Separating title, author and content body

When writing brief description about a photo, if you make the top part of the description as:

<title>
by Some One
<the content body afterwards>

The "title", "author" and rest of the content will appear in a standard way in the RSS here.

Panacea in the computing world -- reboot

"There's no reset buttons in life!" someone shouted, but fortunately, there are plenty of them on all kinds of electronic devices and for a good reason.

We have encountered several instances when user complained that they couldn't successfully upload pictures. In quite a few of those instances, after a reboot pictures were uploaded successfully.

Even before the application is used, immediately after install or update it could help too. . .

USiT iPhone version

It's finally here. The iPhone version of the app can be downloaded directly from iPhone units or going through the iTunes on laptop/PCs


http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=305895286&mt=8

By searching the words "USiT" or "Cincinnati" from iPhone "AppStore" or iTunes can also get to this app.

Android application in action

This application USiT was intended to support different kinds of mobile devices with the commonalities such as: GPS, camera and accelarometer . . . the kind of smartphone with "large" (for a phone) touch screens. The iPhone application was developed first, but due to the long lasting approval process by Apple, the iPhone app is still pending. Now Android phone users are getting a jump on those iPhone users, with pictures rolling into this place.

http://photos.cincinnati.com/

The above map is also embeddable:

http://photos.cincinnati.com/embedded

Waiting for username and password

In case you are waiting for user name and password sent out from the USiT application and it never arrived, it could be that the email has been sent straight to your junk email folder. It's sad but true that any short and computer-generated email could be mistaken as junk mailby free email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail.

It's probably for the well being of everybody.

In case you've entered a wrong email address

We have a tester who accidentally (didn't pay attention to what the keyboard was recommending) entered a wrong email address during the registration process. Since all the subsequent processes such as "resetting password" or "managing photos" were dependent upon a correct email address, such a problem didn't seem to have an easy remedy.

The solution, email support@cincinnati.com and ask for help from "digital/technology staff" of cincinnati.com. Describe the differences in spelling of the email addresses and someone should be able to correct the entry.

Uploaded photos lost with iPhone

It is not completely known why, but some pictures do get lost in the transmission, as "vanished into the thin air" kind of lost. We can't blame the wireless communication anymore as we used to, since we are talking about 3G now, and TCP protocol is supposed to guarantee the delivery.

We used the NSURLConnection initWithRequest method, and supposedly it is calling the "CFNetwork/342.1 Darwin/9.4.1" to send the photos. CFNetwork is the most reliable way to send large amount of data with iPhone, or is it?

Maybe we can look at other ways to send data with CFNetwork in iPhone SDK, but for now, try sending photos when you have strong signals with either 3G or Wi-Fi.

Name change -- pasffypl to USiT

Our mind changes quickly. Before the product is even out of the door, we are going to rename it. The name and it's meaning are now illustrated here:

USiT [use-it, U-See-it-takes]

- noun, verb.


1 : You see it, and it takes (pix).

2 : U Takes & it Sends

3 : U SiT for a while after taking the picture. No more burning midnight oil to download photos after a hard day of fun.

4 : Unlimited Storage in There (somewhere on the Internet)

5 : U Submit IT as a story about a picture is worth a thousand words.

6 : USe iTs strength (camera phone to capture the moment and desk/laptop computer to write stories).

Making up stuff

The mission for a club is usually to make up stuff for fun or other purposes.  As the first order of things for this "technology" club, we decided to make up a product and then make up a name for it.

The product to be made is a phone application that is capable of taking pictures with a phone camera, tag the photo with latitude and longitude (the fancy name is GPS positions) and then send to an easily accessible place on the internet.  Afterwards, one can download photos first and then store at photo sharing web sites, or directly get published by media web sites who are fans of RSS feed and content sharing.  

As far as making up product name goes, the first name made up was "pasffypl", which stood for "point and shoot first, find your photos later".  The word "pasffypl" sounded German or Dutch, but it is actually in real authentic English.  It was influenced by the name "Haagen-dazs", which had no real meaning in any language.  Pasffypl at least meant something in English.

Some people might ask, "a name that means nothing? what will that product do"?  The product might turn out to be a product that does nothing, with a name that means nothing.  What a great combination?  People love that stuff.

More like a phone club

At this juncture of the technology development, our focus is on different kinds of phone. There used to be many desktop and laptop computers around us, but as laptop and phone got more and more powerful, laptops are replacing desktops, and phones are taking over some of the business functions for on-the-go professionals. But wait, they are certain things get done on smart phones today that couldn't even be done by laptop computers before.

iPhone and all the phones came afterwards trying to call themselves "the next iPhone killer", all have an accelerometer, a touch screen and a camera. These are the hardware that triggered the formation of this club and that's where the story begins as they say. . .