The first iPhone application that I’ve been involved in creating is now available on the iTunes AppStore. This is an exciting moment for me and for Point Inside, as we bring the company out of stealth mode and go public with our product.
Point Inside maps indoor spaces. At launch, we have nearly 400 malls around the United States and Canada mapped. Not only do the sites have maps, helping you to find the nearest restroom, ATM, or the store that you’re looking for, but it includes promotions from our partner retailers.
Seth Godin has a new post up, Square One is Underrated. In it, he points out that when you discover that you are on the wrong path, speeding up is not the solution. The solution is to go back to the last point that you had the chance to find the correct path to the destination, even if that’s all the way back to square one.
This is an important point for NASA as well. They started down the path with Constellation, to build huge rockets to go to the Moon in an unsustainable way, much like we did in the 60’s. Apollo on steroids they called it. But costs escalated, making it even more unsustainable, and schedules slipped, yet they insisted on continuing down that path. Even though, if they’d followed Congressional mandates, they had a more sustainable and reliable choice in buying launches to orbit from the commercial sector.
Why is it more reliable? To start with, following the NASA approach of having only one rocket to get to orbit, when (not if) an accident happens with that rocket, you ground the fleet and lose access to space for about two years (Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia all created about a two year stand-down, give or take a bit). With the commercial fleet, there would be up to four different rides into space, on four different launchers. So while one stands down to fix it’s problems, you’ve still got other options.
I’ve been building a test framework for acceptance testing the Point Inside client API. I based the concept on Fit and Fitnesse, an open source framework for just this type of testing. Since this is for the iPhone, I used the UITableView in a NavigationController to provide a hierarchical layering. I use colored text to show status.
Gray text means the test hasn’t run.
Yellow text means the lower level tests had mixed results.
Red text means the test failed, and green text means the test passed.
The actual tests need to have a lower level view that shows specific data about the test. Pressing any test cell causes the test to execute. If you select the cell in the first or second image above, the tests below that get executed.
There’s a color issue with going back up the chain. The first image is gray because I pressed the cell in the second image. Going back to the first view, the color isn’t updating.
So there is more work, but I’m going to proceed with this. In the future, when I have some time, I’m going to work on making this an open source package for others to be able to create acceptance testing of iPhone applications.
I now have HikeSuperstition displaying trails. The problem is, the maps don’t have any data in the areas where we are putting trails, so the map looks pretty blank.
Here is an example:
I could use Google maps, but Google is all about downloading from the web, not caching on the device. Since there is no connection to the internet in much of the areas we are mapping, dynamic downloading won’t work. The trail will need to be downloaded first.
on edit: This may be the last update here for a while, as my PointInside project is starting to move, so I’ll be focusing my development time there now.
At long last, after far too much effort, I’ve gotten HikeSuperstitionMountain iPhone app to display trailheads on the map. It also rotates.
Part of this effort involved creating a sample application (SimpleSampleMap) for the route-me project. This application acted as a base to develop HikeSuperstitionMountain from. Now working on adding the ability to select the trailhead markers and open a UIWebView that displays information about the trailhead, and the trail(s) that start from that location.
I’ve been working on an iPhone app that we’re calling something creative like HikeSuperstitionMountain. This application will provide users with pre-mapped trails that they can follow on their iPhones, using Core Location to provide location via the GPS chip.
Currently I have the application using route-me, an open source mapping project designed to provide map data, currently from OpenStreetMap project. We may change to another source before submitting to the AppStore, as the Open Street Maps data does not include the wilderness area.
I am also currently showing the trailheads on the map, which you can see in the image I’ve linked to below:
In an effort to contribute to an open source project and improve my understanding and status in the iPhone development community, I’ve started working on route-me, an open source project to provide mapping capabilities for other projects to use.
I’m building a sample app so other developers will have an example that they can use to start their own application.
Megan McArdle has a great article showing the moral bankruptcy of the logic that our leaders seem to be using today.
But second of all, just as there is no way to tax a corporation, there is no way to default on a corporation. Whenever you default, you are taking money from some person: a shareholder, a creditor, an employee who loses their job when the corporation is liquidated.
And to return to the question I asked earlier: what if Felix were defaulting on you? Because he probably is. His mortgage bonds are owned by pension funds, bond funds, and of course, investment companies whose debt is in turn held by bond funds, pension funds, and insurers. If they suffer gigantic losses, they will either leave a bunch of people unprepared for various forms of financial distress, like retirement or a house fire–or the taxpayer, aka you, will bail them out.
I’m not generally an apologist for Bush or the latest incarnation of Republicrats, but this certainly proves who was unwilling to deal with the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they could have been dealt with.
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