One More Tap » Apps

Screencasting Using Display Recorder for iPhone, iPad or iPod touch [Jailbreak Only]

xcool — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 02:49:31 +0000

True story: I finally did it and jailbroken one of my iOS devices. The victim happens to be my faithful first-generation iPad. I did it simply because I wanted to be able to do screencasting on my device.

You see, I have always been a fan of Street Fighter. I downloaded both Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter IV Volt the moment it was released. If you want a fighting game for your iOS device, the Street Fighter series is the one to get.

With the debut of Street Fighter IV Volt, online multiplayer became possible. I’ve spent countless hours before bed playing with people from all over the world. One thing I loved about the game is the ability to save replays of your favorite matches. Some of these replays were epic moments during game play. I hit the maximum amount of 20 replays quickly enough that I find it difficult to let go most of these replays.

At first, I thought of using a digital camera to record the screen while the replay plays. Not a very good idea. Truth be told, I’d even tried using my iPhone 4 to record the game from my iPhone 3GS. I’m a person who looks for perfection and has an eye for detail, and both options created videos that were lousy in quality or simply mediocre.

I did some research and found Display Recorder by famed jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich fitting my needs. There are other solutions out there, but Display Recorder gets the most attention. However, nothing’s perfect in this world, and so is Display Recorder. It does screencasting perfectly, but it doesn’t record any audio.

No worries there. We can always improvise. And I’ll tell you how in a while.

So, I set my sights on jailbreaking my iPad since its not my day-to-day device. I’m not going to detail the process of jailbreaking here, simply because jailbreaking is not the focus of this site and you can easily find hundreds if not thousands of articles on the internet regarding jailbreaking with a simple search on Google.

Once the iPad has been successfully jailbroken, I downloaded Display Recorder after paying the small fee of just $4.99.

Before you start screencasting using your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, it’s a great idea to check out Display Recorder’s settings. The default settings are okay, but I’d change it anyways. Display Recorder’s settings are available under the Settings app. Refer to the attached screenshot if you’d like to copy my settings. Here’s the tricky part. The framerate is set using a slider, but there’s no indication of what value is being set. It defaults to 20 frames per second (fps) but I thought I’d set mine to 24 fps. This value is stored in a file located at /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.booleanmagic.displayrecorder.plist. Look for DRFramesPerSecond and change the value to 24.

By default, Display Recorder can be activated by pressing and holding the Sleep button. A prompt will appear to confirm if you want to start recording. Feel free to try recording some screencasts.

Earlier, I mentioned about improvising on Display Recorder’s inability to record audio. My Unibody MacBook Pro came with an audio jack that functions as both audio in and out. What I did was to connect one end of an auxiliary cable into my iPad’s audio jack, and the other into my MacBook Pro’s audio in jack. Here’s a selection of auxiliary cables on Amazon if you need one to get one for yourself. Next, I launch QuickTime Player and voila! Just be sure that the volume from your iPad is not set to too soft, otherwise you’ll have a hard time later.

Now that I have everything setup accordingly, I am ready to record screencasts on my iPad. For Street Fighter IV Volt’s replays, I recorded the replays from start til end. At the same time, audio from the iPad is routed to my MacBook Pro and recorded as well. I end up having two streams of recording on my computer. One for audio and the other being the video.

It’s a matter of dubbing them and synchronizing the audio using any video editing software that you have. Mac users like myself may want to use iMovie that came pre-installed. I’m not a Windows user, but I heard that Windows Movie Maker fits the bill.

Display Recorder isn’t all perfect, as I’ve mentioned above. During my recording sessions, I observed lags and some flickering. But the resulting video came out okay with a little bit of lag, but minus those flickering. I’m perfectly fine with this, since it’s tonnes better than recording by holding another camera or iPhone.

What do you do with the video that you recorded? Well, I uploaded mine onto YouTube, of course!

iOS 4 Multitasking and Your Battery Life

xcool — Wed, 25 May 2011 06:59:57 +0000

I read David Pogue‘s latest article in the NYTimes regarding extending your battery life with a lot of interest. There are some mistakes in the article, particularly on how one can actually prevent apps from staying in the background by killing them – Pogue has requested the NYTimes people to amend his article.

What got me more interested was the fact that quite a lot of people don’t really understand how multitasking on iOS 4 works. One of the main reasons was the way Apple (and most likely Steve Jobs) dictated how multitasking should work on their mobile operating system.

Thinking differently, Apple thought that their multitasking implementation would help a lot in saving battery life. To a certain extent, they did.

iOS 4 Multitasking

Multitasking on iOS 4 is a little different compared to what every one of us understands it. The truth is, most apps that are compatible with iOS 4 goes into a suspended mode as soon as you exit the app by pressing the Home button. There are however, some apps that simply gets killed when you exit – really. Developers are given the option whether to enable multitasking for their app or not.

Yoda: there is another.

Yes, there is an additional category of apps that remains running in the background when the users quit. Some example of apps in this category include those that plays music in the background like Pandora, some VoIP-based apps like Skype and apps that require constant usage of the GPS radio. These are apps that will drain your battery, per se.

Obi-Wan: So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view.

Certain iOS 4 compatible apps that go into a suspended mode, don’t really get suspended until 10 minutes later. Apple gave developers a grace period of exactly 10 minutes to complete whatever task that the app was actually doing. For instance, let’s say you are downloading a file in GoodReader (boy, I love this app a lot!). While the file downloads, you get an incoming phone call. You decide that the call is important so you picked it up. Moments later, you end the phone call and return to GoodReader. Your file may have been downloaded completely. GoodReader has just spent the 10 minute grace period to complete its task of downloading your file before telling the operating system that it is okay to put it (GoodReader) into suspended mode.

What happens if Good Reader didn’t actually finish downloading the file after the 10 minutes grace period is over? In this case, the app would have to give up the task and inform iOS that it is okay to be suspended. Failing to do so will result in the app getting killed by the iOS watchdog.

AppSwitch - Processes List

Apple did a great job with the way multitasking is handled. The implementation of their “multitasking bar” was a little flawed though. It is basically a list of “recently used apps” instead of “what’s still running” in the background. You don’t actually see what apps are really running in the background unless you dig further into iOS.

That’s where the idea of my recently released app, AppSwitch came about. The app was born out of the need to see what apps runs in the background, versus which doesn’t. Before AppSwitch, there were already a lot of apps that display a list of processes on your device. But I thought I could bring AppSwitch a level further.

A few months later, AppSwitch was born. And while it took a few weeks of “fingers and toe-crossed” moment hoping that it won’t get rejected, the app finally went thru Apple’s strict approval process.

iStat - Processes List

AppSwitch identifies and displays a friendly list of apps that runs in the background. Compare this to the usual processes listing app that simply gives a list of weird Unix-like names. AppSwitch can do this because of its own internal database of identified apps, all thanks to feedback from users and developers alike.

I tend to use AppSwitch to see which app remains running in the background, and decide if I should kill it from the Recently Used List. This has helped me save battery life by allowing only apps that I really need to run in the background and preventing others from running at all once I quit the app.

I’d have to say that we do get a lot of request from users asking to add a “kill” button into AppSwitch. Unfortunately, that will never be allowed by Apple.

You may be asking why would I want an app to see what other apps are running. Well, truth is, AppSwitch has its novelty and it’s other features like the Console can be helpful in troubleshooting an app. You can still kill apps from the Recently Used List.

On another note, you may also want to check out this article that I wrote many moons ago on how I actually maintain the long-life of all my battery-powered devices.

Discounts Galore – Second Annual New Year’s App Blowout!

xcool — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 13:14:25 +0000

Happy New Year folks! May you have a blessed new year and new decade! Well, what is January 1st without any gifts or celebration?

A group of independent iPhone developers have banded together to bring the world a little bit of holiday cheer. Apps have been heavily discounted as a gift to all iPhone and iPod touch users! These applications will be discounted for at least 48 hours from December 31st 2009 to January 1st 2010.

Here’s the list of apps on sale:

Twilight Golf, $1.99 (was $2.99)
Crayon Ball, $1.99 (was $2.99)
Eyegore’s Eye Blast, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Pinch ‘n Pop!, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Pollywog, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Smiles Zen, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Smiles, $1.99 (was $2.99)
Train Conductor, $1.99 (was $3.99)
iTweetReply, $0.99 (was $1.99)
CatTaTa, $0.99 (was $1.99)
RocketFuse, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Rail Adventures, $0.99 (was $1.99)
SpaceDuel, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Ringo, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Screw the Dealer Pro, $0.99 (was $1.99)
CashMachine, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Outnumbered, FREE (was $0.99)
iHurt, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Dragon Eye, FREE (was $0.99)
iType2Go Pro, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Tap-Fu, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Rogueship, $1.99 (was $2.99)
Hi, How Are You, $0.99 (was $1.99)
3D Wizard Wand, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Sword of Fargoal, $2.99 (was $4.99)
MatchTunes, $0.99 (was $2.99)
Volcano Planet, FREE (was $0.99)
AquaWars, FREE (was $0.99)
Trace It, $0.99 (was $1.99)
Battle for Wesnoth, $1.99 (was $4.99)

Go ahead, launch iTunes on your device or computer and start shopping away! http://www.newyearappblowout.com

BattPowr Pro – Accurate Battery App

xcool — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:18:18 +0000

Wondering how much battery life your iPhone or iPod touch has?

BattPowr Pro shows you the current percentage of battery life left on your device. Quickly view your remaining charge thru the large visual indicators.

BattPowr Pro also checks your device type and calculates the remaining hours and minutes for each different use, including: audio playback, video playback, web browsing on Wi-Fi, EDGE and 3G, talk time on both 2G and 3G networks, 2D and 3D gameplay as well as standby and charging times.

Features:

accurate information on remaining battery time
checks device type before estimating remaining time
beautifully designed interface
large visual indicators
uncluttered design, scroll to view more readings
battery image ANIMATES while device is charging
Always On mode when charging, see your device charge itself
toggle between different remaining time displays
option to set default remaining time display
shake device to refresh display

BattPowr Pro by XCool Apps has been updated a few times since release, adding new features and skins as well as bug fixes. BattPowr Pro supports ALL iPhones and iPod touch models, including iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3G. Recently added is the full charge alarm that lets you know when your device is fully charged.

Don’t just settle for the usual battery app. BattPowr Pro adds more fun in charging your iPhone/iPod touch with an animated battery! BattPowr Pro’s full charge alarm is the best in the entire App Store! Select and customize your desired charge alarm. There are 14 different alerts to choose from!

Check out BattPowr Pro from the iTunes App Store for only $1.99. You may also get BattPowr Free for $0.00 to try out some of the exclusive features, then upgrade to BattPowr Pro. Either way, BattPowr is a great addition to your arsenal of tools for your iPhone or iPod touch.

BattPowr Pro [iTunes link]
BattPowr Free [iTunes link]
XCool Apps [link]

Review: Quicksense

xcool — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:18:00 +0000

Safari mobile on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch does wonders when it comes to browsing the web. Aside to the lack of Flash support, Safari mobile basically has no peers when it comes to doing what it does best.

At times however, native apps does better than logging in to a web interface. This is true when it comes to applications like Google’s AdSense program. Quicksense tries to fill the gap left open by our folks over at Google.

Fast and easy-to-use, Quicksense makes getting up-to-date information on your Google AdSense earnings as easy as launching the application. Upon launch, the app displays the most critical details first – your current earnings. Further good-to-have info, like earnings from the day before, the current week and month are immediately viewable as well. Also present in this same view are advanced details like the number of impressions, clicks as well as your current eCPM, which stands for “effective cost per thousand impressions”.

If you want further details of your daily earnings, Quicksense delivers. Each row, when tapped, displays a detailed channel earnings. Useful when keeping track on ad placement/channel performance. Quicksense also makes it easy to see a complete day-by-day history of your AdSense earnings. You can even load your entire history, way back until the day when your first opened your AdSense account.

Following our geeky review of iAdSense and Analytics App, we used the same procedure to check on what’s going on behind the scenes when Quicksense is running. As of this review, it is safe to say that Quicksense only sends your data over to Google’s servers. We did not find any calls to other servers beyond that.

If you run a blog or have a web site with Google AdSense ads running, Quicksense may be the right solution for your on-the-go tracking of your earnings. There are a few downsides at the moment. One thing I really like to see is the ability to password protect the application. Useful if you happen to have peers that like to borrow your iPhone or iPod touch and play around. You wouldn’t want them to see how rich (or otherwise) you are. Aside to that, I’d love to see earnings in my local currency, automatically converted from the US dollar that is standard display in AdSense.

Quicksense is available now from the iTunes Store at only $3.99 and is compatible with both the iPhone or iPod touch. I’d say its money worth spending if you constantly need to check your AdSense earnings. iPhone users with limited data plans will love to know that the app actually helps in terms of data usage since you’ll not need to load the entire AdSense web page over and over again.

Rating: 3.5/5.0 Taps

App Data
App Name: Quicksense v1.0.1 | Developer: Supercritical Flow | Purchase via: iTunes App Store @ $3.99 | Released: Aug 11, 2009 | Reviewed on: iPod touch v3.0

One More Tap » Apps

Screencasting Using Display Recorder for iPhone, iPad or iPod touch [Jailbreak Only]

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iOS 4 Multitasking and Your Battery Life

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Discounts Galore – Second Annual New Year’s App Blowout!

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BattPowr Pro – Accurate Battery App

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