Surprise!  We’re actually posting a timely entry on the blog.  Check out e-Faces and Names, our latest app for the iPhone.  It’s a memory game which requires you to remember names and occupations for faces shown in the game.

e-Faces is the third app we’ve developed for our good friends at MyBrainSolutions.com.  There’s more games to come in the near future, including versions for BlackBerry.  Special thanks to Jeff Garneau for another great effort.

Check out one of our newest apps for the iPhone, e-Catch the Feeling.  It’s a health and wellness game which helps improve your mood - the goal is to quickly pop bubbles containing positive words while ignoring the negative words.  It’s surprisingly fun and gets quite challenging by the end.

e-Catch has actually been in the App Store for a couple months, but as usual we’ve been too busy with other projects to blog it.  It’s the second app we’ve developed for MyBrainSolutions.com and our first game on the iPhone.  Special thanks to lead developer Jeff Garneau for his hard work on the project.

]]> http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2010/01/22/catch-the-feeling/feed/ http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2009/11/23/breathing-theres-an-app-for-that/ http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2009/11/23/breathing-theres-an-app-for-that/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:39:08 +0000 Jeff http://takefivelabs.com/blog/?p=136

Although we released the MyCalmBeat app for iPhone over a month ago, we never got around to blogging it.   A few days ago version 1.1 was approved into the App Store.  It provides the usual bug fixes and UI improvements, and adds much-requested audio cues so you don’t need to watch the breathing bar to stay on pace with your optimal breathing rate.

If you haven’t tried it yet, MyCalmBeat is one of the many online brain health training solutions offered by MyBrainSolutions (the first to go mobile - we’re working on more).  Basically it helps you lower your stress and become more resilient to anxiety-inducing situations by training you to maximize your heart rate variability.  You can read more about the science here.

]]> http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2009/11/23/breathing-theres-an-app-for-that/feed/ http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2009/10/15/apple-showin-some-love/ http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2009/10/15/apple-showin-some-love/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:27:23 +0000 Jeff http://takefivelabs.com/blog/?p=117

Nice!  What’s Invasive is listed as a Staff Favorite in the iTunes App Store.  I guess that means we’ll have to bite our tongues the next time we get an App Store rejection.

In case you missed it, our What’s Invasive iPhone app was released to the public last week.  If you live near Los Angeles and enjoy the outdoors it’s a must-download.  Also it looks like we’ll be working on a nationwide version of  What’s Invasive, so watch for that.

It’s been a while since we’ve posted on the blog, but we’ve been really busy with a few interesting projects.  One of them, “What’s Invasive”, has just been released in the App Store after a lengthy review from Apple.  In collaboration with CENS and the Santa Monica Mountains National Reserve, we created an iPhone app that enables visitors to easily document invasive plants in the park.  The geo-tagged photos captured by users go directly to the invasive plant management group at the park so it can decide how to best handle the infestation.  The mapped data is also available to the public.  Also, check out the press our beta version got in National Geographic.

The man in action.

Congratulations to Sasank for winning the Best Paper award at the 4th International Symposium on Location and Context Awareness (LoCA) in Tokyo, Japan.  Sasank presented his recent acadmic work, “Using Context Annotated Mobility Profiles to Recruit Data Collectors in Participatory Sensing” [pdf].  Sounds like a mouthful, but it’s really quite interesting stuff.

Opened Pre showing off the Keyboard

I managed to get my hands on a Palm Pre bright and early on release day, June 6th. It was easy to pick up and the line wasn’t very long, though they seem to be selling pretty well. So now, with phone in hand, I can offer a few thoughts on some aspects of this new smart phone challenger.

First off: the problems with phone. It certainly isn’t perfect and has some serious flaws from hardware design down to software execution. Although the phone looks quite nice and sleek when you first see it, the keyboard does not have the same quality craftsmanship. It looks cheaper than the rest of the phone, feels a little flimsy, and is far too hard to slide out. Struggling to get it open is also a hassle and makes any time you need you to enter text feel like a burden. It just doesn’t slide out easily enough. While people have been complaining that the keys are too small to be used, I’m not sure I agree. It took a little getting used to, but now I’m quite happy with them and I can type fairly quickly. If it wasn’t such a hassle to open the keyboard to get to them, I wouldn’t have any problem with the typing. The other main hardware issue I had was with the cover of the micro-USB slot for charging and connecting to your computer. It’s literally impossible to open without extending the keyboard. I certainly don’t plan on opening that port too often (especially if I manage to pick up the Touchstone), but I found myself considering breaking off the piece that covers it so I didn’t have to deal with it. A minor issue, but still an annoyance.

On the software side, things are generally good, but there are a few issues. Opening up new cards seems to be a little sluggish and requires you to stare at the background waiting for an app to start up. This isn’t a huge issue when you’re opening up most apps, but when things like settings and the phone pad itself are cards in of themselves it’s rough to wait a few seconds just so you can start to type in someone’s number. Of course you can leave it open, and save yourself the boot up time, but that means less memory and faster battery drain. The other really big issue I have is with the way contacts are handled. The Messaging app built in has room to control AIM and GChat as well as your SMS and MMS messages. This is great for keeping your interactions with someone together, but as soon as you choose to sign into AIM or GChat it adds everyone on your buddy lists to your contacts. Synergy is supposed to carefully integrate this with your other contacts, but this is just really frustrating given that I don’t really want my AIM buddies in my contacts. I’d rather prefer a standalone AIM client at this point to keep my contacts clear and not have to deal with sorting through them. It’s frustrating that it assumes I want them all added, and is something I’d much rather not have to deal with.

However, this leads into what the Pre does right. Firstly, the universal search is great for quickly making a call, sending a text or emailing a contact. Just start typing in a contact’s name when you’re not inside another app and you’ll be taken straight to the contact with handy little button. Underneath their name will pop up buttons to instantly go to email, a call, or the messaging client. The card system, is also really great. This is where the Pre really shines compared to other popular smart phones. It looks very sleek and it is incredibly convenient to be able to see exactly what you have opened. There’s no wondering about what programs are running and you can easily sort through open apps, get a quick snapshot of what state they’re in, and move between them. Navigating within apps is also pretty fun. The gesture area is a great addition that lets you control things without touching the actual screen. You can move back with a small swipe, move between apps with a large swipe and bring up your quickbar with a quick swipe up. Giving so much control over your apps and being able to run apps in the background really makes the Pre stand out in the crowd. Like Android, it allows for apps to produce updates that appear neatly in the bottom corner, but it also allows for small control over the apps. Pandora and the Music Player let you have basic controls from within any app, which is an awesome addition. I can imagine plenty of developer’s taking advantage of this added functionality in great ways. This also shows off the one area where the Pre really has Apple beat. Swiping between apps with ease and having multiple things happening at once really show off the restrictions Apple has in terms of letting apps run in the background. It seems much more active and flexible, and it really is.

Cards in action

That of course brings me to my final point. Because Palm hasn’t released the SDK yet the app store is barren, with only 18 apps on the market as of its release. Hopefully when the SDK is finally available we’ll see lots of cool apps flood the marketplace, but as of now you are missing out on lots of cool apps that the Apple Store, the Android Marketplace and the BlackBerry app store give you access to. I suppose that’s the cost of early adoption, but I would’ve hoped Palm could have provided the kit early so we could see apps flooding in right from the get go. And I have to say I’m eager for the SDK to be released so we can dive and get to playing around with it.

The only thing left to add is the Pre’s greatest strength. Closing apps in WebOS is the more fun than closing apps on any other platform. Flipping cards away to the top of the screen to dispose of them is great. It will make you want to exit things just for fun. Seriously.

First, all “web” requests need to respond within 30 seconds.  So you can’t do something crazy like image processing or intense processing.  Instead, you should do your processing in the background through task queues (smart cron jobs) and have responses to web requests pre-processed.  Also, all external requests (emails, url fetch requests, etc…) need to be 1 MB or less.  This makes you strive for compression when dealing with communicating to an outside entity.  Finally, everything (processing, bandwidth, number of requests) counts towards your quota.  Of course you can pay to increase your quota, but at TakeFive, we like to be “efficient,”  so things like saving to a memory cache and then creating processes to eventually store aggregates to a database is the way to go.

Anyway when I first approached developing on the cloud, I thought I could do whatever I wanted and it would just work.  But actually it’s forcing me to be smart - which is a good thing.

A typical night out for Take Five Labs

]]> http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2009/06/08/celebrity-apprentice/feed/ http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2009/05/20/website-changes/ http://takefivelabs.com/blog/2009/05/20/website-changes/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 10:31:23 +0000 Sasank http://takefivelabs.com/blog/?p=10 We finally got around to updating our website (I blame Jeff - slacker) with some of the projects that we have been working on over the past couple of months. The first is an iPhone app that we implemented for  Veritas Prep in regards to the GMAT test. The other two are projects (GarbageWatch and Biketastic) that were developed with CENS at UCLA in regards to participatory sensing. Check them out and let us know what you think!