Creating an iPhone Ringtone from a Youtube Video

XKCD makes an excellent point:

The question becomes: how do I get a ringtone like this? First, find a good source. YouTube has a good source for mosquito sounds, although SoundCloud might be a better option, YouTube has a much wider selection.

Now the question becomes: how to get that sound on my phone as a ringtone. There are many ways to do it. The cleanest way is to install an audio router, such as sunflower (for OSX). However, this isn't something I'll want to do all the time, and the sound quality doesn't really matter that much to me, so I decided to do the simple thing and record computer speaker output with the Voice Memo app on the iPhone. Here's how it worked:

1. Record the audio with your iPhone Voice Memo app.
2. Sync to iTunes
3. Use GarageBand (which is system software) to import the audio file, set the loop, and modify. Instructions on how to do this are available inside GarageBand help - Select Help from the menu and then search for "ringtone".
4. In iTunes, select your iPhone and then select "Tones" from the psuedo-tabs. If you're like me, you never click on this and it's easy to miss.
5. Click the "Sync Tones" box.
6. Select your tone.
7. Hit the "Apply" Button
8. In your iPhone, go to Settings|Sounds and select your ringtone!
9. Profit!

Personally, I think it would be stellar for Apple to add the ability to add a "Use Voice Memo as a ringtone" function right on the phone, without having to go through all of these steps. You could put it in the "Share" menu. Are you listening, Apple? :)

The Smartphone Age is a great time to learn chess!

I'm excited to report that the portable chess problem has been solved, and the solution is called a "smartphone" (aka iPhone 3GS). As a result, there is no reason not to learn this fabulous game.

My reintroduction to the game was made by my iPhone courtesy of Deep Green, but only really deepened with Shredder Chess (a total steal at $7.99 - the desktop version starts at $50) particularly thanks to the puzzle feature. "Puzzles" are generally mid-game problems with solutions from 1 to 8 moves in length. They are fantastic "aha!" teaching moments, and they are fun to solve. I've learned more about forks, time, and pinning from these puzzles than in years of casual play. I can apply these lessons directly to my normal games.

• Click here to get a sense of a shredder chess puzzle (updated daily).
• Click here to play against shredder free online.

The great innovation here is two fold. First, portable computer chess finally has found a great platform: the smart phone. Most people's interest in chess isn't high enough to justify a separate device, which have been sold for years. But it's enough to sustain an app on a phone you carry anyway. Forget Doodle Jump - play chess when you're waiting around for something! The second innovation is Shredder Chess' concept of a Chess puzzle.

Chess puzzles highlight the beautiful parts of a chess game. Openings are about memory and style, end games about mathematical certainty. But mid-game situations are where that big advantage is won or lost, and so where the game is won or lost even if it takes another 30 moves to knock over the king.

Shredder's software execution is all but perfect, particularly the ability to play the puzzle then switching to play the position against the computer, allowing you to test out alternate theories from both sides. That is, the solution to the puzzle is only the start. You can regress the game and ask the all-important question: I beat my opponent this time. How could he have avoided this fate?

Without a single word, these puzzles say so much! What a perfect way to learn the game: rather than memorize and apply the insights of masters, this method encourages you to make your own insights, which in turn makes the game in a very rewarding game of discovery rather than a boring game of regurgitation or application of theory. The insight of masters are invaluable, but to really appreciate them you must have your own framework of understanding. (Many Go teachers say that you should play at least 100 games of Go, before studying theory for this very reason.)

I should add that while you generally don't have to play out the puzzle game to it's end, I often do, as my end game is (was?) a big weakness. I might be up a queen and still lose in my rush to end it. But now I really understand the significance of a passed pawn and the slipperiness of the King and the need to be thoughtful and careful even when you have an enormous power advantage. Carelessness kills.

I can't say enough about Shredder on the iPhone, but there is one thing missing: openings. Very few of the puzzles occur in the opening, and most of those take advantage of fairly obvious opponent mistakes. Shredder has a cool feature where it identifies and names your opening. But it would be nice if it had an "opening drill" feature to help you memorize openings (and understand their implications for the rest of the game).

Not to take away anything from the amazing and innovative new kinds of games like Flight Control, Doodle Jump, Angry Birds, or Spider but why not kill two birds with one stone (or two stones with one bird, if you play Angry Birds). Chess is an aristocratic game of kings. It's good for the brain and a lot of fun, and perfect on this platform.

9 ways to write native iPhone apps with JavaScript

John Resig writes about iPhone JavaScript development back in November 2008. Here are the projects he mentions. (status as of June 2010 in brackets):

1. JiggyApp requires a jailbroken iPhone [offline]
2. JSCocoa "full bridge" for doing full bore Cocoa programming in JavaScript. My take: kind of like Swig but instead of Java/C it's JavaScript/Obj-C. Written by Patrick Geiller. [online. moderately active]
3. PhoneGap adds some native functionality (accel, gps, but no magnetometer) to an app . Also has great documentation - a free O'Reilly book "iPhone Apps" (which talks about cached webapps, too). Targets Android and Blackberry, too. [online. active]
4. WebTouch is basically a "blank" iPhone app with a single WebKit instance. John likes this one the best. Code. Author. Blog. [online. inactive]

From the comments:

1. Capuccino/Objective-J
2. Use "Transfer and View" apps like Dropbox or Files - see this blog post.
3. QuickConnect - an Xcode template. Code and blog. Development started 4 years ago?! [online. active.]
4. MotherApp - generates an Objective C application from JavaScript (presumably). [online. active. commercial]
5. Big5 is an app store app that somehow lets you tap into native functionality. Now open source at github. The readme points users to phonegap.

Not really sure what the state of the field is today, but PhoneGaps documentation (courtesy O'Reilly) is pretty huge.Summary: PhoneGap is the winner. But I really like the transfer and view concept, and JSCocoa for doing desktop development.

Make yourself happy and avoid the Nexus One

In the end, there are two reasons I cannot recommend this phone:

1. The display is unreadable in sunlight. If you like the outdoors, like I do, this is a deal breaker. (If you're a vampire, read #2)
   
2. The buttons along the bottom of the Nexus One do not work. Or rather, do not work all the time, which is actually worse from a usability standpoint.

Regarding the first point, it is astounding to me that anyone would sell an electronic device that completely fails in sunlight. The sun remains the world's most important light source, and to make something that doesn't work in the sun is outrageously stupid. Only those who never leave a building should consider this phone, and that includes using it in your car. And I don't like to disrespect the sun on general principle.

(I can't help but wonder what this implies about the Google culture and possible vitamin D deficiencies there.)

As for the second point, well, the buttons gotta work. Every time you hit a button and it doesn't work, your expectations are blown, and you cause feelings of fear and anxiety in the user. They are small feelings. But they add up. Eventually, the user is all but flinching before touching a key. They look for ways to avoid touching the offending keys. This is usability 101. But you have to stab, cajole, pray, and otherwise beg the shitty Nexus One buttons to register a tap.Absolutely unacceptable. Apple has shown how to do great touch UI with an absolute bare minimum of buttons. The back|menu|home|search buttons on the Nexus One are worse than useless: they actually eroded myexperience to the point where I just don't want to use the phone anymore.

And since point 1 rules out all users except vampires, that means point 2 is going to mean Google has to deal with a lot of pissed off vampires. Maybe someone can get Stephanie Meyer to chronicle the inevitable vampire assault on Mountain View. In the meantime, I'm selling my Google stock.

I'm sorely tempted to eat the $45 restocking fee and return the thing, but I need an Android device for a business project (which doesn't rely on the display, luckily). So I'm gonna keep it, but I'm not gonna like it.

(For the record, there are three good things about the Nexus One: Google Voice, Live wallpaper, and strong syncing tools. And, to be honest, when you turn the brightness all the way up the indoor display is quite fetching.)

Unlocking the iPhone 3GS - Overseas

The iPhone 3GS has the potential to be the traveler's best friend: it has a great camera, now a very good video camera, a good sound recorder, and lots of handy travel apps. And it even has a GPS and a compass!

But travel requires that the iPhone be offline quite a lot more often than when used as a daily device. The reasons are several. Countries don't have data networks, let alone 3G data networks. They may not even have ubiquitous wifi, let alone ubiquitous, free wifi which is the norm in the LA area at least. Even ordinary internet access may be restricted or expensive.

I learned all of these lessons the hard way. Newly arrived in Aukland, New Zealand I had some time to kill before the next leg of my journey and sought out a coffee shop and a quiet corner to take care of some iPhone unlocking. Frankly, I had never considered doing this before my big trip, as I'd been pretty satisfied with the default service of both AT&T and the Apple Store applications. But, I wanted to be able to use my phone as a phone here, so I set about learning about the process.

This took much longer to understand than I expected; it appears that this is still a very fringe activity for a very mainstream device. The best resource for hacking the iPhone 3GS was on iphonehacks.com. This has a lot of detailed instructions and good links (although I may have had to find a different link for the ipsw file IIRC). In addition, one of the steps ended up costing me about NZ$25 in coffee. :) Here are the steps, in brief:

1. Jailbreak the device. This allows you to install non-Apple approved applications on the phone.
2. Unlock the device. This allows you to use non-AT&T carriers.
   
3. Install the new SIM card.
4. Enjoy and send metta to the clever programmers who made this possible. And send metta to apple for making a nice device.
   

redsnow is the name of the program that jailbreaks your device. For most people this is a minor inconvenience. ultrasnow is the name of the unlock program, which itself is an unauthorized application. Cydia is another unauthorized application that is used to install ultrasnow. The wrinkle with the iPhone 3GS is that Apple made some change to OS 3.1 which makes it harder to jailbreak, so you have to downgrade to OS 3.0, then do the jailbreak. An extra step, but no biggie. [If someone had written just that paragraph I would have been saved a lot of furrowed-brow time. I hope someone finds that useful.]

One step seemed simple enough: to restore 3.0, just download a file from Apple. And so I started. When the download just stopped, I was a bit taken aback. But then I realized, ah, they meter the internet here! This file was 300MB and the coffee shop had a 50MB limit on internet usage (using these neat little paper cards with codes you had to type). Problem solved few lattes later (the guy was kind enough to give me two cards per coffee) I had the file. But by then I had to leave, and didn't want to mess something up by rushing.

At my final destination I set about completing the jailbreak. Dutifully following instructions, I did it! Now, time to unlock. Ah, but here is the wrinkle: Cydia requires the internet to download ultrasnow, and there was no wifi here! And of course, no data network. Without data my iPhone had turned into a fancy digital camera, able to sync to my computer only.

I still haven't completed the unlock because of the lack of wifi. Yes, there may be a way to download the package and install it manually. And if worse comes to worst I'll do that.

The moral of the story is: jailbreak and unlock your iPhone before leaving on your trip! Then you can easily pick of a pre-paid SIM card, pop it in and be happy. I'm not sure I would actually do this, but there have been several times a wifi router would have really come in handy for both my iPhone and my computer.



As a postscript I'd say that the iPhone has one standout feature for basic travelling: the video camera. Not only is it very good quality, it is neatly compressed and ready to upload. The videos on my compact are HUGE for their size. The iPhone 3GS is a big let-down, however, when it comes to battery life, and nothing sucks down the iPhone's battery like video. It is best used in short spurts (like flickr's "long photos"). And when you're overseas this actually means you will bring: a charger, a wall adapter, and a cable. I'm super glad I got the battery extender from Mophie before I left. $80 well spent.

The iPhone is also a big let-down for almost every other travel application. The voice recorder is excellent for journaling, but doesn't geocode and clips are hard to share (use Evernote instead). You can read books and watch movies on the thing, but that's not too common for me. There is no really good way for someone to give you their contact details, or to jot down a bunch of tips someone is giving you. It's good for keeping lots of contact information around, but only if the battery didn't die. It is, of course, a very good MP3 player. :)

The underlying reason for this lack, I think, is that most iPhone apps just aren't designed for feature-rich, extended, offline, and unplugged operation. They are designed for commuters who have 3G or Wifi all the time and keep it plugged into the computer they are working on most of the time.

Phones are easy to borrow. Computers are even easy to borrow. If I had the choice between having:

• handy small atlas, a cheap pad of paper, and a pen
• iPhone 3GS

And I was on the road, I would choose the former. Now that I think about it, it's pretty easy to borrow a pen, too.

iphone wants

ipod/iphone in car controls: http://www.diceelectronics.com/ipod_integration.htm
iphone speakerphone via bluetooth: http://www.motorola.com/motoinfo/product/details.jsp?globalObjectId=153

(courtesy http://tonyballinger.com/?p=202)

Idea: Sennhieser iPhone headphones; universal USB recorder; legit keylogging uses for authors

To maximize PC performance, I listen to the music played by my iPhone snuggled in it's cradle next to my PC rather than iTunes. This is a nice arrangement, except I can't use last.fm, and more importantly when a phone call comes in I have to quickly unplug my headphones because they won't work with phone services (even though they work fine with iPod services). My Sennheiser HD560 headphones do not have a microphone, or an iPhone compatible jack. But they have a detachable cable at the headphone-end, and it would be a simple matter to manufacture a replacement cable with the appropriate plug and microphone. This would rock. I imagine this would be something of a niche market, but if you could build such a cable in China for $1 and sell for $30 over the internet, it might be worth doing. :) I wonder how many other headphones have removable cables?

The other idea came to me while playing piano: I want to jam on my keyboard and then sift through the MIDI results later, and I don't have a good way to do it right now. My keyboard does not have a built-in sequencer, and I would like to record my jams. It has a USB MIDI port though, and I was thinking it would be nice to attach a thumb drive, and transfer the data later to my computer with Ableton (this way I don't have to boot up into my computer to just jam and make ideas). But then I got to thinking, why not make it a universal recorder that just records whatever USB voltage wiggles it senses? You could use it as a keylogger, or a voice recorder, or whatever.

Speaking of keyloggers, here's a novel, legitimate use for them: let's say you're an author and you're going on a long trip and don't want to write in longhand (it's too slow, too illegible, etc), but don't want to bring a computer either. So you bring your favorite normal PC keyboard, and type blind into a special thumb drive. The thumb drive would need to be powered, but it would be a pretty darn efficient way to type simple journal-style content. Of course, higher end versions might have a tiny LCD display on the top so that you could catch your obvious mistakes as you type them, similar to what old Brother style hybrid typewriters used to give you. If you are a travel writer, you could slip the thumbdrive into an internet cafe, and dump the text into a web-based client software that would help you organize and edit what is bound to be a pretty messy text stream.


(Unfortunately this device would not be suitable for digicam backup because AFAIK cameras don't PUSH their data down USB, the data is PULLED by requesting client software. I'm not sure there are standards on requesting data. However, maybe the "direct print" interface present on some cameras) could be pressed into service for this purpose.)

Hot Synergy: GMail IMAP on the iPhone

So I've been pretty disappointed in Spry, and I've been trying to figure out a way to replace them. I am quite happy to report that, not only have I been able to replace the mail server (exim, if you must know) but I've improved things considerably by switching to GMail's IMAP provider. It's easy to setup (and see a video, too) and it gives you these important features:

1. Folders! I can finally see my tags on my iphone!
   
2. Drafts! This is really just a happy side-effect of the folder thing, but it's important enough to mention on its own
3. Spam! This is also just a folder thing, but I can now mark things as spam on the phone rather than just delete them.
4. Synchronized "this has been read" state! Sync spam state! Sync responses without cc'ing myself!!!
   
5. Vastly improved security with SSL. I was setup with unencrypted POP before, which was a really bad idea on a device like the iPhone which is bound to connect promiscuously to all sorts of shady networks, including unsecured WiFi hotspots.
6. Unified email. josh.at.joshrehman.com was set to forward to javajosh.at.gmail.com, so messages sent directly to javajosh would not get picked up by the phone.
7. Speed. I know it's crazy but somehow Google is able to serve mail MUCH faster than my custom exim installation.

All in all this is like getting an awsome, unexpected Christmas present. Thanks for screwing up, Spry! If not for you, I never would have found this delightful synergy between Gmail and the iPhone.

Idea: Iphone speakerphone volume booster

Many users report that the iPhone speakerphone volume is too low, even when on the highest setting. It would be a nifty device for home or car that would attach to the base of the iPhone and boost the speaker. Well, actually it would probably *replace* the speaker.

Come to think of it, I wonder if the new generation of iPod speaker docks (the old generation does not work with my iPhone, alas) could be used for this purpose.... It's worth a shot, even if the iPhone mic might get obscured (the mic is also on the bottom of the phone, and would be blocked by the doc.) One could "mod" the doc by, say, drilling a hole in it to give the mic some space.

How to charge your phone in an emergency.

Let's say you're stuck in the middle of nowhere - or perhaps you don't have access to a USB enabled computer, and forgot your wall charger. You're phone is dead. You need a phone number off of it, or perhaps you need to use it. What should you do? Well, if you have an onion and some Gator-aid (actually, simple salt water would do) you'll be ok. Here's what you do: