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.

Lextech refuses to employ some of the less imaginative sales tactics used by other growing companies. For example, we don’t use obnoxious sales pitches or interrupt families gathered around the dinner table by cold calling them. Why? Because we have faith in our work.

We believe that we can only be as successful as we make our clients. If our clients are successful and happy with the work Lextech has done, they will tell their friends. And they have!

100% of our clients to date were referred to us by previous clients or friends.

This referral helps us immediately establish a higher level of trust and a close working relationship. When our clients trust us, they are more likely to share their real business challenges and pain points - making Lextech more effective at designing custom solutions.

We don’t simply want to be the systems engineering company you trust with your business. We want to be the friend you would trust with the business you have financed by taking out a second mortgage on your family home.

Office Express President, Bill Raspe’s e-commerce website experienced 3 to 4 days of downtime per month. Maintaining, updating, and adding new features to the website was incredibly difficult and often impossible because the vendor gave Bill limited access to the back end of his system.

He wanted to change vendors and upgrade the system, but because a large portion of an e-commerce company’s business is generated through internet searches, the old website URLs had to remain live to maintain search engine rankings once the new site went up. The success of his business hinged on a smooth upgrade.

What did Lextech do?

Lextech’s systems engineers started by converting the old Microsoft ASP website on a shared server to open source technologies on a dedicated (private and secure) server, which was more cost effective. Project engineers even trained Office Express personnel in the PHP programming language, so they could make changes and updates to the site whenever they wanted. Lextech engineers also followed a very structured plan to link the old website back to the new one and test each link in various search engines. The search engine rankings remained intact.

What is the big deal?

Limited access, excessive downtime, and costly licensing fees are unacceptable barriers to growth. Office Express said sayonara to their crappy vendor, and welcomed Lextech’s cooperative methodology. Since the upgrade, envelopesexpress.com’s conversion ratio has improved by 60%.

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.

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.