Hey, I’m visiting some friends in Zurich right now! I wrote this blog post before we flew out on Tuesday so if you’re seeing this it’s either because I’m completely jetlagged and didn’t have enough energy left to make another post or I couldn’t find an internet connection.

Well, okay, the latter is pretty unlikely because it’s Zurich and my friends are even geekier than I am. So I guess I must be totally jetlagged and passed out on a couch or something right now.

I just submitted my latest iPhone app, Holograms, to the iTunes store! With any luck, it’ll be available in a week or so. In the meantime, I guess I’d better start working on a demo video or something…

I’m in the home stretch on my Holograms app. I’ve got most of the features in, but I’m trying to work out a problem that’s related to scaling of images. Once I get that working, I’ll create a few example holograms for the app to ship with and then I’ll submit it to Apple for sale. Hopefully, that’ll happen this weekend..

Remember those bubble-gum cards with the red and blue pictures from Jaws 3D on the back? Okay, perhaps I’m dating myself, but those cards left a big impression on me as a kid. When my family got a PC, one of the first programs I wrote was a red and blue star field program that actually looked like it was 3D if you put on thes red and blue glasses. So naturally, I’m trying to incorporate something like that into my Holograms app. I’m not totally sure it’ll work but I’m giving it a shot…

I’m getting closer to submitting… I just implemented a rainbow type effect to tint the image. The colors shift subtly as you tilt the device. If I can get far enough along in the next few days, I’ll look into doing ad-hoc provisioning to allow for beta testing. But to be honest, provisioning is a really frustrating and time consuming process for me so I’m not making any guarantees. My priority is to try to get this app submitted as soon as possible.

Phew, I managed to get the orientation stuff working! It’s not that hard to rotate the image itself but it’s a bit trickier to get all the touch interactions and texture modifications rotated as well. It just goes to show, the hardest part is often not the part you see, but the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.

No, I’m not talking about the Saturday Night Live Shorts, I’m talking about my hologram app! I’m getting closer to submitting. Right now, I’m trying to work out some orientation code. But I also started adding a few little optional effects. This one takes the image and makes it look like it’s drawn with blue lasers. Hopefully, version 1.0 of Holograms will be ready to submit in a week.

“Help me, Meowbi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!”

Longtime readers of this blog (hi Mom!) will know that I got into a bit of a vehicular altercation recently. My motorcycle and an older gentleman’s car debated as to who should be in the intersection of Park Avenue and Emery Street at 7:30pm on Thursday, April 12. In a legal sense, I won because he had a stop sign and I did not. But in a more pragmatic sense, he won because his Cadillac weighed 10 times as much as my Kawasaki Ninja.

Sadly, the Ninja did not survive the incident. (Don’t worry, I was fine as I was thrown off the bike and met the sweet, sweet embrace of asphalt fully encased in an armored suit and helmet.)

Fortunately, the other guy’s insurance fully covered the accident. I looked around for another bike to replace it and my friend said that she could give me a really great deal on her old Honda CBR f4 because she wasn’t really riding it anymore and it needed a bit of a tune up. So now I’ve got a new bike!

One of my favoritest things ever about Japan is the Japanese bath. The idea is that you’ve got a whole room that’s tiled like a shower but it also has a bathtub in it. You wash yourself outside the tub and once you’re clean, you soak in the hot bath. It’s incredibly relaxing and combines the best aspects of a shower and a bath.

It’s always been our dream to have one so when we bought our house and had a chance to build out a basement, an ofuro room was the first thing I designed in the plans. Five years later, it’s finally ready!

I’ve made a bit more progress since last time. It seems that the problem was that I wasn’t getting the alpha value of the texture maps correctly. I found a couple web pages that talk about the problem of alpha channels with glReadPixels, but I think they’re both talking about Mac OS X and not iPhone specific Open GL. I did find one other guy that was doing iPhone stuff with glReadPixels and alpha channels but he seems to have the same problem I have.

Fortunately, in my case, it’s just a single channel stencil mask so I can just copy the red channel for the alpha channel. It’s a bit inefficient and kludgy. But hey, it works. And after spending several days on this one issue, that’s all I care about.