IPhone Cafe

An application from iMatrix performs barcode scanning on the iPhone.

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According to their website, iMatrix provides optical recognition of 2D barcodes and is neutral to code formats and services providers.  It stores and regenerates 2D codes; opening the door for applications such as e-ticketing, mobile ticketing, and couponing.  The iMatrix website provides a Blog which contains dozens of posts.  A May 25 post indicates iMatrix has become 2D Sense and they appear to be growing.

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iPhone Matters posted the article Use Your iPhone as a Barcode Scanner which provides additional information. If your iPhone is jailbroken and you’ve been using installer.app to install applications, you already know how to install iMatrix. 

My current favorite iPhone game is from BinarySquare.  It’s called Spinblox, and it’s a match-three style game.  Starting off, the game drops three rows of colored blocks, which you tap and move blocks around the screen to create rows and columns of three or more.  As you level up, more colored blocks, and eventually iconed blocks are added to the mix, making it more difficult to create rows before the screen fills up.

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I love this game.  I play it obsessively, especially when I should be working instead.  I literally am playing right now as I type this review.  My only problem with the game play is there is no room for impatience in tapping the blocks.  If you don’t put enough pressure on the screen, it won’t register the touch, which means the difference between level up or starting over.  Other than that, it’s a simple, yet addictive game that has yet to get old for me, though I’ve been playing it for several weeks now and added it as a permanent icon to my home screen!

I only know one other person with an iPhone, and we were having dinner at a local restaurant tonight when the conversation turned to “The Simpsons”–specifically, the episode “Homer to the Max” where Homer changes his name to Max Power.  I insisted this episode occurred prior to Season 9; my friend was equally certain that it was after.  Naturally, since we both had iPhones, it became a competition to see who could look up the answer first.  That’s when I discovered that, even though we had the same phone, the same plan, and were in the same restaurant literally a foot apart, he was able get an Internet connection and I couldn’t.  It was totally unexplainable, and therefore that much more annoying.  I got home, did a little research, and still can’t figure out why my phone wouldn’t connect.  If anyone out there reads this and has any ideas, I’d be glad to hear them!

A page on Apple’s iPhone developer site describes how to set a style for drop down menu’s. Apple’s on-line CSS documentation mostly uses in-line style definitions. I’m accustomed to styles defined within a STYLE tag, so I took Apple’s recommendations for the iPhone and placed then into a style called iDD (short for “iPhone Drop Down”)

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In the snippet below, iDD is defined and then it’s used as the class attribute of the select tag.

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<style TYPE=”text/css”>
.iDD { background:brown;    border: 1px dashed purple;    -webkit-border-radius:10px; }
</style>
…
<select name=”city” class=’iDD’>
   <option>choose</option>
   <option>Seattle, Wa.</option>
   <option>Washington, Dc.</option>
   <option>Dallas, Tx.</option>
   <option>Chicago, Il.</option>
   <option>New York, Ny.</option>
   <option>Miami, Fl.</option>
   <option>Baltimore, Md.</option>
</select> 

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webkit-border-radius produces a drop down that displays with rounded corners on the iPhone.

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To see iDD in action, visit the Metro Brunch page. It’s not much, but it does show brunch locations in a couple of major cities using Google Maps as the source. Below is the brunch page after selecting the rounded drop down list box.  As with any drop down, iPhone displays it’s own drop down widget which is optmized for the iPhone  Safari web interface.

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For some reason, a search of brunch sites in New York city produces results that differ between the iPhone map and a desktop browser Google map.  Only New York behaves this way. Other cities produces pretty much the same results regardless of browser type.

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Searching for “brunch” in Dallas Tx. produces a map like this.

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For testing purposes, the brunch page has been loaded with the following cities: Seattle, Washington, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Miami, Portland, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Fransisco,  Oakland,  Cupertino, Memphis, Paris, London.

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The page uses a Google search parameter mrt=kmlkmz which includes User-Contributed ‘Community’ content collected from the GeoWeb

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April 17th, 2008 - Not sure why, but searching for “brunch” finds fewer locations when the search is run on an iPhone vs running on a desktop browser.  It may have something to do with user contributed content handling.  Here’s a link to another version which searches on “fine+dining”.  It seems to to a better job than the brunch search.

Fine Dining Search

I got a great question about the blank screen people find on their iPhone when they are rearranging icons on their home screen, and wanted to discuss it here.  The iPhone has seven (I think) screens that can be filled with shortcuts to web applications.  Using the Safari web search function on your iPhone, go to www.apple.com/webapps.  There you will see an extensive list of web applications.  Click on one that sounds interesting to try it out.  For instance, I am addicted to a web app game called iPipes. 

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To add an iPipes icon/shortcut to my home screen, I would first bring up the application on my phone.  At the bottom of the screen, there is the menu of icons (back and forward buttons, a plus sign, a book icon, and the pages icon).  Tap on the  plus sign and it will ask you if you want to add a bookmark, add to the home screen, mail a link to the page, or cancel.  Choose the “Add to Home Screen” button, and it will add the icon to your home screen.  

A new iPhone service called FlyTunes will deliver audio content from internet radio stations with no iPhone “jailbreak” required and will contain more selection than satelite radio.  See the radio channel list of 90 stations. FlyTunes claims to work with the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s handy for getting the latest news from NPR or BBC.

Several sites, including iPhonematters are buzzing about an unconventional new iPhone game called Trism that uses the built-in orientation detector to control game play. It’s not yet released, but you can check out the YouTube video:

Video of Trism

Just got an iPhone and have been trying to figure out how to play games on it.  It took me a couple days, but I finally realized that you can’t download games to the phone like you can on most other cell phones.  Instead, you have to go to the iTunes website and play these little web apps games directly from the Internet (assuming you can find the games, that is.  Trying to navigate through the iTunes website on the iPhone screen is like embarking on a Grail Quest–you really have to want to find the games sections to endure all the midget print and impossibly tiny links).

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My first issue with the games is the fact that you have to play from the Internet.  This means you have to be able to access the Internet.  I spend a lot of time in the subway here, and my phone has no connection with the outside world when I’m down there, so I don’t get to play games while I’m waiting for my trains to come, and that sucks.  My second issue is that the touch screen, while very responsive for simple things like typing or dialing numbers, isn’t quite fast enough to properly keep up with the frantic pace of some of these games.  Also, you have to have freakishly thin fingertips if you want to touch the screen with any precision.

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That said, there is this one game, called iPipes, that I’m pretty addicted to.  The goal is connect pipe pieces together before this toxic-looking ooze rolls through them.  Simple, but fun.  I was wondering if there are games available other than on the iTunes site, or if anyone has games that they would recommend?  Thanks!

I’ve found these games useful for passing time; especially at an airport waiting for the next flight:

• Digiwidge Reversi - Level of Play: Easy - This is my favorite IPhone game; only complaint; it’s too easy; I never lose.  The next version should have easy and hard play levels.
• Shredder Chess - Level of Play: Hard - I’ve never beaten this game; but I’m not a serious Chess player.
• SpinBlox - a match-three style game where you tap and move blocks around the screen to create rows and columns of three or more.

 

MacMost has lots of Iphone games. I’ve played missile command which works okay, except my cities seem to disappear before they get hit by the enemy.

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Another site for Chess, Reversi, Battleship, Checkers, etc. is IFonearcde.

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If you’re serious about chess, see iPhone Chess Clock for pointers on how the IPhone supports playing a blitz.

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See Trism for more on an upcoming game that uses iPhones built-in orientation detector to control game play.

The IPhone’s built in mapping service is a frequently used function that’s great at finding business locations. One favorite location is Norms Ale House in Fremont, Wa., but that’s a bit off topic.

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The next IPhone release, version 1.1.3, will include a new mapping service designed to show the phone’s current location by triangulating against cell phone towers. See Silicon.com and MacWorld for more.

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If the revised service works as well as current IPhone maps, my friends with dedicated GPS’s may be jealous. Their GPS’s don’t take phone calls.

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Feb 26, 2008:  iPhone version 1.1.3 is installed and Google maps are now equipped with positioning software from Navizon.  The map screen has a new button in the lower left corner.  Press it and the display will update with a blue circle approximating the position of the iPhone. It takes a few seconds for the circle to appear.  I’ve tested the locator while moving around Seattle and found it’s reasonably accurate. In the picture below, the actual position of the phone is the point where 41st Street meets the blue locator circle. I guess you could say it’s accurate to a city block.   

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Locator accuracy seems to vary from area to area.  In some spots the circle gets bigger and ranges from one to maybe ten city blocks. I’ve not  used the locator in areas with fewer cell towers but suspect accuracy deceases as the phone moves further away from areas with lots of cell towers.

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So far, I like the locator feature.  While moving through unfamiliar territory, it’s handy to press a button and see my current location.  And, it appears that a newer version of the software, Navizon version 2.0, adds a Slider mode which updates the position every ten seconds.  It will be nice when version 2.0 is availible from Apple.