art geigel's personal blog

1. App Groups

Initially, several screens filled with colorful app icons was fun.  Flicking around from left to right was just part of the experience.  Eventually, most users began to wonder if there wasn’t a better way to categorize their apps rather than just having them float around in random positions.  And if you wanted to make any sense of your screens by systematically positioning your apps; you were met with an never ending time-consuming process as soon as you added a new app.  Amazingly, 3 versions of the OS has not addressed this need.  Perhaps that’s why so many users jailbreak their iPhone to use a more user-friendly OS.  Take note Apple.

2. Safari Search

I’m not talking about searching for lions or tigers or zebras on an African plain — rather I’m talking about one of the most fundamental capabilities one needs when sifting through large amounts of text — TEXT SEARCH!  I can’t count the number of times I’ve ended up on a gigantic blog and need to find one snippet or comment only to give up after having scrolled the entire page and missing it.  On a computer I’d just hit CTRL+F and search.  A new iPhone OS needs this feature.

3. Merge Contacts

There are many ways we get duplicate contact information in our iPhones.  Whether we sync to popular contact management software, receive vCard profiles in MMS or email, or simply inadvertently create a new contact in the process of quickly trying to get an email out.  The point is that duplicate data creeps into our address book one way or another.  If you have ever attempted to clean this up you know that it turns into a time-consuming process testing the extent of your sanity.  A native function of the address book app should allow you to merge contacts on a field by field basis choosing which data to keep.  Not terribly difficult to do.

4. YouTube Account Management

The YouTube app is fun and useful… unless you have a YouTube account and want to do something useful with it.  iPhone 3Gs allows you to upload video taken on your device via your YouTube account.  A very cool feature.  But any attempt to edit details of your video — let alone delete the video — requires you to login to the actual YouTube website.  You might be saying, “That’s okay, I’ll just access my account via Safari on the iPhone.”  Sadly, both the Touch and Mobile versions of the YouTube website don’t allow this functionality either.  In order to make any meaningful changes to your videos (i.e. edit comments, edit tags, edit names, delete, etc.) you will have to view the Full version of YouTube within Safari.  Lame and/or fail.

5. Multi-Tasking

I personally don’t buy the argument that iPhone hardware isn’t capable of handling multi-tasking.  Even if users were limited to only 5 concurrently running apps it would be better than what we have now.  There are some things we do in one app that we would like to leave to a background process while we move on to another item.  For example, if we are waiting for a webpage to load we might want to check out Facebook.  When we leave Safari to go to the home screen in order to start Facebook; Safari stops working.  That means if I come back to Safari (even a couple minutes later) the page I had meant to navigate to will still be in limbo.  Am I really to believe that a few processing cycles can’t be diverted to a separate app?  Surely email I’ve “sent” in the mail app is still delivered even when I leave that app.  Why can’t the same be applied to other apps?

A big thank you to everyone who donated money and sponsored my 5K run!

I ran alongside hundreds of others in Beachwood, Ohio this morning as part of the annual Race for the Place fundraising event.  All proceeds raised (including your donation!) directly support The Gathering Place and allows their organization to continue offering services free of charge to families touched by cancer in Northeast Ohio.

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge each person who sponsored my run:

1. Bill Reid
   re:id design
2. Gay Wellington Geigel
   My mom!
3. Jason Kiss
   Friend, Sherwin Williams/CSU Comp. Sci. Grad Student
4. Jody Conner
   Office Manager, Great Lakes Financial Group
5. John Soper
   Professor of Economics, John Carroll University
6. Ken Bossin
   Northeast Ohio Attorney
7. Kent Davis
   Friend, DatASIA, Inc.
8. Loung Ung
   Cambodian Author & Lecturer
9. Mark Hauserman
   Director of the Muldoon Center for Entrepreneurship, John Carroll University
10. Martha West
    Ink Shop Marketing, Inc.
11. Ryan Shary
    Friend, Vibrant Mind Studios, Inc.

Jeff Zimmerman and I will be running in a 5K race on June 7, 2009 to help raise money for an organization called The Gathering Place.  The Gathering Place is a support center providing programs and services free of charge for individuals and families touched by cancer.  The race takes place in Beachwood and more information can be found by visiting their website.

Jeff and I are asking for donations so we can meet our fundraising goal of $100.  Any amount would help — $5, $10, $20 — whatever you can afford.  You can make a donation online using a secure credit card form.

Thank you in advance for your donation.  You’re helping a good cause.

Every computer science student at Hiram College is required to perform two research projects, called IRCs, prior to graduation.  Of the two projects I completed I am proudest of my Computer Vision project because it not only was one of the coolest things I’ve ever studied, but it also required an extensive amount of hard work to complete.  The satisfaction is still a source of motivation for me to this day.

The project’s in-depth details can be found at http://www.geigel.com/signlanguage/, however, briefly, I was able to employ computational methods, initially researched in the 1980s, to recognize American Sign Language letters within computer images.  (Note: The initial research performed in the 1980s focused on recognizing faces in images which have popularly become known as Eigenfaces).  The process is called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and is widely considered to be a breakthrough discovery in the advancement of Computer Vision.  Much of PCA’s attractiveness comes from it’s ability to train similar, yet slightly different, images of a given class.  In my research, for instance, the classes I dealt with were signed letters corresponding to different hand orientations.  When it boils down to it, PCA is able to mathematically define (using Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues) the most important features of a given class (for example a fist for letter A versus the open cirlce for the letter O), and then when a new unknown image is presented to the system a calculation can be performed and a mathematically reinforced estimate can be made as to what class the unknown image belongs.

Ellen Walker, my Computer Vision professor at Hiram College, oversaw my research and offered help when I ran into issues.  Ultimately, I was able to develop/program/execute a fully functional PCA system in C++ for recognizing American Sign Language letters.  In fact, once the PCA system was trained, I was able to test it on 10 sample images with 100% recognition accuracy.  The project was a huge success!  Both in it’s results and in the lessons, knowledge, and gratification it left me.  Though Ellen has never explicitly said this to me, I think that she was also impressed and surprised with how well the results turned out.

This all took place in 2005 — the year I graduated from Hiram.  As the years went on I would occasionally correspond with Ellen and then on 11/29/2006 I received an email from her asking if my project could serve as a possible AI/Vision project that she would be submit to the University of Hartford’s “Machine Learning Experiences in AI” shared curriculum.  Of course I was excited and happy that my project would be the inspiration for such a project. 

A few years later I received another email from Ellen on 2/23/2009 saying that project was now appearing on Hartford’s website at http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/compsci/ccli/samplep.htm.  The project’s detail page can be found at this URL: http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/compsci/ccli/rasl.htm.  There’s also a PDF (http://cs.hiram.edu/~walkerel/RASLUPCA.pdf) that has in-depth details along with a credit at the very bottom stating that the project was inspired by my project!  In classic programmer speak — w00t!

My life is owned by Google.  Seriously.  I use Gmail as my only email program and their calendar as my only calendar.  I’ve also recently decided to use their documents software instead of Word/Excel.  Having Google maintain my digital life has made things a lot easier.

So when I got my new iPhone a few weeks ago I was eager to setup my Gmail account.  Just as I expected it was painless and easy.

Then I moved on to my calendar which I thought would be just as easy.  Unfortunately it wasn’t.  I was hoping that the iPhone would support a pull architecture for iCal synchronization — basically allowing me to tell the iPhone that it’s time to sync between the iPhone and my Google calendar.  A lot of calendar software packages support the iCal standard, and Google calendar allows you to export your calendar in this format.  Naturally I thought this would be supported on the iPhone, but it wasn’t.

I then searched online to find what I was looking for.  I found a syncing program that works with the iCal standard, but only with the iCalendar application in OSX.  Since I run XP on my machine this wasn’t any help.  I then found an application that said it could do what I needed, called NemuSync, but it required that I jailbreak my iPhone — something I wasn’t looking to do.

Just as I was about to give up I found the answer to all of my problems.  It was called NuevaSync and it has been the best thing I’ve ever setup for my iPhone.  NuevaSync is free, and allows you to setup an account with them that bridges information on your iPhone with Google’s calendar without ever having to install an app.  On a more technical level, they offer a Microsoft Exchange layer to push syncing between your iPhone and Google’s calendar.

Because Exchange is a push architecture you never have to worry about activating a sync request — it’s done automatically when you add a new event in your calendar either on your iPhone or on your Calendar webpage.  So let’s say you’re on the road and enter an event on your iPhone.  By the time you get home and log on to your Google calendar it will already be there.  NuevaSync is a real-time ongoing syncing of your iPhone calendar and Google calendar.

I was so happy when I found this out that I emailed their staff to thank them for the service.  They could easily charge $99 a year for this service and I would have paid.  It’s so seamless and translucent that I literally had to write a blog article singing its praises.

If you’re an iPhone person and use Google calendar you must setup an account today.