Uploading » iPhone

iCensr [3.0...working]

Elizabeth — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:36:55 +0000

The Story Thus Far

Is one of pain and hopelessness. After working on the iCensr application for the National Coalition Against Censorship for a month, I started testing my app on the 3.0 simulator only to find that it seemed like I could not access the camera or photo album. Part of this inaccessibility was the result of short comings in the code. Another deceptive part was the Xcode simulator, which no longer loaded a token camera view to indicate a successful call.

All the same. Today has been an amazingly effective day, in which I accomplished several pressing problems:

Camera and Album Access

This has been a headache for me for the past two weeks but it is finally solved. This new version of iCensr includes cleaner and 3.0 compliant camera and album access. It checks for camera availability before calling for it (without such a provision, the application would crash if there was no camera to call). Better yet, it disables the camera button if the device does not have a camera.

if ([UIImagePickerController isSourceTypeAvailable:UIImagePickerControllerSourceTypeCamera]) { UIImagePickerController* picker = [[UIImagePickerController alloc] init]; picker.sourceType = UIImagePickerControllerSourceTypeCamera; picker.delegate = self;

[self presentModalViewController:picker animated:YES]; }

Finally, initially I had removed the editing capabilities. This struck me as rather pointless at this point. It would rarely be useful and, thus, simply serve as an annoyance since users would have one more frame to load and dismiss.

if (![UIImagePickerController isSourceTypeAvailable:UIImagePickerControllerSourceTypeCamera]) { camera.enabled = NO; }

Screenshots

Some changes in the 3.0 SDK also resulted in the code for capturing the edited picture to miss the edits. Somehow, this strikes me as counter productive. So, it was a bit of a priority to get that working again.

UIGraphicsBeginImageContext(self.view.bounds.size); [self.view.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()]; UIImage *viewImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext(); UIGraphicsEndImageContext();

Redactions

After playing around with the earlier version of iCensr on the iPhone, I found the mechanism making redactions to be unwieldy. When working with a mouse, it make sense to have the precision of the beginning and end within a pixel of those points. But with large pointers such as fingers, it is hard to see where the exact center of a touch is going to be. Thus, I added space to the beginning and end of the redaction bars and widened the stroke so that they will black out an area of similar size to the finger. Thus the result of the gesture should be more intuitive to the user.

Navigation

Earlier, I found that, on quitting the editor view, the user could no longer return to it (at least, it would not be visible). In this version, I have solved this navigation bug.

To Do

Status animation for uploads
Animating transitions
Dismissing Keyboard
Cleaning up & memory management

iCensr [NSXMLParser and Device Testing]

Elizabeth — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:34:27 +0000

[written June 6th]

Yesterday, in following with the rest of this delightfully productive week, I successfully downloaded the new 3.0 SDK and uploaded iCensr onto my iPhone. In the course of updating my iPhone SDK, i discovered the the twit pic class that I was using to post pictures implaments NSXMLDocument, a useful tool for working with XML but, unfortunately, one that is not supported on the iPhone environment. This meant that my code would no longer run. So, I got to learn a bit about the NSXMLParser class as I worked to pull the URL of the image posted on twitpic.

With that adjustment, I was able to upload my application to the iPhone. This process, surprisingly, took all day.

Thus, now, while painfully buggy, the application is running so I can demo it to interested parties.

iCensr [cleaning & alerts]

Elizabeth — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:27:46 +0000

Editor and Exporter screenshots from iCensr simulator

[written June 3rd: ]

As part of my clean up effort, I have decided to start including more alerts to make sure that the user has entered a twitter ID and Password and that they are correct. If you get it right the first time, you need never see these ugly alerts again! Just incase it comes up later, I found a few forums postings to be particularly enlightening. At the iPhone dev SDK forum, there was a great discussion on alertviews with a text field. For multiple text fields in the alertview, check out stack overflow.

iCensr [redactions]

Elizabeth — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:36:01 +0000

Editor and Exporter screenshots from iCensr simulator

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand (digitally speaking) before you, a not-terribly-humbled-but-very-gratified woman. After a little less than a month of scraping, scrounging, and, when things were particularly dark, schooling in the ways of COCOA, I have a working product. Yes, it is buggy. Yes, not all the buttons work. Yes, the upload time is slow. But what truly matters is, at the end of the day (and I guarantee you, this is about as close to the end of the day one can get), you can take a picture and undo all the mistakes of humanity with a swipe of a finger—squeegeeing away, as it were, the carcasses of Beelzebub’s splattered minions that obstruct your vision as you drive down the I-5 of life.

It is amazing how, in the last few days, everything has seemingly come together. Today, concluding that Matt Gemmel’s MGTwitterEngine only offered part of the solution, I turned to the overwhelming wealth of code that comprises Canary (application website, click here for the GitHub source code. While there was more related code to be had, I have, thus far, contented myself to make use of the simple—and thus, comprehensible—class: ORSTwitPicDispatcher.h. Thus, the morning began well with the successful submission of test pictures to the iCensr Twitter account.

Better yet—and yes folks, it does get better—this evening I incorporated the editor with the image view and set up the application to take a screenshot of the result to be handed over to the lovely functionality I had implemented this morning. Oh! The beauty of things when they work!

You can follow my uploads on Twitter and TwitPic

Hopefully, in a week I will have an app ready for beta testing.

iCensr [Twitter > camera > album > upload]

Elizabeth — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:32:39 +0000

Today has probably been my most effective day of work yet. I started out the morning by implementing Matt Gemmell’s MGTwitter Engine. It works like a charm. In this version of iCensr, I am able to take a user’s name, password, and text and tweet it to their account!

Next, I moved on to camera and album capabilities. I found a simple tutorial on accessing the album / camera on the iPhone and manipulating pictures posted by Mike on iPhoneNoob. Better yet, he had an additional post on uploading these pictures to a server. The final result is my most recent commit on github.

With this progress, I am feeling very good about the progress of this app. Hopefully I will have a fully working version in the next few weeks so that I can start user testing it and working on the companion website. (Not to mention my other side projects!)

Tomorrow:

Integrate line drawing with the new default editing frame
Move the “upload” command to the share page and reintegrate said page.
Set up a script on my server to take test submissions and post them.

iCensr [thoughts and drawing]

Elizabeth — Sun, 31 May 2009 08:35:50 +0000

It’s strange how little steps can really hold up the overall progress of a project. In this case, I found myself struggling with developing the drawing capabilities that will allow the user to censor their images. After all, that is the point of the whole project. While it took three days, I have finally managed to get the basic drawing up and running. Unfortunately, this current implementation involves a few hacks that are not in the best form.

Providing that I do, eventually, finish this application (this last semester has been a bit of a blow to my confidence on this front) I have thought of a new feature that might be fun for the next generation. I’m not going to let myself get bogged down with it in this iteration. I think it might be neat to take advantage of the core location capabilities of the iPhone to create an option of submitting the censorship to a map, so that people could collectively censor a shared landscape. It would be interesting to then let people see what parts of their environments other people thought worth censoring. Of course, such a feature will likely only be of any use in dense metropolitan areas. But my history of work should show that I care most about creating content that I would find interesting.

Next, I think I’ll move on to getting basic twitter capabilities going, to be followed by actually taking pictures.

Sorry, luvs, I’m not fealing clever today.

iCensr [source code scrounging]

Elizabeth — Sat, 23 May 2009 22:37:56 +0000

With my research complete and foundation laid, the time has come to start developing this application. Thus, I have begun researching and collecting source code and classes that may come in handy for developing the iCensr application.

Camera Functionality

My first instinct has been to start with what I already know. Thus, I went to my classmate, Alex and asked him about his SoundSnapp application and how he went about taking pictures with this application. It turns out, that he made use of the Camera Test library developed by Norio Nomura. Unfortunately, it employs a work-around that would not be allowed in the iPhone Applications store. That would be too great a concession for this current project, though it may be useful for some of my smaller scale pieces.

Thus, it looks like I will have to resort to Apple’s standard, though slower, camera implementation.

EDIT: I’ve found some lovely tutorials on setting up camera/album functionality. Actually, they are pretty much the same thing, one is a video tutorial by Bucky. The second is a print tutorial by Mike on iPhoneNoob.

Twitter

While a lot of classmates have made use of twitter for past projects, it is rather uncharted territory for me. My own account languishes, barely used.

Regardless, on the Twitter front, I have started looking at Twitter’s API documentation. Best of all, there are already two twitter libraries written for Objective-C. I think I will be using Matt Gemmell’s MGTwitterEngine.

I have finally started watching the podcast of Stanford lectures on iPhone Application development. Apparently, one of their projects is working with Twitter. Lecture 9 is on “Dealing with Data: User Defaults, SQLite, Web Services,” which should be quite useful, as well as the following talk on Tweetie.

More links will probably come as I keep looking.

iCensr [navigation layout part 1]

Elizabeth — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:09:39 +0000

Today was time I wasted entirely on developing and implementing a splash screen which fades out to a log in page. While constituting a “bell and whistle” in absence of the actual vehicle, it is an nice place to start, and has given me some ideas as to my future steps for developing application.

I had come across the idea of setting up a splash page earlier on while researching for my class, Little Computers. I discovered a delightfully handy blog, iCodeBlog, which is absolutely chock full of tutorials of the the Objective-C ilk. Thus, when deciding what to accomplish today, I decided to do as the White Rabbit and “Begin at the beginning and go on till [I] come to the end: then stop.” As the very first thing any user would see in this application would be the splash screen, it seemed that that, too, would be where I started.

Thus, following iCodeBlog’s splash screen tutorial, I threw together a placeholder splash screen, the first draft of the sign in page, and tied it all together with a little fade out and in action. You can see the code and assets in my github repository.

Photography taken by bredgur

iCensr [application rundown]

Elizabeth — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:43:11 +0000

iCensr, in case you hadn’t read my past post, is an application—made in association with the NCAC—to censor your environment by taking pictures and editing out content with a touch of your finger. The overall aim is a satirical look at the arbitrariness of censorship and how it can create a new, possibly more scandalous, message as a result the censorship process.

Before designing and developing the application itself, I began by researching similar applications already available in the application. There are four main types I am interested in: (1) censorship applications, (2) photo editing applications, (3) photo sharing applications, and (4) applications sponsored by and promoting other causes / nonprofits.

Censorship Applications

There are some censorship applications already developed. Applications for censoring foul language are particularly popular. Applications such as Censor, Mr. Censored, and iBleep all allow users to generate the classic “bleep” sound to censor their language in real time.

There is also Hide My Secret!, an image editor that allows users to pixilate portions of their photos. While this is similar to iCensr, I believe that it is sufficiently different because Hide My Secret! is meant to be a serious tool for unobtrusively concealing information before sharing pictures while iCensr is employs an obtrusive black bar in order to make a clear and satirical statement about censorship.

Photo Editing Applications

There is no end to photo editing applications such as Photogene, iRetouch, and AutoFocus. They tend to be priced at $2.99 and offer a suit of tools such as cropping, sharpening, levels, gama correction, rgb balance, saturation, color temperature, clip art and more. These are generic tool sets with more a focus of enabling users to realize their visions rather than guiding users to a particular end.

A more specific editing application would be iSteam. Users blow in the microphone to “steam up” the window and draw on the screen to wipe away the “moisture”. The application is simple in concept but complete in user interface and experience.

’stachetastic is more in the way of what I’m creating. Users edit their pictures to add a mustache or beard and edit sed facial hair. The creators also developed mulltizer and 80s hair. What interests me is in how specific these applications are. While they allow the flexibility of editing any picture, they perform one task.

Photo Sharing Applications

Photo manipulation and sharing is already integrated in AutoFocus, which allows users to upload to Facebook, Picassa, and Flickr. There are, however, other, dedicated photo sharing applications.

Phanfare Photon synchronizes and accesses photos and video from Phanfare’s website to the iPhone and allows editing on the website.

Also, twitter applications such as Twitterific allows users to upload pictures from their iPhone to twitpic

Cause Related Applications

The blogs The Extraordinaries and Have Fun * Do Good saved me a lot of effort researching promotional applications for nonprofits with articles such as iPhone Apps for Nonprofits. As is pointed out in the post, there aren’t a lot of applications designed for nonprofits.

Cost: so far, most of these promotional apps do not charge for their services. While this is understandable when you are trying to promote a cause, it prevents any opportunity for revenue collection through donations. Pet Earth offers a “lite” version that is free as well as a complete version, costing $2.99 and donating a portion to plant trees. People Against a Violent Environment approaches the money issue differently by linking users back to the website with information on how to make donations. The problem with this design is that it requires a great deal of effort for the user to do make a donation.

Type:

informational: applications like Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch are dense with facts, including a simple rundown of what fish you should and shouldn’t eat according to sustainable fishing practices and full descriptions of the fish and why the fishing practices of them are or are not sustainable.
awareness: Another method is People Against a Violent Environment factoid applications for sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse awareness. These applications pop-up one sentence statistics with buttons to “Dismiss” or “Help Now,” directing you to the website with more information.
entertainment: applications like Pet Earth make environmental awareness a game as players stop disasters and polluters and earn trees to plant on their planet.
Impulse: there is talk about an application iGive, which would pop up random charities and give the user an option to donate money to the charity. I would be very interested to see how they set up the money transfer.
Subsidized guilt: applications like Melodeo’s Christmas music app give a portion of the money spent on the application to a charity—Salvation Army, in this case.

Design: overall quality and complexity of the applications varied strongly. People Against a Violent Environment’s application was clean and simple but linked to a messy website while Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch application was bordering on utilitarian but drilled down for a large amount of information. User interface design was a bit of an afterthought and took backseat to the main purpose. Most of these applications, in addition, could have been used on most any platform.

iCensr

Elizabeth — Tue, 19 May 2009 08:17:59 +0000

Before flying off to California, I discussed my internship project with Sarah for the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). Seeing as I will be bingeing on iPhone programing in anticipation of Apple’s WWDC ‘09 and considering the censorship controversy over Apple’s application store limitations, we thought it would be applicable if I spent my internship developing a satirical application for the iPhone.

There are many ways to approach this project. The most obvious is to create some application so scandalous that there is no way that the store would accept it. Of course, that would be counter productive, since not getting into the store is far from unusual. Rather, we decided to take the subversive course and design an application that would be acceptable by Apple policy but encourage users to consider the arbitrariness of censorship and the way we use technology in our everyday lives. Thus, Sarah and I thought of iCensr.

The name, as should be obvious, alludes to those two major new media platforms: Apples iBlank collection of products—offering sleek, user friendly technology paired with a sense of accessible exclusivity—and that photo-storage titan Flickr. iCensr explores the practice of photography capture, distribution, and, of course, censorship. iCensr will allow you to censor your environment by taking pictures, editing them by drawing black lines over “undesirable” content, and sharing them by either adding them to your Twitter feed, emailing them to a friend, submitting them to the iCensr website, or all of the above.

The intent of this application is mainly to address the arbitrariness of censorship, how what is inappropriate to one person is fine to another, and how the censorship of something can be a message in and of itself. We hope to encourage users to approach this application as a challenge to create scandal through censorship rather than conceal it. In the same vain as Jimmy Kimmel’s Unnecessary Censorship and the Song of the Count, we want users to take harmless content and make it into a statement by creating an illusion of indecency, thereby playing with our perceptions of our environment.

You can follow my progress on this project on my blog under the “iCensr” tag and view and contribute to the source code, available on my github account.