Free Soft

Personally, I am very proud of iMatrix success. It is very specific product with very narrow niche on a market but still has great feedback from useres worldwide!
Today, I would like to give you some figures behind the project.
As you could notice, I did not update application long time. Most inportant reason is, of couse, I was busy porting application to official platform based on iPhone SDK. Second reason is that I wanted to see real usage of iMatrix, not a big splashes after each update and presence in "Recent Packages" in Installer.app ...
Now just figures:

1. Number of registered installations is more than 310'000. I call installation as "registered", if user installed application and performed some activity in application like registration, activation or 2D code recognition. This number is based on unique iphones on those application is installed. Please note, I do not collect IMEI because I take care about privacy of my users. Instead, I use hash function based on IMEI to generete unique identifier of mobile phone.

2. 85'000 users used application at least two-three times for scaning iMatrix codes.

3. More than 15'000 users use iMatrix application frequently. Yes, it is 5% from registered installations and I am sure it is a lot taking into account specific area for application.

4. About 70% of the users are from USA. 25% - Europe and the rest is for Russia, China and Brazil.

5. At best days, I have about 10.000 unique visitors on iMatrix site with average about 500.

Well, now I need your comments :))

Tagi: narrow niche, th number, e care, secd, reas, sashes, figures 1, phe, imatrix, hash, bil, three times, ing, russia, presence, statistics, china, europe

The page http://www.hackthatphone.com/112/iphone_information_1.html is monitored for updates. There are no changes detected since 01/01/08 23:23:26.

Tagi: page hack, iphe, amp

Tagi: th project, e care, exchange support, iphe, phe, itunes, magda, crypto, 3g, lena, mms, photo courtesy, few days, amp, proposal

Mashup Camp winner helps you make wise movie rental decisions

Never rent a bad movie again. I created iMoveMash.com after renting one bad movie too many at the local supermarket's DVD rental kiosk. The free-wifi sign near that kiosk and my long time interest in mobile applications sparked an idea to help movie lovers make better rental decisions.

The resulting mobile web application integrates 7 data sources, including DVDPlay's kiosk content, Blockbuster's latest movies, IMDB movie ratings, Kids-In-Mind movie ratings, YouTube, Yahoo Movies, and Google Maps.

iMovieMash lists the kiosk's or Blockbuster's new movies in descending IMDB movie rating order (best movie first). Each movie I list is also a link to Yahoo Movies and search results from YouTube's API. The YouTube search query is biased in a way that is likely to return trailers or videos related to the movie itself. When clicked, the YouTube results launch the native YouTube application in the iPhone or iTouch.

iMovieMash took 2nd place at Mashup Camp 6, where I demo-ed the application dozens of times in 5 minute "speed geeking" sessions. That was a good bit of fun, and re-enforced the concept that successful products have a simple message, solve a real problem, and look good.

The application was developed with Perl for the backend and the IUI iPhone framework for the front end. It looks best on the iPhone or iTouch, but runs fine on a Blackberry or any web browser. Just goto http://imoviemash.com.

Tagi: google maps, kids in mind movie ratings, kids in mind, iphe, youtube, google, minute speed, bit of fun, camp 6, time interest, itouch, geeking, blockbuster, iphone, mobile web, mashup camp, search query, data sources, kiosk, backend

We've made some progress on the USB gadget driver for Linux, and we're now running a generic serial gadget for communication. This implementation is important because USB is now a lot less laggy and things like ethernet over USB, etc., can eventually be supported, easing access.

We've also got pretty far with porting the NAND driver to Linux. Most of the read support is now there, and we've isolated the routines in the iPhone kernel where the raw hardware write occurs. CPICH and c1de0x are working on reversing it. Hopefully, it will be analogous enough to reads that it won't take a huge amount of time to work out.

This is different from reversing their FTL, however, which is a complicated slew of data structures, merge buffers and other exotic algorithms that take care of evenly distributing writes throughout the device and also making writes take less time.

I think reversing all of that would take too much time and effort. Instead, my proposal is to just reverse the hardware NAND writes. Instead of using a partition, we would have a loop-mounted root filesystem (similar to how Wubi is setup), with the root filesystem being a file on the Media partition. Since there's a non-empty file at that location, the FTL system, whatever it is, must create a one-to-one mapping from logical sectors to physical NAND pages. We can already read the mapping it creates (we have already reversed the read-side FTL code), and so all we have to do to alter the data is to write to the same pages we would've read from. Of course, this means that wear-leveling and bad block handling is not performed. However, if we use a filesystem that's aware of bad blocks and can wear-level (YAFFS or JFFS2), then it amounts to the same thing. The wear-leveling would then take place over the particular physical pages belonging to the rootfs image, rather than the entirety of the NAND. This would make the physical pages belonging to the rootfs image wear out a little faster than the rest of the NAND, but the actual effect of this should be inconsequential.

The additional benefit of this setup is that there's no repartitioning required, so setup is cinch. See this wiki document for specific proposed implementation details.

Tagi: raw hardware, e care, bad blocks, locati, ftl, data structures, slew, gadget, amount of time, algorithms, kernel, sectors, ace, yaffs, proposal, benefit, linux