MatthiasRingwald
Latest
SSDs kick up performance for developers and users alike
I'm a developer. One of the things we devs do to pass the time is complain about how long it takes to compile and brag about the power of our development systems. Hot-rodding your system isn't just limited to development, though. There are lots of people out there who sit and wait as their systems limp along from the start up chime to the login screen. You probably already know that adding RAM generally makes your Mac more responsive, but do you know how much of a boost you might get from a solid-state drive (SSD) versus a conventional hard drive? TUAW friend Maurice Sharp decided to test it out. He got down and dirty with his Macs and timed how long it look for HDD and SDD based systems to perform various operations. Here are the results he achieved, comparing solid state response times to hard drive response times. 1 MacBook Pro 2.3GHz i7, 16GB RAM 2 Project build folders were cleaned before each compile 3 Build phase only. 2000 C++ and 400 Objective-C files 4 Mac Mini 2GHz i7, 8GB RAM 5 MacBook Pro 2.4GHz i7, 8GB RAM 6 MacBook Air 1.8GHz i7, 4GB RAM 7 21296 lines of code Look at the typical differences he experienced. Although this chart is focused on code-based tasks, his day-to-day startup times also massively decreased. Sharp writes, "There is one caveat. To switch over to SSD, you have to clone your current hard drive to the new drive. For a 500GB drive, this took about 4.5 hours (thanks Carbon Copy Cloner). Plus another 15 minutes to install the drive. Of course this can be done out of hours, or by an IT department if you have one. [But] now you can generate the numbers you need to show your boss, or even yourself, why an SSD drive is a good investment." Don't expect miracles, however. Another TUAW dev buddy Matthias Ringwald reports, "I replaced the HD in a 2009 Mac mini in 2010 with an Intel 160 GB SSD. While it got more snappy/faster boot times etc, the compile time for our Dybuster Dyslexia C++/Qt project decreased only from 7 minutes to 6 minutes." That said, a 17% decrease in compile time is nothing to sneer at. What's behind the difference? Sharp proposes "There are obvious things like the speed of accessing information on a the drive comparing a rotational system where the sector may or may not be at the head, and may or may not be cached, versus no reliance on mechanical rotation. But there are other things that may account for the lack of gain that Matthias was seeing. That is related to using the disk for virtual memory paging. "As you probably know, the OS uses part of the disk to swap out parts of RAM that are not in use, especially when the memory needed is greater than the physical RAM. If there is a lot of paging, that will suck performance, even with an SSD, as the system dedicates cycles to swapping RAM contents on and off disk. This is why I boosted my RAM first and got a sense of how that worked. Using something like iStat menus, you can see how much memory is being used and how it is allocated (as well as the processes that are hogging it!)" If you've gone to an SSD-equipped system on your development machine, has it made a dramatic difference? Or have the improvements been more subtle? Join in the conversation below.
Aftermarket Eyes Free Siri button: Could it be possible?
After Monday's keynote, many of us here at TUAW wondered whether an aftermarket Eyes Free button was possible. Eyes Free buttons, which will be integrated into several car lines, allow you to access Siri features by pressing a button on your car's steering wheel. Apple is working with car manufacturers to integrate Siri into select voice control systems. Through the voice command button on your steering wheel, you'll be able to ask Siri questions without taking your eyes off the road. Could this be created? With all due respect to Ian Betteridge, the answer to this headline is not "no" but "maybe". For all that we'd love to kickstart up an effort on this, it turns out that the obstacles are both technological and legal. The button would need to be paired to a phone, would need a power source, and would need to be installed securely on the steering wheel or attachable to a sun visor or provide some other mounting for use while driving. With regard to technical viability, we already see similar features in the Jawbone Bluetooth earpiece line with its support for voice dialing. Press and hold the earpiece button and you invoke VoiceControl on older iPhones and Siri on newer ones. So the tech challenges aren't insurmountable. It would have to be a little more specialized than other aftermarket Bluetooth buttons currently on sale, but only in that the button would be limited to invoking Siri. There are already kits available to wire up existing buttons to aftermarket devices, like the one discussed in this forum post. (Look about halfway down the page, where you press the button for two seconds to place a call, that's how you'd invoke Siri.) In other words, we could easily see this be a product in the $30-$50 range, especially with less snazzy requirements for lower-end cars. I contacted Matthias Ringwald, expert on all things Bluetooth, to discuss what it would take to install an after-market Siri button in a car, specifically tied to voice dialing. What Ringwald thinks might stand in the way could be "made for iPhone" licensing. Apple might require participation for certification, so the product could be sold as intended. As for the tech, he told TUAW, "If it's part of the regular hands free profile (HFP), it shouldn't be hard to add." UPDATE: An anonymous source tells TUAW that Apple detailed the API for Eyes Free Siri in the WWDC Bluetooth sessions.
Type to your iPhone with Type2Phone and your Mac keyboard
As a general rule, I avoid reviewing apps from friends. You send me a pitch, I pass it along to the team. But when Matthias Ringwald, Bluetooth developer extraordinaire told me about Type2Phone, I really wanted to try it out myself. For $4.99, this Mac app transforms your computer into a wireless Bluetooth keyboard. If you're not exactly following why anyone would care about that, let me explain why this utility fills a huge hole in the iOS experience, particularly for developers. Nearly all recent devices now support external Bluetooth keyboards for text entry. You navigate to Settings, enable Bluetooth, select a device and pair to it. You can then type using a physical keyboard rather than the onscreen touch one. This greatly speeds up text entry. What Type2Phone does, by emulating a BT keyboard, is let you perform the same announcement and pairing tasks, but from your OS X desktop. That means, if you're testing software on your device (or you just want to type to your device with your computer nearby for any other reason), you can pair and go in just a few seconds, without having to drag out a hardware keyboard. The application remembers the pairing details for you, and you can select each device from a pop-up menu. For devs, that's insanely useful. You can instantly type into text fields, into text views, or into any object that implements a UITextInput protocol. Type2Phone means you can do your text entry from your normal keyboard, along side your normal development tasks. It evaporates a messy annoying detail of development. Personally, I'd prefer if the app offered a way to switch off its scrolling text preview (you see it at the top of this post) -- I type fast enough that the scrolling letters make me a bit dizzy -- but aside from that, this app did its job exactly as promised. You can grab Type2Go from the Mac App Store.
Dear Aunt TUAW: How can I tame iOS with my Apple Wireless Keyboard?
Dear Aunt TUAW, It would give me great comfort if I could rest my head on your bosom of knowledge and have you answer this troubling question. Auntie, why isn't there better support for the Bluetooth keyboard on the iPad? I mean love my keyboard (no... not as much as you Auntie... silly) but all I can use it for is typing. I mean, I should be able to use the navigation keys in the Safari browser? Like scrolling up/down/etc. Hotkeys when in the Springboard or in an app? How about games using the keyboard for controls (ASWZ) as an option? None of that works. I know, Auntie. You're gonna bring up attach rates, but instead can you please talk to Uncle Steve and have him get on this? Your loving and devoted Nephew, Kevin C
Hunting for open GameKit solutions
On iOS, GameKit offers a simple way for applications to connect to each other using ad-hoc peer-to-peer communication without having to be connected to a common network. Despite its name, GameKit has been used for many non-gaming purposes as well as for games. These include contact information exchanges, media sharing, device-to-device presentations and so forth. It's surprising, therefore, that Apple has not introduced a computer-based standard to allow Mac and Windows computers to participate in this information exchange (let alone Android and BlackBerry devices) using the common GameKit programming frameworks. When you look closely at GameKit, you begin to experience the sense of top-down control and paranoia that permeates this implementation. If anything, Apple comes off as just a wee bit psychotic looking at the measures it takes to control GameKit connections, which are (after all) nothing more than Bonjour and Bluetooth handshakes.
Apple TV hacking: Wiimote footage
Do you remember about a year ago when we showed you a Wiimote working as an iPhone input device ? Jump forward to the new era of Apple TV 2. Developer hacker Tom Cool from the #awkwardtv channel on irc.moofspeak.net has cross-compiled that demo for the ATV 2. You can see it in action in this newly posted YouTube video. Like the keyboard hack we posted about a few days ago, this mod is based on activating a custom stack (via Matthias Ringwald's BTstack implementation) that enables the Apple TV's built-in Bluetooth functionality. The Wiimote communicates over Bluetooth to the Apple TV unit, and displays a virtual representation that concurrently mimics the Wiimote's orientation. We're still a bit ways off from full Wii-style gaming on the Apple TV 2, but it's getting closer every day as this demo shows.
Apple TV Hacking: hackers, grooveshark, Bluetooth stack
Family responsibilities have kept me from posting about many amazing developments going on in the Apple TV hacking community this past week but I assure you that things continue to move ahead quickly and in promising directions. Brian Chen wrote up a great summary of this effort over at Wired. This week has brought forth several new system enhancements including NitoTV enhancements and the recently-introduced Plex module that can be installed to the system menu. There's more to come. The first alpha of the Apple TV grooveshark client has been written as a collaboration between NitoTV developer Kevin Bradley and @hackfrag, as shown in the video embedded below. Grooveshark provides peer-recommended music streaming as well as Pandora-like playlist generation. It's yet another exciting Apple TV add-on in its new iOS incarnation.
Apple TV hacking update: Bluetooth, white lists, ports, cables
We continue to keep track of Apple TV's hacking potential; here's another quick update of the new hardware. iFixit confirms that there's an on-board Bluetooth chip: "The Broadcom BCM4329XKUBG 802.11n Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM chip on the Panasonic board is exactly the same as the one we found on the iPad." iOS developer Matthias Ringwald tells TUAW that it shouldn't be hard to get his custom Bluetooth stack running on Apple TV once it's openly jailbroken. "I managed to hook the communication between BlueTool and BT chipset before, so I can record that exchange on iPad which sets up the Bluetooth chipset and just do a playback. Chances are good." Read on...
Found Footage: Synergy on iOS
Are you familiar with Synergy? It's an app that lets you share your keyboard and mouse between many computers -- and we at TUAW have been fans of the app for a very long time. We were delighted to learn over the weekend that Matthias Ringwald, otherwise known as the "King of BTstack," has built a BTstack Synergy Client. It works with Synergy to accept remote events and synthesize them on your jailbroken iPad or iPhone. As this preliminary footage shows, you can use your Mac-based mouse to tap on your iOS screen. Keyboard support is not yet available; Ringwald says he intends to add that. When complete, this is going to be an absolutely brilliant tool for debugging. As an aside, Sorin Sbârnea and Nick Bolton started a Synergy+ branch of Synergy last year. The plus branch provides a Synergy maintenance fork, implementing a variety of bug fixes.The original Synergy has not had source updates or releases since 2006, according to Bolton's write-up. Synergy+ implements "many significant bug fixes such as support for Windows services on Vista and Windows 7, and a brand new GUI (based on QSynergy)."
Add GPS to your jailbroken WiFi iPad with BTstack GPS
A while back, TUAW took a peek at RoqyBluetooth, a GPS solution for jailbroken iPads and iPod touches. Today, Matthias Ringwald has released BTstack GPS. Like Roqy, BTstack GPS offers integrated core location for Bluetooth-enabled devices that lack an onboard GPS system. Retailing for $5 (via the Cydia store), BTstack GPS was written by the same developer who created BTstack, allowing iPhone OS units to communicate with external bluetooth devices including keyboards (you may be familiar with his BTstack Keyboard application), mice, Wiimotes, and now, Bluetooth GPS dongles. The software requires you to disable Apple's Bluetooth in the settings app. You then launch the GPS app, wait for your system to detect the external GPS unit, select it, pair, and then wait again as the GPS unit finds locks to the medium orbit satellites that provide GPS data. This can take a minute or two, so be a little patient. Once the lock finishes and the GPS data starts flowing, Ringwald's app will update, showing your current location on a map.
Found Footage: iPhone/Mouse integration
What happens when you combine two amazing jailbreak utilities on the iPhone? You achieve remote mouse based support! iPhone developer Lance "ashikase" Fetters, author of the amazing Backgrounder jailbreak app, wrote a VNC style extension for the iPhone called MouseSupport. It provides a floating window with a virtual cursor that can be controlled with synthesized pointer events. A second utility, developed by Matthias Ringwald, is called BTstack Mouse. It integrates with ashikase's MouseSupport and Ringwald's open source BTstack implementation to provide iPhone/mouse integration. The video shown here uses Apple's Magic Mouse to demonstrate the BTstack Mouse extension. BTstack Mouse will shortly be available on Cydia and will retail for free. So why does this all matter? Who cares about using a mouse with an iPhone when most people have perfectly usable fingers? Where does a mouse fit into the iPhone world? This effort is part of a larger project to create a nomadic computing environment on the iPhone. To put yourself into the right mindset, try thinking of an iPhone as a portable pocket-sized Unix system instead of as a mobile cell phone. Practical work-ready peripherals that can move as you move, without need for carrying along a laptop, act as an important part of that vision. You can be on the go with just the phone itself -- as you know, a naked iPhone offers a perfectly usable mobile solution for light computing needs -- or you can start accessorizing to upgrade your computing efficiency. By providing hooks for these accessories, the iPhone opens itself up to better desktop-style computing in addition to its existing mobile tools. In the end, when the vision of this project is fulfilled, you'll be able to move the iPhone between desktop set-ups where it can connect itself into a "dockable" Bluetooth-enabled work system, to your pocket on the go, to a lightly-accessorized system for coffee house use.
