My Birthday 2012

I happened to be in Gurgaon-Noida this birthday. Birthday started with Shubham's wishes at his apartment followed by Parul's SMS. Thanks Shubham for the wonderful Camera Lens Cup which decorates my work table now. The evening was spent with Manu at Gravity restaurant whit live ghazals. This was followed by the movie, Houseful 2. The youtube video below has one of the ghazals requested by Manu.

 

Another interesting thing which happened was that I got many automated birthday wishes; the following screenshots tell the story. Apart from these, Kingfisher was generous enough to cred 500 miles to my KingClub account.

Blog hits 10,000 visitors

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Destination Goa

Mummy and Papa were going to see off Chhotu at Delhi airport on Jan 17th. Hence it was unanimously decided that they would fly to Goa from Delhi for a 4 day vacation. I too joined them in Goa. It was an amazing trip. Goa lived upto its expectation - picturesque and serene. 18th and 19th we hired a cab to take us around the place. The beaches were undoubtedly one of the best I have ever seen. Coconut trees hanging on the roads and foreigners strolling in every corner, it is a wonderful location to spend a peaceful vacation.

19th evening we left for Mumbai. It was a bit uncomfortable night journey on the ever-swaying bus. On 20th, we went for Mumbai darshan bus tour which was fun. The guide showed us all the major beaches, film stars' bungalows including Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Rajesh Khanna and Amitab Bachchan.

On 22nd we reached Shirdi. This is small town in Maharashtra which has witnessed incredible growth rate in the past couple of years. The Sai temple, market and food places were very clean and well kept. 

Buffer Labs becomes iOS developer

February 10th, I got a mail saying "Thank You for Joining an Apple Developer Program". Through a simple and sweet application process, Buffer Labs got enrolled into Apple developer program for an year.  It required us to send two faxes to Apple office in California, which were easily done through a free fax site. With this done, we got access to iOS 5.1 beta which I immediately installed on my iPhone 4s. This moment marked the iPhone4S become fully functional/ carrier compliant etc.

Since the day I bought it (by exchanging my old iPhone4), there has been serious issues with the carrier settings. Apple had decided to do away with the turn off 3G button. The phone used to stay on the 3G network for calls as well, which was not compatible with Airtel and Idea (It somehow worked on BSNL though) and hence whenever you tried to call someone, it would take 1 minute before you connect. Receiving calls and message was not possible at all. After this update, the phone can actually make calls. The phone is actually glistening white and beautiful and as remarked by Shubham "almost like a jewel". Slightly washed out theme of the OS adds to the beauty. Siri is a disappointment though as it doesn't understand half the time in Indian context. The speed however is amazing fast and 8 MP camera with face recognition and video stabilization is amazing. See the picture below :

Now it's time for some app development. Since the license allows to test the app on the phone, I was excited again to work on my JoPlanner app. Within two days, and with help from Stackoverflow, the app is almost near completion. I never expected iOS programming to be so fast and simple. I had always looked at ObjectiveC as unusually complex language but iOS api adds unprecedented power to it. The only place where I had to really read long documentation and take Shubham's help was when I got stuck not knowing how to pass data from a child class to parent class. Finally, I used custom Delegates and Protocols as described in following links :

http://tiptopcode.blogspot.in/

http://www.theappcodeblog.com/2011/04/15/passing-data-between-views-tutorial-using-a-protocol-delegate-in-your-iphone-app/

I have also been quite excited about designing some icons for supplementary apps :

Do more with your iPad

Came across two amazing apps for iPad which have filled the gap I was looking for and taken my iPad experience to a new level. The first one being Blogsy- the blogging app. Unlike its counterparts, it offers rich viewing along with raw HTML. Also, adding pictures, videos just got easy with it. Within two clicks you can select the source of media and the location to store it. It is very easy to drag and position the image on the screen.

You can add multiple accounts, create local copies of the posts etc. But the great thing about the app is the easy access to your blog and editing comfort.

The second app is the web albums. It is a Picasa web album viewer, uploader and downloader. And what a UI, I am overwhelmed with the work these guys have done. They have replicated the pictures app on the iPad along with the pinch to go back, swipe to next gestures. Click on the photo and you can see all the camera EXIF data. Add captions to the photos, upload new ones, even move pictures between your web albums - wow! It even gives you option to cache entire albums locally, and adjust the cache limit as per your wish.

While still amazed with the above two apps, I came across a photo editing app - Photogene for iPad. It features more than 2 dozens of editing tools which are very effective. This app definitely has the capability to shift the photo editing platform from laptop to iPad.