Top reasons you should NOT join to the mobile team at Pyramid Consulting

1. There are many exciting things in our activities. You may DIE if you cannot control your emotions.
2. There’re many interesting things to learn. You will be overloaded with knowledge and new things – but useful for your work & your life.
3. Your friends may envy you because you can do many wonderful & crazy things.
4. We’re NOT colleague only. We’re brothers in a family. If you’re afraid of having more brothers, don’t join us.
5. We share all things together, all troubles & happiness, both in work & life. If you’re afraid of sharing, this team is not a good choice for you.
6. All members are courage men. Dare to talk, dare to do, dare to share.
7. You cannot stand some our bad habits for relaxing at the weekend: drink & eat dog meat, play some games – may be good (or bad) for your health.
8. If you can think of more reasons NOT to join into mobile team, please share to us.

Multiple phone application framework

Multiple phone application frameworks are: frameworks/solutions that allow developers to build applications to run on multi phone devices.

Recently, there' re some companies trying to build these solutions. This may make a new trend in developing application on mobile: build once, run every where (at least on most popular mobile platform) :)

Actually, this idea is good. However, it meets some troubles:

• Mobile Platform + their SDKs are changes frequently. The multiple phones application frameworks cannot catch up with the speed of change of the platform + SDKs. Mobile developers prefer to have chance to use the latest APIs to make use of the strength of the newest platform.
• On some popular mobile platforms (Apple, Android, BlackBerry), there' re always some private APIs - means some APIs are not official public. Developers must work on the real platform & SDK to use these APIs. The multiple phones application frameworks cannot wrap these APIs into their library because it needs to be more generic to be used in a common way.

Anyway, we should wait.

You can checkout a list of some open source multiple phone application frameworks here

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

This is a book bought on Amazon. Below is a slide summary for content inside. It makes me very interesting.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

View more presentations from Marcos Garcia de la Vega.

iPhoneARKit and Point Of Interest apps on iPhone

A point of interest, or POI, is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Space Needle, or a point on Mars representing the location of the mountain, Olympus Mons.

The term is widely used in cartography, especially in electronic variants including GIS, and GPS navigation software. In this context the synonym waypoint is common.

(from wikipedia)

iPhoneARKit is a great tool for developing POI (Point Of Interest) apps on iPhone. We've just done the first demo based on this library. It's a simple application to detect POI locations in camera view and show related information (in the context of this demo - is shops with coupons)

Bee Buzz Finder from Vinh Nguyen on Vimeo.

Many business ideas comes from this, right?

Convert MTS/M2TS(AVCHD) to AVI

Yesterday, I used a Sony camera to record  some our video demos.  Unfortunately, output videos are in AHCHD format. So, I have to find a way to export them to avi or other format before putting to our R&D press.
Actually, there are many commercial softwares to do this. However, I don't like them. He he, I love things  free and open source. FFMPEG is the best one in the open source world for conversion video/audio format. Anyway, I found some bad things with FFMPEG:
+ Difficult for compilation in Windows. It was developed for best use in Linux world. To compile it in Windows, we need Cygwin or MSYS.

+ Loss documentation in practice. It takes me more than 1 hour to find the best command to convert MTS file to avi.



Finally, I compile FFMPEG successfully in Windows and my Ubuntu. I also run it successfully for my conversion need. However, let me show you some shortest ways to work with FFMPEG for conversion from MTS to AVI.

Install FFMPEG

In Ubuntu, it's very easy. Just open Synaptic package manager to find and install ffmpeg.
In windows, you need to compile ffmpeg before using. However, there a site contains some distribution binary package. You can download the final package to use in http://ffmpeg.arrozcru.org/builds/

Command to convert your MTS file to avi

ffmpeg -i your-mts-file.MTS -vcodec libxvid -b 18000k -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 -ab 320k -ar 44100 -deinterlace -s 1440x1080 your-output.avi


If you run this in Ubuntu and found the error: Unknown encoder 'libxvid', please install libavcodec-unstripped (you can find this in synaptic package manager).

To understand more about above command, you should read the ffmpeg documentation here