Thesis Update

Aiming to be finished this Thursday with the paper, presentation and working prototype.

Changed the name from iPhone Classroom to Pocket Classroom.
Now the “official” project web site is www.pocketlearning.org
The paper now has images and is all formatted in Word so posting in PDF from now on. Click HERE for the document. 
And a video of the iPhone application’s new version. 
Finally, I am also working on the “class creation” tool:
Still need to tie them together and add editing features but for the most part it is functional (reads and writes to the database and so on). 

iPhone Dev Bar Camp

This Saturday I participated in a Bar Camp – iPhoneDevCampNYC – at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn which ran from 10 am to 6pm. 

It follows the open source mentality where there was no fixed schedule or preset presentations. Whoever felt like they had something to contribute to the group would lead an hour long session. 
We had 5 different rooms we could use at the same time and about 30 people to attend. 
I ended up leading two sections, one in iPhone Web Apps – customizing a web page to take advantage of some of the iPhone’s features – and another session on using the iPhone’s camera within your iPhone application – something I figured out how to implement, but had more questions than answers. 
Overall it was a great event where I met several interesting people sharing the same enthusiasm about the iPhone and this new gold rush that is happening around it in the development community. 
Here are a few pictures:

Digital Imaging Reset – Color Combination

Take 3 pictures using a red, a green, and a blue filter for each shot. Convert them to Black and White. Combine them in Photoshop using the Channels – Merge Channels – RGB method found in the channels tab (next to Layers usually). The best result was obtained by white balancing before and after combining the pictures.

An effective and impressive example of this was made by the photographer to the Tsar in Russia, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii whos research resulted in patents for color film slides and color motion pictures. 

Digital Imaging Reset – Black and White

This week we talked about Black and White digital photography. Basically if you shoot black in white you get a photograph with higher resolution. 

Color pictures are obtained by allocating a color to each pixel of the sensor chip according to the Bayer Pattern, resulting in 1/2 green, 1/4 red, and 1/4 blue pixels. 
The chip is therefore giving you that amount of information for each color.
When shooting black and white, ALL the pixels are allocated to grayscale – from black to white. 
This results in sharper pictures with more detail. 
I got my favorite pictures and converted them to black and white to see what changed. 
What I found was that the pictures I liked the most in color were not the best ones in black and white. 
I suddenly had a different set of “absolute” favorite pictures. 
Here are the ones I thought worked best in black and white:

iPhone Classroom

Here is the first video of the iPhone Classroom as a native iPhone Application – in other words – this is not a web page – this is a real iPhone application developed with the iPhone SDK and so on…
I used some web content here to make it easier to create new lessons – no need to recompile or reinstall the application to have the latest list of lessons and their content:



Saturday Photos

Gorgeous day – felt like summer – everyone was out and about. Went for a rollerblade ride at sunset along the Hudson River Park (West Side Drive) at took some pictures: