Fantastic news today from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).  After a lot of hard work and mountains of paperwork, jailbreaking your iPhone is now explicitly a permitted fair use under the DMCA!

The first of EFF’s three successful requests clarifies the legality of cell phone “jailbreaking” — software modifications that liberate iPhones and other handsets to run applications from sources other than those approved by the phone maker. More than a million iPhone owners are said to have “jailbroken” their handsets in order to change wireless providers or use applications obtained from sources other than Apple’s own iTunes “App Store,” and many more have expressed a desire to do so. But the threat of DMCA liability had previously endangered these customers and alternate applications stores.

In its reasoning in favor of EFF’s jailbreaking exemption, the Copyright Office rejected Apple’s claim that copyright law prevents people from installing unapproved programs on iPhones: “When one jailbreaks a smartphone in order to make the operating system on that phone interoperable with an independently created application that has not been approved by the maker of the smartphone or the maker of its operating system, the modifications that are made purely for the purpose of such interoperability are fair uses.”

The EFF also successfully renewed the existing DMCA exception for carrier unlocking.  More on the ruling by the Library of Congress is here and here (and many other places, since this is huge news!). The full ruling is here, and EFF’s history with this case is here (EFF’s servers are understandably getting hammered today!).

This doesn’t mean that Apple will stop their technical attempts to thwart jailbreaking, but it does mean that our iPhone jailbreaks and unlocks are now unambiguously legal under the DMCA.

Great job, EFF!

This will be lost on many of you, but to the programmers this will make perfect sense. Basically, when programming, there are a lot of times when you have a long list of numbers or words that you'll want sorted greatest to least or alphabetically. The way this is done will vary by what algorithm you use. Aldo Cortesi visualizes these sorting algorithms, showing just how each one works.

If you're confused but still interested, here's a simple example.

Let's say you have a list of numbers from one to five listed as such: 4, 20, 6, 12, 100. We want to organize these systematically least to greatest. The easiest way would be to setup five "spots" and then go through each number, starting at the beginning, and decide if the number is bigger or smaller than the number we already looked at. That's not the most efficient way to do it though, and when you have millions of numbers to sort, instead of just five, then efficiency matters.

[Thanks, Marlena]

A sweet engine for getting started with Android game development is the

Mobile games are on slower hardware, similar to later 90′s computers so native is a great way to go for 3d and 2d game development because of this limitation at the current time and well into the next few years.  Take this time to learn you some native gamedev. andengine isn’t native directly as it is Java based but compiled with the Dalvik JIT virtual machine. Another way to go native on Android is the Android NDK which allows C and C++.

• andengine download at google code
• andengine examples at google code
• andengine blog
• Mercurial repository at google code
• cocos2d-android port of cocos2d-iphone with BSD license
• rokon android is another BSD licensed android game engine

The engine also has extensions that can be easily added and some great ones exist already.

• AndEngine Live-Wallpaper Extension
• AndEngine .MOD-Player Extension
• AndEngine Multiplayer Extension
• AndEngine MultiTouch Extension
• AndEngine Physics Box2D Extension
• AndEngine Augmented-Reality Extension

Sure, why not, let's make it a hairy Friday. From Tor Weeks: a series of moustaches styled by their typographic counterpart, aka typestaches. The big and bold typefaces like Federal and Wide Latin get thick and burly moustaches, while the more delicate typefaces, get thin and curvy.

If only facial hair were as easy to select as fonts. I'd get myself a 24pt Mr. Century Ultra.

Grab a print for yourself here.

[via kottke]

Video streaming is powered by LiveCycle Collaboration Services, a set of hosted Flash Services that enable developers to easily add real-time collaboration and social capabilities to their applications.

This application is obviously a bare-bones proof of concept. However, it is fully operational, and the same code can run on different runtime environments: AIR for Android, AIR on the Desktop, and Flash Player in the Browser. Users can participate in the same collaboration session regardless of the runtime environment they use.

Watch the video:

The 30 lines of code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:Application xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" xmlns:cs="AfcsNameSpace" currentState="logon" fontSize="28">

	<fx:Script>
		[Bindable] private var roomURL:String = "http://connectnow.acrobat.com/YOUR_ROOM_NAME";

		protected function connect():void {
			auth.userName = userName.text;
			currentState = "default";
			session.login();
		}
	</fx:Script>

	<s:states>
		<s:State name="default"/>
		<s:State name="logon"/>
	</s:states>

	<fx:Declarations>
		<cs:AdobeHSAuthenticator id="auth"/>
	</fx:Declarations>

	<s:TextInput id="userName" includeIn="logon" top="200" horizontalCenter="0"/>
	<s:Button label="Connect" click="connect()" includeIn="logon" top="250" horizontalCenter="0" height="50" width="150"/>

	<cs:ConnectSessionContainer id="session" roomURL="{roomURL}" authenticator="{auth}" autoLogin="false" width="100%" height="100%" includeIn="default">
		<cs:WebCamera top="10" left="10" bottom="10" right="10"/>
	</cs:ConnectSessionContainer>

</s:Application>

I am very happy that the community is getting more and more involved in P2P. I told you, it has endless possibilities!

AS3-P2P-LIB
AS3-P2P-LIB is a pure ActionScript 3.0 Library by Dominic Graefen that helps Flash developers get started with P2P easily.

All Classes | Example | Project page at GitHub

P2P Video Calls on Android

My fellow evangelist Mark Doherty built a great demo app using P2P and AIR 2.5 for Android. Watch this video, where he shows how it works. And btw: I should really teach him how to pronounce my name Mark, you are going to get a lesson at MAX 2010!

Check Mark’s blog post for further information.

If you were at MAX last year you probably remember the demo I did in the keynote on day 2. With literally just a couple lines of code you can add a complete license manager and payment solution to your AIR application. You can even create time and feature based trials.

Melrose works exactly like all the other application stores out there. We don’t charge any monthly or yearly fees but we do take a percentage of your earnings (obviously there is no charge for free apps). In return we’ll provide a safe and secure way to monetize your AIR applications. That means you don’t have to worry about things like credit card processing and hosting your license manager logic. Your private dashboard will tell you how your application is doing. You can view charts on number of downloads of your apps, number of trials, number of purchases, revenue, number of activations, and trial to purchase histogram (i.e. conversions from trials to purchases).

Developers and publishers in 47 countries can use Melrose to distribute and monetize AIR applications.

Melrose is still in private beta but you can already sign up today. You can find all the necessary info on the Melrose Labs page.

You can do this because the Blind Type keyboard is no longer tethered to the bottom of your screen. In fact, you just type away anywhere on the screen — just like there was a keyboard underneath — and the app figures out what you meant.

Luckily for you, these guys have a video demonstration, coz I’m having a Dickens of a time trying to explain it to you. Do me favour and watch the video, won’t you?

While it’s not yet available, Blind Type are hoping to launch the keyboard on Android, iPhone, and iPad. If you’re keen (I know I am), make sure to keep an eye on their website for release details.

[via Daily iPhone Blog]

What do you do when an application just blows you away the minute you open it? Write about it on BP, of course.

Designers have been trying to figure out how best to tackle the 10 inch screen, and while I’m not certain whether we’ve reached that conclusion, or if there is just one way of doing it, but Flipboard certainly is the best attempt yet. It combines fluid interactivity, with live personalised data, into an experience unlike any other. What boggles the mind, is that it’s free.

You have no excuse not to download it. Screenshots and fantastic promo video after the fold.

You are given a frequent buyer card for your local coffeeshop. Each time you buy a cup of coffee you get a stamp on your card. When the card is filled you get a free cup of coffee. Here are two different scenarios:

Card A: The card has 10 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card all the boxes are blank.

Card B: The card has 12 boxes for the stamps, and when you get the card the first two boxes are already stamped.

Question: How long will it take you to get the card filled up? Will it take longer or shorter for scenario A vs. scenario B? After all, you have to buy 10 cups of coffee in both scenarios in order to get the free coffee. So does it make a difference which card you use?

The answer apparently is yes. You will fill up the card faster with Card B than with Card A. And the reason is called the “goal-gradient” effect.

The goal-gradient effect was first studied in 1934 by Hull with rats. He found that rats that were running a maze to get food at the end would run faster as they got to the end of the maze.

The goal-gradient effect says that you will accelerate your behavior as you progress closer to your goal. The scenarios I describe above were part of a research study by Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng (full reference is below).  They decided to see if humans would behave like the rats. And the answer is, yes they do.

Here are some important things to keep in mind about the goal-gradient effect:

• The shorter the distance to the goal the more motivated people will be to reach it.
• You can get this extra motivation even with the illusion of progress, as in Scenario B above. There really isn’t any progress (you still have to buy 10 coffees), but it seems like there is some progress so it has the same effect
• People enjoy being part of the reward program. When compared to customers who were not part of the program, the customers with the reward cards smiled more, chatted longer with café employees, said “thank you” more often and left a tip more often (all statistically significant for you research buffs out there).
• In a related experiment the same researchers showed that people would visit a web site more frequently and rate more songs during each visit as they got closer to a reward goal at the site. So this goal-gradient effect appears to be generalizable across many situations.
• Motivation and purchases plummet right after the goal is reached. This is called a “post-reward resetting phenomenon”.  If you have a 2^nd reward level people will initially not be very motivated to reach that 2^nd reward. Right after a reward is reached is when you are most at risk of losing your customer.

And for those of you who want to read the original research:

Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng, The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected:Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention, Journal of Marketing Research, 39 Vol. XLIII (February 2006), 39–58.

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He had a stand-out statistic that snagged my mind. I thought I would visualise it.

Shocking proportion. Interestingly, when I sketched the diagram, my imagination had the scale way wrong.

I tend to stay away from the HTML5 vs Flash "debate", principally because I think it's inane. Both platforms offer certain advantages over the other and some interesting results can be achieved by utilizing their strengths. Case in point, Flash's built-in webcam support and WebGL's hardware-accelerated 3D graphics are features that only exist in their respective platforms (for now). Bridging the technologies produces something unattainable by only using one, as the following quick examples illustrate.

Simple interactive cube.

Plane deformation (Kaleidoscope shader by iq ported from Shader Toy).

Raytracing (Kinderpainter by iq ported from Shader Toy).

Passing webcam data to Javascript involves a few steps. The BitmapData drawn from the Video object needs to be compressed to JPEG and encoded to Base64 for the data URI to read it. This can be a very taxing process in native ActionScript, but is nearly negligible when done in haXe or Alchemy. In this case, I'm using both. The JPEG compression is performed by metalbot's Alchemy JPEG encoder, while the Base64 encoding is handled by Bloodhound's haXe crypto library. ExternalInferface passes the resulting string to the WebGL's texture Image source with the following method:

Not only is it possible for HTML5 and Flash to peacefully coexist, but they can also help each other achieve a result not possible on their own. Kumbaya.

'Unicyclists are very rare on campus pathways and none of the authors have ever observed a unicycling clown on campus. Since the clown was unicycling near the walking path, this was clearly relevant to the task of safely navigating across Red Square (besides, you never know when a clown may throw a cream pie in your face).'

• Opinion Cloud: Summarizes comments on YouTube videos and Flickr photos to provide an overview of the crowd’s overall opinion.
• Google Voice: All sorts of helpful Voice features directly from the browser. See how many messages you have, initiate calls and texts, or call numbers on a site by clicking on them.
• AutoPager. Automatically loads the next page of a site. You can just scroll down instead of having to click to the next page.
  
• Turn Off the Lights: Fades the page to improve the video-watching experience.
• Google Dictionary: Double-click any word to see its definition, or click on the icon in the address bar to look up any word.
• After the Deadline: Checks spelling, style, and grammar on your emails, blog, tweets, etc.
• Invisible Hand: Does a quick price check and lets you know if the product you are looking at is available at a lower price elsewhere.
• Secbrowsing: Checks that your plug-ins (e.g. Java, Flash) are up to date.
• Tineye: Image search utility to find exact matches (including cropped, edited, or re-sized images).
• Slideshow: Turns photo sites such as Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Google Images into slideshows.
• Google Docs/PDF Viewer: Automatically previews pdfs, powerpoint presentations, and other documents in Google Docs Viewer.
• Readability: Reformat the page into a single column of text.
• Chromed Bird: A nice Twitter viewing extension.
• Feedsquares: Cool way of viewing your feeds via Google Reader.
• ScribeFire: Full-featured blog editor that lets you easily post to any of your blogs.
• Note Anywhere: Digital post-it notes that can be pasted and saved on any webpage.
• Instant Messaging Notifier: IM on multiple clients.
• Remember the Milk: The popular to-do app.
• Extension.fm: Turns the web into a music library.

What does AnswerLab do?
We provide user experience research and consulting for web, mobile and software applications. Our research helps clients improve areas that are confusing or frustrating, so that they can deliver compelling products that are easy to use.

The market research industry exists because of basic human nature – it’s really challenging for people to truly put themselves in other people’s shoes.

We help clients understand how their products are perceived by their target customers. For example we recently conducted a study for a company that was producing games for the iPhone. The development team learned that users had trouble understanding the game rules, however once they understood the rules they loved the game. Without user experience research the team would not have known about this critical roadblock to game adoption.

This San Francisco Business Times story on AnswerLab shows Founders Dan Clifford and Amy Buckner.

How successful is the business?
We’ve been very happy with the success of the business. AnswerLab is approaching its 6th anniversary. Each year, we’ve been profitable and have grown our year-over-year revenues. Our top-line revenues have already been made public since we were on the most recent Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately held companies. In 2009, our revenues were $2.7 million. Our run-rate so far this year exceeds that so we expect another year of record revenues. We often compete and win against $1 billion+ research firms. Clients that choose us are industry-leaders such as eBay, Yahoo, FedEx, Electronic Arts, ESPN, and more.

How did you fund yourself at first?
My co-founder Amy Buckner and I funded the company ourselves. The nice thing about a professional services firm is it doesn’t take much capital to get started. All you need is a couple of phones and laptops. Add a website and you’re in business.

Amy and I continue to own the business and we haven’t taken on investors. We’ve both worked at multiple companies before starting AnswerLab and saw that the demands of outside investors to hit quarterly numbers can really impact the relationship companies have with their clients. Pressuring a customer to ensure that they sure they sign your agreement before the end of the quarter does not create a trusted advisor relationship.

Card sorting studies help clients develop a site navigation structure that makes the most sense to their users.

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