SatSleeve turns an ordinary iPhone into a satellite phone. The present model fits the iPhone 4 and 4S but the iPhone 5 version is reportably in the works. The Thuraya SatSleeve App only lets you set up and use your satellite phone to make voice calls and text messages at this time. Thuraya also plans to release a SatSleeve with data capability later this summer.

Features:

iPhone 4 and 4s compatible
Bluetooth connectivity
12 languages
Voice Calls
SMS text
Battery backup 2400mAh
Emergency Call button
Coverage in 140 countries, 2/3 of the earth

Your phone simply inserts into the case and is transformed into a satellite phone. The app pairs through Bluetooth to connect to the sleeve. The case contains a satellite antenna and a 2400mAh battery that can also be used to recharge you iPhone.

The sleeve itself has an SOS button that can be programmed to make an emergency call to whoever you want. The Thuraya network cover 140 countries around the world but you will notice that North and South America are missing from the coverage map.

The app shown at left links with your contacts and allows you to make calls or text your friends. The SatSleeve is easily paired to your phone. Take the back cover off of the SatSleeve and press the pairing button on the bottom. On your phone go to the Settings menu and turn Bluetooth "ON". The SatSleeve selection should be shown. Once it automatically pairs to your phone you will not have to pair it again.

For you world travelers this may be the ticket. Total freedom from landlines and spotty cell coverage. The $499 dollar price tags seems pricey, but compared to a bulky satellite phone costing $600-$1500 it is a nice solution. A $99.00 per year pre-paid calling plan has rates from 99 cents to $1.49 a minute. It is not cheap but that is the price of world wide service.

I am bummed out that they do not cover the Americas. Must be a licensing issue or something. I can only hope that it will be offered in our area at sometime in the future.

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SEAiq 2.5 Revision

Posted by Unknown Minggu, 07 April 2013 0 komentar

Application: iPhone 3,4,5, iPad, iPod Touch iOS 6.0

Function: Marine GPS Navigation and Charting

Rating: ****

Cost: SEAiq USA $9.99, Free version, SEAiq Open $19.99

Mark Hayden, the author of the SEAiq series of apps, has been very busy lately. He has not only sailed more than 15,000 miles this past year but also has made many valuable additions to his SEAiq charting app. I originally reviewed the SEAiq USA app back in April of 2012.

Mark and his growing family arrived back at their boat in Australia with an added crew member this year. Their son joined them as they spent many months exploring the coasts of Australia and eventually moving on to Southeast Asia. Concerns about pirates forced them to cross the Indian Ocean and onto South Africa. The last leg of their trip was from South Africa to Cape Verde where the boat will remain until baby number 2 arrives shortly. They plan to continue their adventures in the Mediterranean. Congratulations Mark and Dana!

You can follow all of their travels on their Northfork blog.

Mark's many ocean miles have given him a unique perspective on what features are valuable for crossing oceans as well as coastal cruising. He happens to be an accomplished sailor and a very talented programmer. This combination has produced one of the best charting apps on the market today.

The latest additions to SEAiq have added more functionality to the already feature rich app that is becoming the Go-To-App by many boating enthusiasts and harbor pilots. The variety of features and the versatility to display just about any type of chart make it a must have app.

Features:

NOAA ENC Vector
NOAA Raster charts
US Army Corps of Engineers vector chart of inland waterways
For SEAiq Open formats include, KAP and BSB formats, S-57, S-63, Inland-ENC, CM93, and KAP/BSB plus home-made charts generated from satellite imagery
Offline use of charts
Night time color modes
ActiveCaptain points of interest
On screen instrument display
iPad vertical instrument display
LAT: Latitude, LON: Longitude, ACC: Horizontal Accuracy of current GPS fix, COG: Course Over Ground, SOG: Speed Over Ground, BTW: Bearing To Waypoint, DTW: Distance To Waypoint,VMG: Vector Made Good
English and metric units
Import/Export
Detailed Vector chart information
Waypoints creation and edit
Route creation and edit
Tracking
Smooth chart quilting
World chart view
Multi-touch gestures, pan and zoom
NMEA WiFi instrument and AIS data
AIS display
Weather Grib downloads from the Internet or Saildocs via Sailmail
Wind, pressure isobars
Anchor Alarm
7 Day evaluation period
Drag and drop Variable Range Markers
Drag and drop Electronic Bearing Lines

Mark continues to add many useful features to an already great app. He makes it easy for you to try the app with his Free version. All the features of the app are available for 7 days. The premium features are colored a light magenta so you know what you get when you purchase the upgrade.

The premium features will no longer be available after the 7 day trial period. They do allow you to un-install the app and reinstall it for another 7 days if needed.

Chart Types:

SEAiq has a very wide range of charts that can be displayed. Unlike most charting apps many of the charts can be downloaded and updated for free. For SEAiq USA and SEAiq Free, both raster and vector charts and updates can be downloaded free from NOAA within the app. Vector charts for inland waterways published by US Army Corps of Engineers are now available too. The app allows you to switch back and forth between displaying the raster or vector types of charts. The Raster setting in the settings menu will switch the viewed charts between Vector and Raster.

For the SEAiq OPEN version, you can load charts in the KAP and BSB formats. SEAiq OPEN now supports formats including S-57, S-63, Inland-ENC, CM93, and KAP/BSB. Many of these can be downloaded from the Internet and imported using the Open In feature. Support also includes home-made charts generated from satellite imagery. This is useful for areas that do not have good chart coverage. The OPEN version is free to download and with an in app purchase of $19.99 it will upgrade to the premium version with all the features. No other app allows you to download and use so many different chart types.

Mark provides links to many free S-57 chart sources within the app's help screen. (See below). Help for downloading other types of charts is also explained nicely within the app.

NOAA provides high quality charts of the USA and territorial waters:
http://www.charts.noaa.gov/ENCs

The US Army Corps of Engineers provides charts of some inland waterways in the USA (in both S-57 and Inland ENC formats):
http://www.tec.army.mil/echarts/E_download.html

Numerous charts of inland waterways in Europe. Below are some of the links. Note that these links change from time to time:
Austria: http://www.doris.bmvit.gv.at/fileadmin/group_upload/8/ECDIS_Download/Edition_5.zip
Belgium: http://ris.vlaanderen.be/IENC/
Czech Republic: http://193.86.76.109/lpm/maps_S57.asp?lang=en
Germany: http://www.elwis.de/RIS-Telematik/Inland-ENC-der-WSV/IENC-Dateien/index.php.html
Netherlands: http://www.vaarweginformatie.nl/fdd/main/infra/enc
Romania: http://www.afdj.ro/electronic_map.html
Serbia: http://www.plovput.rs/elektronske-navigacione-karte
South China Sea (requires registration): http://scsenc.eahc.asia

Status Bar:

Another new addition to the app is the Vertical Status Bar. This is available for iPad versions when in landscape mode. When you rotate the app into landscape mode the status bar will move from the top of the display to the side of the display. The data is now organized into more logical groups for display. The GPS position and senor data is separated and shown on top. The SOG and COG readings are displayed using a bigger font which makes them stand out and easier to read.

Context-sensitive information is also displayed when certain features are turned on so you only see the data when it is useful to you. When the anchor alarm in enabled, the information about relative position of the anchor is displayed. When AIS is being used, information for the most recently selected target is displayed.

VRL/EBL:

Variable Range Markers and Electronic Bearing Lines are some new tools added for measuring distance and bearing. These can be added to you chart by simply double tapping at any point and making a selection. The VRM tool allows you to specify a distance around your present location or a point. A circle is then displayed at that radius.

EBL can be made from any point on your chart to another point or location. It will display the bearing and distance between the two points. This feature is nice to quickly find distance and bearing from your own-ship or even to an AIS target. These can be dragged and dropped onto or off of a vessel.

Weather:

One of the latest additions to SEAiq is the weather data including Wind, Pressure/Isobar data. It has the ability to download this data automatically from the National Weather Service. An Internet connection is required. This latest release adds the pressure/isobar lines. The weather data can also be downloaded manually while underway via SailMail/SailDocs using your SSB. Additional weather data is planned for future releases. The settings menu in the Weather sections lets you control what data you want to see and how it is downloaded.

SEAiq continues to add many functional and desired features for mariners. The app has matured over the past year to become a full featured marine charting app. The latest features including Active Captain POI, additional chart types, import/export, weather, instrument data, EBL, VRM, AIS, anchor alarm, and NMEA WiFi capability make it a must have for you iPad.

~~~ Sail On ~~~ /)
Mark

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Best Practices for Mobile App Development on Android

Posted by Unknown Selasa, 02 April 2013 0 komentar

Designing and building apps that look great and perform well on as many devices ranging from smart phones to tablets is crucial to ensure an optimal user experience.
At the recent DevFest Silicon Valley event held at Google on March 15th, I had presented a talk on Best Practices for Mobile App Development on Android. The talk focuses on the Golden Rules & Best Practices of Performance including how to keep your apps responsive, how to effectively implement Background Services, tips for improving the performance and scalability of long-running applications, and briefly on Best Practices for User Experience and concluding with Benefits of Intents and Intent Filters. For further details, please refer to the slides attached below.

Best practices for mobile app development android march 15 2013 ts from Tasneem Sayeed

If you enjoyed this article, you may want to follow me (@tasneemsayeed) on Twitter. I always announce significant new blog posts and interesting mobile topics via a tweet. You can also subscribe to this blog. Feel free to post any comments that you may have below.

View more documents from tasneemsayeed.

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Android Developer Days is reloading for 2013

Posted by Unknown Selasa, 26 Maret 2013 0 komentar

Android Developer Days(ADD) is now reloading for 2013. ADD 2013 will take place on June 14/15, 2013 in METU Cultural and Convention Center, Ankara, Turkey.
ADD 2013 is targeted to be the one of the biggest international tech related community organization in EMEA. The first ADD was on May 21/22, 2012. There were 700 participants and more than 30 speakers. ADD 2013, June 14/15, 2013, will have more participants, more fun, more networking and more inspiration.
Take a look at the About, Call for submissions and Participation Form.

ADD is a community conference organized by:

Call For Submissions

You can join the conference with the followings:

Presentations that is 15-20 minutes or 40-45 minutes long.
Quickie: 10 minute presentation in small rooms.
Poster: You can show your applications in a place dedicated for posters.
Workshop: Presentations with hands on coding, 40 minutes long.
Indicate your contribution in OpenConf and please indicate how much your presentation is going to take when submitting it to OpenConf Deadline of Call for Submissions is 1st May 2013.
Subjects:

Future Technologies
Mobile World
Future of Mobile World
New Generation Mobile Devices (Project Glass)
Android OS
Future Versions
Android in Different Architectures
Android in Different Areas(Industry, Defense, Home Electronics etc.)
Android App Development
New Features and Capabilities
App Development Best Practises
Android SDK Tools
UI(User Interface) / UX (User Experience) Design
App Monetization
Ad Integration
In-app Billing
User Statistics
Android NDK
Cross Platform App Development Frameworks
HTML5
Javascript
Game Development
Google TV
Google Playstore
Communication Solutions (NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-fi)
3G, 4G Wide Band Communication
Cloud
Google Cloud Messaging for Android
Google App Engine
Augmented Reality
Social Media
Location Based Services and Maps
Mobile Education (Fatih Project)
Mobile Payment
Security
Arduino
Software Development Methodologies
Success Stories
GWT

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Implementing Singletons for the iOS platform

Posted by Unknown Jumat, 08 Maret 2013 0 komentar

The Singleton design pattern is one of the most frequently used design pattern when developing for the iOS platform. It is a very powerful way to share data across different parts of an iOS application without having to explicitly pass the data around manually.

Overview

Singleton classes play an important role in iOS as they exhibit an extremely useful design pattern. Within the iOS SDK, the UIApplication class has a method called sharedApplication which when called from anywhere will return the UIApplication instance that is associated with the currently running application.

How to implement the Singleton Class

You can implement the Singleton class in Objective-C as follows:

`MyManager.h`


@interface MySingletonManager : NSObject {
    NSString *someProperty;
}


@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *someProperty;

+ (id)sharedManager;

@end

`MyManager.m`

#import "MySingletonManager.h"

@implementation MySingletonManager

@synthesize someProperty;

#pragma mark Singleton Methods

+(id) sharedManager {
    static MySingletonManager *sharedMySingletonManager = nil;
    static dispatch_once_t onceToken;
    dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{
        sharedMySingletonManager = [[self alloc] init];

    });
    return sharedMySingletonManager;
}
                  
- (id)init {
    if (self = [super init]) {
        someProperty = @"Default Property";
    }
    return self;
}

- (void)dealloc {
    // should never be called, but included here for clarity
}

@end

The above code fragment defines a static variable called sharedMySingletonManager which is then initialized once and only once in sharedManager. The way that we ensure that it is only created once is by using the dispatch_once method from the Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). This is thread safe and handled entirely by the OS so you do not need to worry about it at all.

If you rather not use GCD, then you can the following code fragment for sharedManager:

Non-GCD Based

+ (id)sharedManager {
    @synchronized(self) {
        if (sharedMySingletonManager == nil)
            sharedMySingletonManager = [[self alloc] init];
    }
    return sharedMySingletonManager;
}

Then, you can reference the Singleton from anywhere by calling the function below:

Referencing the Singleton

MySingletonManager *sharedManager = [MySingletonManager sharedManager];
Happy Singleton'ing! If you find this post useful, then mention me in the comments.

View more documents from tasneemsayeed.

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How to Create a Local SVN Repository

Posted by Unknown Rabu, 20 Februari 2013 0 komentar

Apache Subversion (SVN) is a software versioning and revision control system which is widely used in software industry. SVN is very useful when we create important and huge code over a time period. Because, whatever change happened, we can go back to our previous versions of the code. And other important feature is we can mange our huge source code with a huge development team. Normally, we install SVN in a server machine.

But we can create an SVN repository in our own computer and we can mange our code locally. It is very simple and there are only few steps to complete.

First You have to install SVN in your computer. Here you can find the way to install. After installing, type the following command in the command line consecutively. This example is based on Linux OS.

mkdir /home/user/svndir - This will create a directory called 'svndir'.

cd /home/user/svndir - Go inside that directory.

svnadmin create mylocalrepo - 'mylocalrepo' is the name of your repository.

svn mkdir file:///home/user/svndir/mylocalrepo/myproject - You create a directory called 'myproject' inside your repository.

svn import /home/user/HelloWorld file:///home/user/svndir/mylocalrepo/myproject - You enter your 'HelloWorld' porject in to the local repository 'myproject' directory.

Now you are done..!

You can check your local repository content by executing following command.

svn list --verbose file:///home/user/svndir/mylocalrepo

You can use all the SVN command which has been listed here.

As an example, when you want to check out your project to your workspace type following command.

svn co file:///home/user/svndir/mylocalrepo/myproject /home/user/workspace

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Google Chrome 23 Offline Installer Free Download

Posted by Unknown Rabu, 19 Desember 2012 0 komentar

Download Google Chrome 23 Offline installer.Released Date: 20 September, 2012

Download Google Chrome 23 Offline Installer Free.
Latest Version of Google Chorme Released. Free
Download New Google Chrome 23 Full offline Portable
installer Version.Google Chorme is a Free Fastest Web
Browser in the World and Very Much Popular among the
People.

==Direct Download Link==

Size: 29 MB

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