We are receiving extremely positive feedback about iRa from the development community. The 350+ developers that saw the demo at the iPhoneDevCamp 2 in San Francisco last weekend were so impressed by the application that iRa won the “Coolest iPhone App” award at the end of the 2 day event.

Watch the demo below and then check out the Lextech Labs News page to see what people are saying about iRa!

Video from Andrew Mager’s The Web Life.

Look for future posts that share exciting details about the iPhoneDevCamp 2 from the perspective of our developers that were in attendance.

A number of Lextech team members will be attending the San Francisco iPhoneDevCamp event and the Chicago satelite gathering this weekend. Our goal for the event is to continue building knowledge of the iPhone platform, meet some great people and have an app or two we can release to the world when it’s all wrapped up.

In addition to a weekend focused on hard core iPhone development, we’ll also be providing the backup video feeds for the event satelite locations using a camera equipment mac mini streaming to our video reflector network.

We’ll post a follow-up on the event with the highlights.

We’re proud to say that Lextech Labs (our sister company) has submitted the release version of the iRa video surveillance control system for the iPhone and iPod touch to Apple for inclusion in the App Store so it will be available soon.

For more details on iRa check out the Lextech Labs site at lextechlabs.com/ira.

Continuing the now annual tradition we started last year, a group of us enjoyed the early morning air and rain sprinkles to stake out our spot in the iPhone line insanity of last week (granted last year was a bit more intense with much more time in line). Our spots started at 46th in line and that worked out to score us the initial batch of phones we needed to continue our development and testing of iPhone related technologies, especially over 3G. It was great to meet the variety of folks who decided to take the plunge — Apple fans, Windows converts, IT administrators and totally non-tech people who wanted ‘the phone’.

It took about 4 hours for us to get all of the phone issues resolved (25% were perfect at the store, 25% waiting on the iTunes servers and 50% needing surgery in AT&T’s records to fix updated SIM numbers). Once activated we thoroughly put the phones through their paces and downloaded apps galore to test out. The App Store is an amazing software delivery vehicle and the millions of app downloads already are proof that Apple is on to something huge here. Now we just need to continue the upgrades as more phones come available in the weeks ahead.

And as the coffee, sugar and excitement wore off later in the day, off the intrepid line adventures crept to crash a wee bit early for the evening with dreams of the App Store dancing in their heads…

Apple’s iPhone has radically changed the mobile applications landscape by opening up mobile application development to any web development firm using Web 2.0 standard technology.  No longer is a specialized team who know the intricacies of proprietary cell phone software development necessary.  This allows much faster development of mobile apps and also removes the dependency on a mobile carrier to approve software on their wireless network. And with the 3G iPhone coming soon, web apps will be even faster than the current versions.

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is the term commonly used to describe a new generation of web technologies and their focus on interactivity and data collaboration.  The core technology is typically AJAX (javascript in a web browser which talks back to the web server), which provides the snazzy functionality in sites like Google maps.  This new level of interactivity in a web page also usually includes providing the user access to different types of data at the same time (merging functionality from different web sites together in a single place).

Any Web Developer Can Do It…

Using web technologies to build connected apps has proven to be more efficient than using traditional mobile technologies. Mobile applications today are typically developed in J2ME (Java for phones), Brew or .Net, depending on what the target phone(s) support.  These technologies provide a standard but often require phone specific tweaks as not all phones behave the same way.  Usually this meant that a development team built up a special library over time that handled the quirks and work arounds for various phones.

Using Web 2.0 technologies means that nearly any capable web developer with any technology skill set (Java, Open Source, Microsoft, etc.) can now create mobile applications. It also means that existing applications can have new ‘skins’ applied to them to allow already developed functionality to be rolled out in a mobile environment.

All this boils down to it being much faster to build a connected app using web technologies than with traditional mobile technologies.

For example, during a recent Lextech training session, a small team developed a web app that pulled news headlines from the Tribune, created an audio file with the converted text to speech and sent it to the iPhone. With only about 4 hours of development work, the iPhone read news headlines aloud to the user.

Power to the People

With the mobile Web 2.0 revolution, wireless carriers are no longer the gate keepers controlling what applications users can access.  The mobile user merely points their web browser to the correct place and away they go.  This also simplifies the often nightmarish aspects of rolling out and updating applications that live inside of cell phones.  Now an update to the main server updates the mobile application for everyone.

Companies Already on Board

Many leading online firms are already creating iPhone specific versions of their applications to better serve existing customers and tap into the growing market of mobile app demanding consumers. Google, Facebook and LinkedIn have already rolled out versions of their applications dedicated to iPhone users. 

The Future…

The iPhone is merely the first in what will be a wave of Web 2.0 standards capable mobile devices in the market.  This mobile revolution will rapidly accelerate new kinds of applications we’ve never seen before and allow deeper interactivity while we’re physically anywhere.

 

With the impending launch of the 2.0 OS for the iPhone allowing third parties to build iPhone applications, now is the ideal time to be rolling out an extension of your existing web system for iPhone users. I’m not talking about a different web version but a truly native app that links to your web system.

There is a huge amount of market hype already and many information hungry users and enthusiasts looking for that new ‘mobile’ application. It may have existed on the web for years, but putting a dedicated version in a user’s pocket takes things to a new level.

Depending on your business model you may be able to publish the application for free but then charge users a monthly usage fee similar to your current web users. This opens up your base of potential users installing the app directly from the Apple App Store.

And since the development platform allows pretty ready access to standard URL based services, you should be able to create that native effort without the huge labor it might take to reskin your whole site for a mobile device. If  you use intelligent caching, the user will never have to care if they’re on the EDGE network, WiFi or 300 feet underground — it’ll just work.

And of course if you’re doing it right, the other advantage is that it’ll force you to identify the top 10% of the features in your web system to build into the app.  iPhone users demand simple and elegant interfaces. This simplifies your development, provides a better user experience and may even help you refocus your web development efforts on important areas too.

Here at Lextech, we have internal training events a couple times a month. We take occasional surveys to find out what technologies people are interested in learning about, then figure out who among us knows it or might be interested in picking it up. These teachers are then cajoled into giving a class with the promise of free food. The classes take the form of either a brief overview during lunch, or a more in-depth look during the evening.

We’ve all been very excited about the release of the iPhone SDK (official and otherwise), so an evening training event covering that was a no-brainer. After a brief discussion, it became clear that I would be the easiest one to talk into leading the class since I respond well to flattery.

I decided that the focus of the class should be creating extremely intuitive applications that make use of the iPhone’s rather unique user interface. Coincidentally I had just finished up a project that involved controlling a pan & tilt camera from a PC, and this struck me as the perfect application for the iPhone.

Rather than throw an entire application at people and then try to go through all the different pieces, I thought it would be best to take an incremental approach. I presented the application in essentially the same way that I created it: one layer at a time. For the sake of clarity, each layer was shown as a separate Xcode project that built upon the previous one.

These are the different layers I used:

Video

The first task was to display live video from the camera we would be using. This seemed like a great layer to start with, since it provides an immediate usefulness all by itself. It would also be quick and easy to implement, or so I thought.

The output from the video cameras is analog, so we use a video server (an Axis 241Q) to digitize and stream it. It works great and is easy to use; just set it up and enter the URL in QuickTime.

Unfortunately it turns out that the iPhone does not support RTSP/RTP, the standard protocol for streaming video. After scratching my head for a while, I figured out how to use a UIWebView to render some HTML and Javascript that displayed the video as Motion JPEG. As an added bonus, this has much less lag than using QuickTime for live video.

Network

The server software that controls the pan & tilt cameras is Java based. Fortunately we already had an experimental AJAX interface to the Java server. All I had to do was create an NSURLConnection to talk to the existing web interface.

Touch

Now we get to the part that really shines on the iPhone: the user interface. Our standard GUI interfaces for these cameras have buttons for moving left - right (pan), and up - down (tilt). The obvious iPhone enhancement was to implement these controls using finger flicks and drags, just like scrolling in the other native applications. I just had to override the default touch behavior and send commands to the server using the network layer.

Bonjour

The metaphorical cherry-on-top for ease of use was auto-configuration. Instead of the user needing to know what cameras were available and, even worse, having to type in the addresses and other configuration data, we used Bonjour to make it all automagical.

Apple provides some very nice Java interfaces for Bonjour. It was quite simple to setup the Java server to broadcast information about the cameras using a custom service type. The application is set up as a listener for that service, and when the user launches it they are presented with a real-time list of all the cameras available on the local network. All they have to do is click on the one they want to control.

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The class went even better than I could have hoped. We all learned a bunch of cool stuff that’s going to give us a real head-start on developing iPhone applications. To try out their newly acquired skills, the class attendees even extended the application I presented, adding a pinching interface for zooming the camera. I was a bit surprised when they fixed the compilation errors and it just worked perfectly on the first go. It was a pretty impressive demonstration of the platform’s unique capabilities.

And really, this is what I hope to see more of on the iPhone. Applications that don’t just blandly replicate existing desktop functionality, but instead provide tools conceived within the framework of the revolutionary iPhone interface. Tools that exceed desktop functionality.

The team here has been working diligently on a wide variety of iPhone apps for quite a while.  Having our official development keys, we’re cranking things out using the new OS.  We’ve even been holding internal training events on building iPhone apps. We are building applications to extend some of our clients’ systems as well as stand alone apps that will be available through the Apple store.

As they each get closer to being ready for distribution we’ll be posting more details here.  First up — controlling uber high end surveillance equipment using the iPhone!

Picture this:

I am at Lextech interviewing for my current job. I have been getting to know as much about Lextech and about many of the folks here as they probably got to know about me. I’m liking what I hear and I’m mentally picturing the benefits of being a Lextech employee: Good salary, benefits, paid time off, learning opportunities, interesting projects, free snacks and drinks, and a great team to work with. Even though it means moving from another state, it really isn’t that hard to make up my mind.

I tell Alex that I’ve decided to come on-board and we shake hands. Moments later, I get the first of many pleasant surprises: a beautiful new iPhone.

Now THAT is instant gratification. I know I made the right choice.