FontStudio

Hi to all. Its a bit time I'm not writing something new into this blog, but I was really busy, I swear.

From about 4 months I've started developing Mac OS X applications and today I want to talk about my first creation: FontStudio.

I think that FontStudio is the easiest way to choose the right font for your text.


Do you have to choose the right font for the text you are writing? 
FontStudio allows you to quickly see your text formatted with all the fonts you have into your Mac. Instead of selecting a text and apply a font repeatedly until you find the right one, use FontStudio to see how the text typed into the text preview or dropped in it from another app appear in all the different fonts you have installed. Customize instantly the font format to see your text as appear.
You can easily apply formatting options to all the fonts and see how your text looks like, then when you have done and selected the right font, simply drag away the formatted text into the destination word processor application like Pages or Text Edit. Downloading and installing on your Mac the FontStudio Service at this link ( Open selected text in FontStudio ) you have the possibility to launch FontStudio on the selected text so to have always the application available where ever there is a selected text.

FontStudio lets you:

• Visualize the text formatted with all the font installed in your Mac
• Apply quickly the formatting options directly to all the fonts
• Assign tags and notes to the selected font
• Rate the fonts
• Hide unused fonts
• Drag into the word processing application the formatted text maintaining the format

FontStudio ( 4,99$ ) is available for sale now on the Mac App Store ( AppStore link ) and you can read more about it at my website ( https://www.neralab.it/ ). 


You can find more screenshots here ( https://neralab.it/products/ ).

Thanks for reading.

Airport Express & LAN

Today I wanna share with you a tip on how to configure the Airport Express to create a NATted network and share the same public IP through all the computers connected to the LAN.

In this way you can have a bit of more security toward the outside computers on the internet.

The creation of a local area network is really easy using the Airport Express, and if you want to use it to connect just a computer to internet through a modem it is straight forward:

• connect the modem to the rear WAN port of the Airport
• connect your RJ45 cable to the Airport switch or go wireless
• turn on the Airport and it will perform all the adjustment to find the internet connection and configure it as a bridge for connecting the computer to the internet.

In this way each computer (configured in DHCP) will have an IP assigned by the router.

To create the NATted network with the Airport Extreme and hide your computers from the outside internet network open the Utility Airport on your Mac or Windows Machine and go to the Internet tab and select “Share a public IP address” from the “Connection sharing” combo like in figure below.

In this way the Airport Express will assign the IPs to the connected computers and outside the network will be seen as a single connected computer, hiding the others.

HTH

Maf Event Bus

MAF v3 Framework (Part 2)
The cross-platform MAF Event Bus make use of Qt Signal/Slot to dispatch events between objects locally and remotely. Qt mechanism has been extended to manage also a remote communication transparently to the EventBus users and decouple the sender from the receiver allowing sending events remotely using different network connectors expandable through the strategy pattern.
Other information on MAF v3 framework can be found here: MAF Site

Maf Event Bus

View more presentations from Paolo Quadrani.

Interface Design Basics

Interesting presentation on Interface Design:

Interface Design Basics (english)

View more presentations from Samo Korošec.

Maf3 - Part 1

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Maf3 - Part 1

View more presentations from Paolo Quadrani.

f8 Conference

Today I watched Mark Zuckerberg presenting at the f8 Conference (recorded on 21st April 2010).
It was very interesting to listen on how Internet could become with connections between different social network. We could have a better social experience and retrieve information from the Internet in a manner that is tailored just for us.

Enjoy the movie and thanks for reading :)

Watch live streaming video from f8conference at livestream.com

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• Facebook Want Us To Like Everything (joedawsons.com)

Touch screen on skin

Researchers at Microsoft are working on ways to bring about any type of surface (in this case the skin) touch screen technology.
To achieve this goal, the researchers used a pico-projector and a special microphone that allows you to intercept the pressure on the skin through your fingers. The system is called Skinput.

The projector can display the user interface, while the microphone determines the position based on the physical principle of transmission of waves transmitted through the body.
The video below shows how to create touch screen interface using the arm of a person as a "screen" touch.




Thanks for reading :)

Related articles

• Skinput Turns Your Body Into a Touchscreen (mashable.com)

Man Machine integration

Kevin Warwick in this video talk about an interesting point of view about man-machine integration as a way to expand our knowledge and potentials.
Human race can be more powerful and can see things in different way and with different perspectives if it accepts a mix artificial intelligence, robotics and implants.
Take a look at this fascinating video of professor Warwick at University of Reading's Cybernetics.

• Artificial intelligence: Ex-cyborg Kevin Warwick on mixing man and machine
• |
• silicon.com

Thanks for reading and leave your comments :)

WiLink 7.0 Texas Instruments: WiFi, GPS, BlueTooth and FM all together

Texas Instruments has presented the new chip that will solve most problems of wireless connectivity for mobile devices: WiLink 7.0.
This is one of the first quad-chip for mobile devices that integrate WiFi (IEEE 802.11n), Bluetooth, GPS and Radio FM in a single chip so to decrease the costs of 30% and space occupied of the 50%.

Devices will have wireless capabilities without loosing performances. Analysts foreseen that within 2013 will be sold more then 4.5 billions of radio-combined chips.

Thanks for reading :)

Electric cars are becoming more of a concept

Recently we witnessed the completion of the VOLTA by the GM, Fiat 500 and now the Venturi Voltage concept car presented at the NAIAS 2010 (image below).

All these cars have in common the use of more or less efficient batteries to power the electric motor.
I think the real revolution will happen when you do not think only to accumulate energy, but also how to produce it. A car can increase its autonomy in a much greater than the average current only if it is equipped with systems of energy production. Examples could be producing energy from the sun, the use of air currents that are formed during the movement of the car itself and the conversion into electricity of heat developed by electric motors.

I believe that technological innovation in this sector is just beginning and maybe this could lead to something completely innovative rethinking the concept of mobility.

Thanks for reading and leave your comments.

Augmented reality and aerial drone. There's an app also for that.

Parrot has been demonstrating at the 2010 CES show in Las Vegas the AR.Drone, a Wi-Fi helicopter with dual cameras and augmented-reality video streaming, that you control using your iPhone or iPod Touch. The AR.Drone features four rotors and interchangeable hulls for flying both indoors and outside. Built-in flight stabilization technology keeps the drone steady while you use your iPhone’s motion sensors to steer it remotely over the craft’s Wi-Fi network.
Parrot spent four years developing the AR.Drone and creating an augmented reality gaming platform. Using its streaming video camera, the AR.Drone image processing can detect other drones or 3D targets. Several demo games are on display, but Parrot hopes that game developers will take advantage of their open API to develop more games and other applications for the AR.Drone.
To make the AR.Drone easy to fly, Parrot developed a microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial guidance system that includes a three-axis accelerometer, a two-axis gyroscope, and a single-axis precision gyroscope for yaw. The flyer also includes an ultrasonic altimeter and a down-facing video camera for calculating speed and position. By tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch you can drive the drone. The built-in Wi-Fi network is used to establish the connection between the drone and the iPhone, then the video camera on the drone streams its feed directly to the screen on your iPhone. If you remove your finger from the iPhone, the AR.Drone’s autopilot keeps the drone hovering about a meter off the ground. If the network connection is lost, the autopilot will stabilize the drone and slowly lower it to the ground for a soft landing.
Parrot hopes to make the AR.Drone available in the second half of 2010. For more information visit ardrone.parrot.com. For details about the open API, visit projects.ardrone.org.




Thanks for reading :)

New battery made from paper

New type of battery is coming. Researchers at Stanford University are using carbon nanotubes with silver nanowires to realize ink to be printed over a standard piece of paper and realize a a low-cost battery or supercapacitor that is ultra lightweight.

Professor Yi Cui said that this type of battery is more durable due to the fact that the ink adheres strongly to the paper. The paper supercapacitor may last through 40000 charge-discharge cycles.

The flexibility of the paper allows many practical applications like using it in electric or hybrid cars.

The experiment shown also in the video where focused on using paper battery to turn on a LED, which glowed brightly.



"This technology has potential to be commercialized within a short time," said Peidong Yang, professor of chemistry at the University of California-Berkeley. "I don't think it will be limited to just energy storage devices," he said. "This is potentially a very nice, low-cost, flexible electrode for any electrical device."

Related articles

• Printable, Moldable Batteries Made From Paper and Nanotubes (wired.com)
• Battery made of paper charges up (news.bbc.co.uk)

A new baby is born

Today I want to announce that a new blog is born: iPhone 4 Passion (yes I know, I had not to much fantasy ;) ). This is a specialized blog I decided to create only for iPhone/iPod Touch and Objective-C programming.

For now I migrated the two presentations that you can find also in this blog, but soon I intend to enrich the blog with code examples, better tips and tricks and other useful information on this awesome device.
So stay tuned and hope to hear soon your comments, impressions, suggestions and so on.

iPhone/iPod Tips & Tricks (...continue...)

Today I want to give you another Tips & Tricks for iPhone/iPod; this time regarding screen snapshots and a fast way to go at the top of a list.

Capture the screen
You can take a screenshot of any application you are using, simply pressing the Home button together to the Sleep/Wake button.
This snapshot will be saved into the 'Camera roll' of the iPhone or in 'Saved Images' for iPod.

Go to the Top
When you are reading a web page, an e-mail or a SMS, you can go to the beginning of the page simply tapping onto the status bar.

This is useful specially if you are navigating a web page and want to reach the head of the page in one tap or you are in the SMS application and want to call the sender of the message where the button to call is at the top of the page.

See the previous post on iPhone/iPod Tips & Tricks.

Thanks for reading :)

Password, safety and Social Engineering for beginners

One of the many ways to protect our information is that of blind with the passwords. These can be of varying complexity and managed by our memory (safest ever, but limited :) in time and in the number of different passwords to remember) or software that allow you to manage, store and / or generate new keys.
Examples of applications are 1Password, KeePass for Mac and Windows or Roboform.

When you surf the web or you are prompted for a password should always pay attention to who is asking us our credentials: it is a trusted site or are about to bite a phishing scam?

Nothing can be safe also using the best cryptex to encrypt our information if we leave our passwords written on post-it or we fall in a phishing site. Social Engineering is well known act aimed to manipulate people and get their information, passwords and so on.

Always check whether you are accessing via HTTPS or via simple HTTP.
In one case the password is transferred from client to server in encrypted manner, so do not be deciphered by any sniffer in the second case (HTTP), the password is transferred in "clear", then a sniffer to read quietly in the information and we are potentially an unsafe condition.

Another IMPORTANT rule is to NOT store anywhere you access codes for your online bank account. Remember that each system is potentially unsafe and can be "hacked" :)

Thanks for reading :-)

Social Sensor Network

Today I was attracted by two news:

1. Hardware add-on for iPhone-iPod: iCarte NFC/RFID Reader. This device allows iPhone/iPod users to be enabled for Near Field Communication (NFC) for contact-less payments and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
   
2. HP Labs with a project called CeNSE (Central Nervous System for the Earth) which use billions of tiny, cheap tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors.
   "... The technology behind this is based on nano-sensing research done by HP Labs. The sensors are similar to RFID chips, but in this case they are tiny accelerometers which detect motion and vibrations. The first CeNSE sensor to be put into the field by HP Labs is, according to the company, "about 1,000 times more sensitive than accelerometers used in a Wii, an iPhone or an automobile's airbag system." Other sensors planned in future include ones for light, temperature, barometric pressure, airflow and humidity."

I'm always fascinated by electronic devices and specially if they are used for solving people problems, making life better and/or safer for all.

A possible scenario as combination of both devices could be to built a map globally accessible with the results of signals detected by those sensors (for example the temperatures measured or motion detection for detecting earthquakes or other possible dangers). The role of iPhone could be to activate the read of the measure when it is near the sensor (by RFID activation) and send a tweet on a dedicated channel automatically or making a dedicated application that updates the global map via twitter.

Another possibility is to generate the sensing map as a Google Earth layer. The iPohne can then contribute to this map by uploading measure coming from its sensors, like magnetic field measurements (for 3Gs device) and level of noise with geo-referencing those measures before upload them to the Social Sensor Network on Google Earth.

Thanks for reading ;)

First Month of life

I don't want to bother you, but two days ago was the first month of life for my blog :-)
I want to say thanks to all my readers and twitter followers.
Soon the next post....

Objective-C for beginners

Today I want to present to you the second lesson I prepared for the University of Bologna with a friend of mine: Omar Cafini about the bases of Objective-C programming.

The presentation wants to give an overview of Objective-C code writing and bases on how to deal with applications present on the iPhone/iPod Touch such Addressbook and ImagePicker.

One note more is about the storage and data handling, touch and multi-touch events handling and SQLite interface.
For more, watch the slideshow and post your feedback:

Parte II Objective C

View more presentations from Paolo Quadrani.

The slideshow of the first lesson is available here.
Thanks for reading :-)

iPhone/iPod Tips & Tricks

Today I wanna start the first episode of a long series of Tips & Tricks for iPhone/iPod so to make better your iPhone/iPod life :)

In this first episode we will see how to make accented characters with the iPhone keyboard:

1. Open whatever app that show the keyboard like the Note app and start writing your text.
2. Now for writing the accented character (for example à) tap the 'a' character on the keyboard and take for one second your finger over the character. Will appear all the combination of accents available for that character.
3. Without releasing your finger from the screen simply go over the accented character you want to insert, then release the finger from the screen; the accented character will be inserted.

Thanks for reading and see you on next episode :-)

iPhone Development Tools

Today I want to share with you a slide show presenting the basics on iPhone development tools which a friend of mine made for the University of Bologna (Italy).

iPhone Development Tools

View more presentations from Omar Cafini.

On the next days I'll public the second episode.
Enjoy the show :-)