Sunday, July 1st, 2007
by lepton
The Myallo Online website at myallo.com has gone mobile with a new version of the site optimized for the iPhone at myallo.mobi .
“Myallo Online displays a personalized collection of news and articles from all around the Web, and we thought this would be great to have on the iPhone” said Michael O’Connor, site creator and longtime Apple software developer. “You can scroll through headlines with your finger, tap to read an article, and tap again to go to the article’s source site.”
“With the iPhone in hand, we are continuing to optimize the site to make the experience seamless. While the iPhone handles the myallo.com version of the site just fine, especially over the fast Wi-Fi network, myallo.mobi greatly reduces the amount of data, which keeps it responsive even over the slower cellular network”, said O’Connor. “ While optimized for the iPhone, myallo.mobi works well with any mobile device” he added.
About Myallo Technology: Myallo’s unique patent pending neural-network-like technology literally learns what you like, predicts your interest in articles of text, and ranks them according to your taste. The technology is currently available in the Myallo for Macintosh application, on the Myallo Online website, and is licensable for commercial use.
Myallo Online, at <www.myallo.com> and <www.myallo.mobi>, pre-reads hundreds of sites from across the Internet, predicts your interest in them, and shows you personalized pages filled with up-to-the-moment articles you’ll want to read.
Leptonic Systems Inc. is a corporation dedicated to creating “Software of Interest” for the Macintosh and the Web.
Sunday, July 1st, 2007
by lepton
I wrote this entry on an iPhone with the WordPress web interface, but with a little difficulty. When I tapped in the text entry area for the body of the entry, the iPhone keyboard wouldn’t pop up. The phone didn’t recognize it as a text field. This was probably due to the way the field does visual text formatting. So, I had to switch to code mode, which presents the field as plain text. After that, there was no problem.
By the way, I’m having no problems typing on the virtual keyboard. As Apple said, the key is to trust the intelligence of the keyboard. Just go on typing away, completely ignoring the blatant mistakes you see yourself making, and in pretty much every case each word is fixed up as you hit the space bar. It is quite amazing!
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
by lepton
It’s one week before the iPhone arrives. Here is a list of fifty of typical smart phone and iPod features, and what we know and don’t know about them when it comes to the iPhone. It’s going to be fun finding out what’s in this thing!
Accessory Car Charger
Accessory Car FM Transmitter
We know that most accessories that plug into an iPod docking connector should also work with the iPhone. So as long as the accessory physically fits, there is a good chance it will work.
Alarm Clock
Time Zones
We know there is a clock icon on the home screen, but we have never seen it. It seems likely that the clock will have at least one Alarm. We also know there is a Calendar icon, but we have not seen that application, either. It seems obvious that the calendar will include appointments with alarms. Will the clock show multiple time zones? Will the phone adjust itself to whatever time zone you are in? This seems likely, as the cellular system can adjust the phone to local time.
Bluetooth Phone Headset
Bluetooth Stereo headset
We know that the phone has Bluetooth + EDR. As an iPod, it seems likely that stereo Bluetooth will be supported. We know Apple will be offering at least two in-ear Bluetooth headsets that are monaural. We don’t know if Apple plans to sell any stereo Bluetooth headphones.
Bluetooth ModemBluetooth is supported, but will you be able to tether your laptop using Bluetooth such that your laptop can connect through it to the internet? We don’t know. I suspect this capability will not be included in the first model.
Battery Life
Apple has given us claims for battery life. These are maximums, but it looks to me that in the real world, the battery life will not be a major point of complaint. If you are like me, you’ll be using your iPhone constantly. WiFi, audio, and video use a lot of battery, and there never will be enough.
Calculator
We know there is a calculator icon on the home screen, but we have never seen the application. Will it be a simple four banger? Will it have advanced math and programming features? Will it be a graphing calculator? We don’t know.
Camera FlashCamera Low Light PerformanceThe camera has no flash. We don’t know what kind of performance it will have in low light. My guess is the camera will perform about as well as the iSight cameras on Apple laptop computers. That’s fairly good for a fixed focus camera without a flash.
Camera Autofocus
Camera Image Stabilization
Camera Macro Focus
Camera Video
Camera Zoom
We don’t know about any of these features. Will there be video, can
Connect to international carriers
Connect to other US carriers
The phone uses the GSM standard, and it has all four possible frequencies. AT&T only uses two of the four. Since the other two exist, it only follows that the phone is International and should work outside the USA. But can you put in a SIM card from another company and have it work? We do not know. I suspect not on this model, not unhacked out of the box.
Dialing by Voice
Can you do voice dialing? There has been no hint of this feature anywhere.
Document Viewer
We know there is a Notes icon on the home screen, but we have not seen the application. Is it utterly simple, like Stickies or the notes function on the iPod? It is straightforward with a bit of simple formatting like TextEdit? Will it open or edit Word, RTF, spreadsheets? I suspect it will be able to display PDF files, at least. The fact that this application exists implies that there is a document system of some kind. Are there folders where we can save our notes? Can we download or transfer files and see listings of our documents? We do not know.
EMail Periodic Check
EMail Push
EMail to groups
We know we have EMail and that it supports POP and IMAP. It seems likely that you will be able to set it to periodically check for new mail. What about push mail, which notifies you instantly when mail is sent? We know Yahoo is going to give us free push mail on the iPhone. But what about other systems? We do not know the extent of what we can connect to with the Mail system. Can we collect contacts into groups and EMail to a group?
Firmware Updates
We do know that the software in the phone will be updated from time to time. It seems clear that updates will be obtained on your home computer via the Internet, and then will be synced into your phone through iTunes. Thus, it will work exactly like iPod updates. I suspect we will see rather frequent updates, and that they will add very significant new features.
Flight Mode
Most phones have a flight mode, which turns off the cellular radio, while still allowing use of other functions such as playing music. It seems obvious that there will be some kind of flight mode on the iPhone - there are many non-phone functions that could be used.
ProfilesAre there profiles? Profiles typically change a collection of settings, such as silent mode, flight mode, wallpaper and other stylings, ring tones, and so on. We do not know if there is any type of profile system in the phone.
GPS
There does not seem to be a GPS chip in the phone. This does not necessarily mean the phone doesn’t know where it is. All modern phones, in conjunction with the carriers, have a way of locating the phone, at least within a few hundred feet. It is possible that the phone might know what town it is in, for example. While not good for turn by turn street directions, this could still be useful in locating nearby places of interest. No such feature has been announced, however.
iPod Games
iPod Graphic Equalizer
iPod On the go playlists
iPods have these features, so why not the iPhone? Game software is specific to the CPU chip, so the games that work on iPods may not work on an iPhone. I suspect iPod features such as graphic equalizers, speeded-up speech, and on the go playlists may appear on the iPhone. There have been no announcements.
iPod Portrait Video
We have seen photos, Internet pages, and record album covers change their orientation and appear in both portrait and landscape modes. But we have only seen video in landscape mode. It appears you will not be able to see video in portrait mode. On a related note, we have only seen demonstrators change from portrait to landscape mode by rotating the phone counter clockwise. Can you also rotate it clockwise? Does it adapt or do
you get an upside down image? Also, does the phone have to be vertical when you rotate it? Will it sense rotation if it is laying flat on a table? We do not know.
Keyboard Predictive Text
Keyboard Dictionary Customization
We know that the keyboard uses a dictionary to make corrections as you type on the flat screen. But can you add your own words to the dictionary? We do not know. I suspect so, otherwise it will be difficult to type unusual words.
Keyboard in Landscape Mode
We have not seen the keyboard come up in landscape mode. What if a web page is being displayed in landscape mode, and you tap on a text field? Does the screen force itself to portrait mode as the keyboard appears? We do not know.
Record Phone Calls
Record Voice Memos
Obviously the phone has a microphone. Can you use it to record phone calls? Can you record voice notes? If the camera records video, does it also record sound? We do not know.
Ringtones
Ringtones Per Contact
Ringtones Per Group
We do not know much about ringtones. We have heard two different ones in demonstrations. Can you add your own? Can you use any of the tunes you have loaded into the iPod section of the phone for a ringtone? I suspect you can. Can you associate different rintones with different callers or groups of callers? We have seen that in iTunes itself, on the iPhone sync screen, there is a Ringtones tab. We have not seen the contents of this tab.
Safari Cookies
Safari Flash
Safari Java
Safari Javascript
The Safari browser is known not to support Java or Flash. It seems obvious you can’t have a browser without Javascript, and cookies will also be necessary. What kind of limitations are there? Can you limit the kind of cookies you accept? We do not know.
Safari Tabs
The Safari browser on the phone is known to support up to eight pages at once. These can be flipped thought like tabs.
Screen saver
The phone has wallpaper, and you can use any of your photos. But is there a screen saver? Can animated wallpaper or screen savers be used? We do not know.
To Do List
We have not seen any To Do list functionality. However, we know that Leopard has To Do items in iCal and in Mail, and we know the phone has both calendar and mail applications. So it seems very likely that there will be some kind of To Do function.
Vibrate
The phone does seem to have a vibrate function.
VOIP
VPN
Though these functions do seem to be possible with the phone hardware, no functionality of this type is announced, and it will be up to Apple to allow such functions in the future if they wish.
WiFi N mode
The WiFi seems to support b and g modes only, not the faster n mode. This makes some sense since the n mode generally likes to use multiple antennas to implement its high speed links.
Tuesday, June 12th, 2007
by lepton
OK, Steve Jobs told developers they had a way to add applications to the iPhone. He said Apple wants to “expand the capabilities of iPhone by letting developers write great apps for it and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure.” The “sweet solution” for this will be to use the full Safari engine inside the iPhone to write “amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look exactly, and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services - they can make a call. They can send an EMail. They can lookup a location on Google maps.” As Web apps, you don’t have to distribute them to individual iPhones, just put them on the Web. And they can run securely, without compromising security on the phone itself.
As an example, Scott Forrestal showed a corporate address book Web application. Using Safari, he went to a Web page. He typed into a Web page’s search field and it brought up a Web page with a list of names that looked a lot like the list in the phone’s native address book. He scrolled them up and down, tapped on one and a Web page came up with the person’s address information, and this Web page looked a lot like a native Address book page. He then showed that if he tapped a phone number on that Web page, he could initiate a call. If he tapped an EMail address, he could bring up an iPhone mail message pre-addressed ready for typing. And if he tapped a street address, it brought up the iPhone’s Google Maps facility showing that address.It was nice. And nice things can be done.
But how much of an iPhone app was that, really? The three Web pages involved seemed to be standard Web pages formatted to look like fields, lists, and information you would see on the iPhone’s native apps. And tapping specialized fields was something already shown in the January keynote as something you could do in any Web page. So what was special about this Web application that made it an iPhone application? Nothing I could see in that demo.
What I didn’t see was a way to write that Address book entry they looked up into the iPhone’s address book. Or a way to download the office layout image he bought up into the Phone. I suspect there isn’t a way to get any of that info directly into the phone, or to get any of the phone’s info directly out of the phone, because the point of this sandbox is to maintain the phone’s security.
You can make nice Web pages that do very nice things and we will see lots of useful Web apps, but to run them you have to host them apps on the Web, and users have to have access to the Web. This is not iPhone Software Development. Steve Jobs said “No SDK needed” and none is supplied either.We can still hope that in the near future there will indeed be a way to make stand alone applications that run on the iPhone. I was predicting in this WWDC we would see Steve tell us that the OS X DashCode application (which makes OS X widgets) would make Widgets that run on the iPhone, and that maybe next January we would see an iPhone SDK running in XCode. I’m still predicting that path will be followed. But when?
Wednesday, April 11th, 2007
by lepton
Not too long ago I completed a major project - a standalone Macintosh application called “Myallo” (a name based on a Greek word meaning “brain”) that used neural network techniques in order to do web searches and rank the results much better than any online search engines could.
If a traditional search engine pulls up a million hits on “gardening”, how does it determine which ones to put at the top of the list? It only has a few things it can do; estimate general popularity by counting how many other sites link to it, see how many matches to the word ‘gardening’ are on the page, check the locations of those matches in the on the page and so on.
But if I gave a program more info on what I’m interested in: gardening yes, but I’m more interested in vegetable gardening than flower gardening. Now it can rank these hits according to my own actual interests!
So in the stand-alone program, you first create an Interest Profile based on a hierarchy of topics. The application can then go to a search engine to pick up hits, then scan the contents of some of those pages to see how they match up with all of the user’s interests.
This works well, but the application was restricted to Mac users, and the user had to set up a profile of all his interests manually. So I determined that making this a website could be good. Any computer user could utilize it, it could scan a large number of articles from around the Web for all site members simultaneously, and by using a large set of topics common to all site members, it could be made so a user wouldn’t have to set up a profile, rather they could just give some feedback on the results, and the profile can be gleaned from that.
The new site, “Myallo Online” at www.myallo.com doesn’t have the user doing any searching at all, and they don’t make up an Interest Profile either. The web site does the searching and interest-tracking, all you do is rate how interesting some of the articles are, and since it pre-scanned articles to see what topics they are relevant toward, it can compute how interested you are in those topics, and makes up your Interest Profile automatically. You can still see and adjust the profile directly, but it’s not necessary. If you rate a bunch of articles about vegetable gardening very high, but those on flower gardening only moderately high, it figures out you are quite interested in gardening, but more in vegetable than flower gardening.
Instead of asking for search terms and running them through search engines, the site just goes out and picks up lots of RSS feeds from around the Web and scans them to see how interested you might be in them. Then, when you come to the main page, it shows you the most interesting stuff first.
Basically, you do no searching and no setting up, yet you get a sort of constantly updated newspaper that automatically gets smarter about what kinds of things should be on your customized front page. As you tweak things by setting a slider next to the article to say this story was more (or less) interesting than Myallo Online predicted, it literally learns and improves.
So i think it’s a pretty cool concept. Take a look!
