Crimson Cactus

• TI introduces a customisable watch which does HRM out of the box

  3.17p.m. on Tuesday, 24th November

  Engadget have just reported that TI have released a hackable watch, which can do all sorts of things including HRM straight out of the box.  This is really interesting.  I wonder if I can make it work with Bleep.  Of course I should probably concentrate of finishing Bleep first. At $49 I reckon its a steal!  I might ask Santa for one for Christmas

  

  
• Who plays the part of transformation in mashups?

  2.17p.m. on Tuesday, 20th October

  In the last week, two people have independently told me about an Australian government sponsored conference to create interesting mashup applications from government data.  I love the idea, and I'm really glad that the government believes that its data should be freely available.  I think most app providers are realising the power of providing open access to their data to drive adoption now.  In my opinion however, independent transformation of data between web applications is still missing as a generic tool to mashup creators.
  
  Generally, in enterprise as in mash-up applications, the source data is not in the correct format to be directly consumed by the final application.  As an example, I am writing an iPhone application which takes heart rate monitor recordings of your exercise and stores them as a Google spreadsheet.  The reason I chose to store the information in an online spreadsheet instead of a bespoke database service is that google already provide all of the tools to make the available in the spreadsheet easily available as XML for others to consume.  It does this using the Atom protocol, which is great, but hardly easy to consume.
  
  Traditionally, a mash-up is seen as the combination of data from one or more external sources with a javascript driven user interface.  The data flow looks something like this.
  
  

  
  

  
  

  This is great, however it induces a great amount of coupling between the components.  The mashup provider needs to communicate directly with the data sources, transform them into its own native format, then consume it.  There's no opportunity to substitute in a different datasource if it becomes available, or easily fix things if the source data format changes slightly.  In enterprise applications, this has long been recognised as an issue and ESBs were developed as a way of handling this.  When an ESB is used correctly, the source data (or application) is abstracted from the destination by a transformation process, usually performed by XSLT.
  

  
  

  I think that the same approach should be used for mash-up style applications.  The big advantage this brings is that it releases the data from the application (and the user interface).  More importantly, it allows the application itself to fetch data from different sources.  It is no longer limited to the sources that the programmer's put in.  A sufficiently talented user can take any datasource, transform it into the correct format that the application expects, and then get the application to point at that transformed source.
  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  For this to work, there is a need for a generic XSLT service, that can take a data feed and an XSL style sheet and produce the desired output.  W3C provide a service which does exactly this.  Unfortunately the bandwidth requirements of any large enterprise use would crush their server so they have put limitations on the service to restrict it to personal use.  This is a shame.  I've written a very similar service for bleep, but it is run as a free Google App Engine app which has quite severe resource limitations of its own.   I reckon Google should release a transformation service of its own.  It would be very useful in many of its apps.  There's no way to make advertising revenue off it though :-/
  

  
  

  Its not really within the average person's skill set to write a transform.  Many software engineers do not know how to do it properly.  In the future, I'd like to hope to think a web app will be written which brings it more within the reach of normal internet consumers.
  

  
  

  To bring this back to the govhack conference I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I think that its good that the government wants people to make mashups, but in some ways they are a little misguided.  Its not just about the applications.  Most people will just put some data up on a google map, which is hardly innovative.  Instead, what I would like to see people taking the source data and transforming it and correlating it against other data sources to produce new data sets.  Then its possible for any number of people to take that data and visualise it in cool and impressive ways.
  

  
  

  For Bleep, some of my random thoughts on data transformation and visualisation have been gathered at this page
  

  
  

  

  
• Interesting article on app pricing

  3.19p.m. on Saturday, 17th October

  Gizmodo have an interesting article on the price of iPhone applications, how they have dragged the consumer's expectation of app pricing down, and how this might not be a good idea in the future.
  
  I can certainly say that I won't be expecting to make much money out of Bleep. Its taken longer than expected to develop, and I don't think I'm going to sell lots of copies. How anyone can make a business out of developing these things is beyond me... I suppose we'll see :)

  

  
• Another Heart Rate monitor device/app for the iPhone

  3.16p.m. on Saturday, 17th October

  There's another company that is producing a heart rate monitor device for the iPhone. Its outlined at fastcompany.com, and looks great. Its exactly the sort of thing that would render Bleep irrelevant. Sadly, its not going to be made into a product at this stage :(

  

  
• New blog format for the crimson cactus

  2.32p.m. on Friday, 16th October

  When I started Crimson Cactus, I started up a blog for it. It seemed to make sense, and I could keep the company posts separate from holiday pictures and musings and whatnot that way. As its turned out, I find that I want to cross-post. That is, I want to be able to post to both of my blogs.
  
  There are a couple of ways of doing this, but I think it just goes to show that I'm doing it wrong. What I really want is to continue posting to my personal blog, but tag those posts that are of interest to the crimson cactus, and then have my web page pick up that tag. This is exactly what I've done now, so now all of the old posts have been imported into my personal blog, and thats what you'll be seeing from now on.
  
  For those of you that follow via RSS/Atom, The new link to use is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/brucecooper/Pqee

  

  
• Fitbit review on engadget

  1.48p.m. on Friday, 16th October

  Engadget have released a review of the fitbit networked pedometer. I remember first seeing this about 12 months ago, when it had just launched at techcrunch 50. I like the idea of the device, but it is yet another thing to carry around, and yet another thing to charge.
  
  It makes me thing of the belt valet computers in David Marusek's Counting Heads (Thanks for the reccomendation @doctorow). One day, not too far away, we will have computers that we carry, strapped to our person (perhaps in belt form), that can handle all of the biometric sensing that we want. It will be able to count our steps, work out our heartbeat, and record everything that we hear and see for future reference.
  
  I'm really excited about the prospect, even if it does open up a lot of privacy concerns. It will be important that we as individuals retain control of the information that is being collected. I'm pretty sure that google having access to all of my heartbeat (which is basically an EKG) information would be a bad idea. David's sequel book, Mind over Ship shows us a very good example of the mis-use of complete information on people.

  

  
• Gizmodo AU running a blog theme of fitness for geeks this week

  1.49p.m. on Friday, 16th October

  Gizmodo are running a theme of playing with balls this week, which fits right up the alley for Bleep. In the linked article, they mention heart rate monitor gadgets in particular. At least my approach will be relatively inexpensive. What a pity that Bleep isn't ready for the publication yet. I'll be following their posts with interest.

  

  
• Ahh, there _are_ heart rate monitor accessories for the iPhone already

  1.49p.m. on Friday, 16th October

  I was operating under the impression that nobody had created a heart rate monitor system for the iPhone yet. This seemed illogical to me as it is such an obvious thing to do.
  
  As it turns out, there is one. I found it today at Smheartlink's site. It looks like a great product, but it is a lot of money to spend, especially after you have already purchased a HRM belt.
  
  Its a bit disappointing to see this considering my app will do much the same stuff, but I still see a niche for my app, as it doesn't require you to charge and carry another device around with you, plus it will be a bit cheaper :)

  

  
• Apple approves how many apps a day?!?

  1.50p.m. on Friday, 16th October

  I saw an article on gizmodo a few minutes ago that says that apple approved almost 1400 iphone apps last friday. Even on the slow days they approve hundreds of applications.
  
  Its massively impressive that Apple have got so many applications. It just goes to show how much of a runaway success they have on their hands. I can't help wonder though how hard it will be for anyone to find the app that they want when there are so many apps to choose from. I suppose thats why we've got app review sites popping up now, like the App store equivalent of gizmodo... Here's hoping I can get them to review my app when its finished.
  
  In Bleep development news, I got it running on my iPhone 3G last night (rather than just the simulator) and it works okay. There are some performance problems which I think I can rectify fairly easily, and then there is just user interface tweaking to go.

  

  
• Progress on Bleep

  1.50p.m. on Friday, 16th October

  I had hoped to finish Bleep to the point where it could be submitted to Apple over the weekend.  Sadly, I've run into some problems causing the application to crash on the iPhone, even though it runs fine in the simulator.  I'm also trying to polish the user interface to make it a better experience for users.
  
  In the mean time, I've uploaded a sneak peek video of Bleep in action.  Bear in mind that this is an early version of the software, and it is still being tweked. Have a look:
  
  

  

  

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