Author Archives: SeanMcTex

Pebble First Impressions

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I was a fairly early backer of the much-publicized Pebble smart watch. After being wristwatch-free for years, I’ve been wearing mine for nearly a week now, and have some early first impressions I thought I’d share for the curious.

First off: it’s a good-looking timepiece. While the 144×168 screen resolution sounds almost absurdly low for those of us who have been spoiled by full-color retina displays, it look just fine in context. The high-contrast display technology is great, and is visible in a wide range of conditions. Being able to turn on the backlight with a quick wrist-flick is terrific, though it does make playing hide-and-seek in the dark more challenging (as my kids will attest).

The on-device software is solid and well thought-out, with a clear, usable interface a bit reminiscent of the original iPod. Scroll views show a shadow at the top or bottom if there’s more content to display. Controlling music works like a charm with the built-in music app or any others that use Apple’s media control APIs. (Combined with Pandora and Apple TV, I can control music streaming from the Internet through my home sound system from my wrist. It’s the future!)

The included watch faces are fairly varied and interesting, with the binary display being a favorite of mine, though it takes me 10 seconds to figure out the time when someone asks me. And thanks to the support for notifications, I’ve known what those incessant chirrups coming from my phone are about without having to fish it out of my pocket.

Funnily enough, my biggest beefs with the out-of-the-box experience have to do with iOS. Pebble is taking advantage of some newer features in iOS 6 that haven’t been widely used yet, and there are still some rough edges on Apple’s side of things. Notifications have to be reset whenever the Pebble and phone lose contact with each other (which includes restarting either device, using Airplane mode, rebooting your phone for a system update, etc). Additionally, when the watch talks to the phone and the Pebble app isn’t already running in the background, iOS throws up an obtrusive alert telling you that the watch is trying to talk to the phone. It then launches the Pebble app into the foreground if you give it the permission to communicate it’s asking for.

There are, however, a few knocks I can level at the Pebble itself. If one gets multiple notifications in rapid succession — for example, when the mail app finds a few new messages in your inbox — the first notification immediately gives way to the latter, with no way to rewind and see the initial information.

The battery life doesn’t seem near as long as the advertised week. I admittedly haven’t run it into the ground yet, and I’m not 100% sure I gave it a full charge, since there’s no indication of charge status when it’s plugged in*, but so far it seems to last closer to 4 days than the week the company cites. (Oops — it just expired. Looks like the 4 day figure’s about right, and the low battery warning seems to appear 12-18 hours before it gives up the ghost.)

The most egregious problem, however, is the SDK. Or more precisely, the gaping hole where it should be. As detailed on http://www.ispebblesdkshipping.com/ (a spoof of Pebble’s own http://www.ispebbleshipping.com/), the kit that would allow developers to create new apps and watch faces for the Pebble was promised first for August 2012, then by January 23, then when the watch shipped. As of today, it still hasn’t turned up, and the company has been tight-lipped about what is causing the delay.

Given that the hardware specs have actually been improved since the Kickstarter finished, my hope is that the programmers are simply hoping to deliver something higher-quality and more capable than they’d initially planned on. The lack of communication, however, is a bit worrisome since many folks who have bought one of the devices did so out of a desire to be able to develop for it.

But overall, I’m happy with this first version of the Pebble. The existing functionality seems solid, and the possibilities for future improvements will be exciting once the SDK is finally out. If the company has to choose between putting something out soon that’s half-baked, or taking longer to create something they’re really proud of, it’s clear they choose the latter — a decision I applaud.

But now I have to go charge my watch.

* UPDATE: There actually is an indicator that lets you know when the watch is fully charged, but until the Pebble folks graciously pointed out the help page, I hadn’t been able to sort out the iconography they are using.

Why is Programming Fun?

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One of the best explanations I’ve ever seen of the appeal of what I currently get to do as a profession.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

From The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks, via Federico Grilli

Back in My Day…

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…we didn’t have fancy 3D graphics! We had half-acre pixels and 8 colors and we liked it!

Today while visiting garage sales with my lovely bride, I stumbled across an October 1982 National Geographic with these ads for game consoles of the day. I was 12 when these ads were run, and remember fondly many hours whiled away with friends playing both Atari and Intellivision. (I never did much with the Odyssey², probably because I saw these ads and the “wizard” gave me nightmares.)

Intellivision Ad

In 1982, these screenshots actually looked different from each other.

Odyssey Ad

The Wizard has a Power Supply stuck to his fingers. Also, his legal department apparently lacked the acumen to get a proper "Wizard of Wor" license.

Odyssey Speech Synthesizer Ad

If the first word you typed upon getting the speech synthesizer module for the Odyssey² was "Geewizbang", it's a pretty good bet you had no friends.

1945: Our New Card Game

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As some of you already know, Liam and I are designing a card game. It’s called “1945”, and is an easy to learn, fun to play, strategic game in which each player captures territories using a combination of armed forces, subterfuge, and special abilities.

We’ve been working on it since last summer, and have been getting enthusiastic responses and excellent suggestions for improvements from the folks who have graciously tried out our rough prototypes. We’ve recently enlisted Emily to do the artwork for the game, and after having received our first set of cards from the printer (with only 10% of the final art), are pretty excited about how it’s all starting to come together.

I don’t want to spam my personal contacts whenever we reach a milestone, but if you’d like to keep up on our progress, help test it, or have any ideas for the best ways to produce and promote such a thing, we’d love to hear from you. You can keep up on our progress through:

Big thanks to everyone who has played and supported us this far. We hope to release the game by Autumn.

Kids’ Day Out: 2011(ish) Edition

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Each Summer, while the kids are out of school, I arrange a full day out with each of them. Sometimes that means taking a day off of work; on other occasions we squeeze it in on a Saturday. Regardless of when it is, it’s one of the things I look forward to a ton each year (and seems to be a highlight for the young people too).

This year, the first adventure was with Liam. Thanks to Kevin Huffaker, a friend of mine from the university who is not only an amazing polymath but also a tremendously generous guy, we were able to start our day with a SCUBA primer. Neither Liam nor I had ever been before. We both love being in the water, and found the experience utterly delightful. While the river was running low and water conditions turned cloudy pretty quickly as people upstream swam around, we had a great time learning how to control our buoyancy and seeing a bit of the river from a new vantage point.

From there, we treated Kevin to lunch at Valentino’s, Liam’s favorite pizza place in San Marcos, and then caught the then-current Harry Potter movie. A trip to the Blazer Tag center up in Austin was next, where he and I emerged 1st and 2nd in our game with 30 other people. (All those video games do pay off!) The center in Austin is one of the best arenas I’ve been to, and was a ton of fun. We finished off the day with a visit to the Nazi Pirate at Peter Pan mini golf, where I was able to salvage a bit of my honor after the thumping Liam gave me at laser tag.

Next up was my day out with Maggie. She loves nothing more than to be in the water, so Schlitterbahn has been the natural destination for us for many years. Repeatedly voted best waterpark in the country, it’s only 20 minutes away from our house, and is a much more agreeable experience than many amusement parks these days. (Free parking, bring your own picnic, and new stuff every year.) We were a bit disappointed to see that Family Blaster, a ride that uses high-powered jets of water to shoot a raft containing up to 6 people up a hill, had been retired, but we did spend a delightful day climbing on floating crocodiles, navigating our tubes down 20-minute long tube chutes, and slipping down slides. We even invented a word game while we were waiting in line that’s become a standard in-car activity for our family.

I took Abigail out next. Our first stop was Tacodeli, a vegetarian-friendly taco joint that’s both delicious and a quintessentially Austin experience. After that, we wandered Barton Creek mall for a bit, and then went to see Cowboys & Aliens, which I’d been looking forward to since seeing the first preview. Our next stop was Mozart’s, a wonderful coffee shop on the banks of Town Lake. We got tasty beverages, I introduced Abby to cannoli (one of my favorite treats), and we both pulled out guitars and played and sang together down by the water while the turtles looked on appreciatively. When our fingers tired, we moved on to Pinballz (the best arcade I’ve ever visited) and played Addams Family, Twilight Zone, and other pinball classics. Our last stop for the day was at the Alamo Drafthouse for Abby’s first Master Pancake Theater show: Twilight! She was a fan of the books, and had been disappointed by the first movie, so I figured a lampooning would be the ideal way to enjoy the second. She agreed.

In addition to the goal of simply having a grand time, I also set Abby and I the task of both taking lots of photos along the way, and picking out our favorites along the way to edit and post on Facebook as a record of our day together. Here are the 8 shots we deemed best.

Unfortunately, I had a dreadful time coordinating Emily’s and my calendars, but in March of the next year, we finally managed to find a day we both had open. After hearing of Liam’s mini-adventure, Emily was keen to try SCUBA as well, so we rounded up Kevin again and my friend Jason and set off for a larger-scale run: near the headwaters of the San Marcos River down to the whitewater course at the other end of town. Since we’d finally had some rain after a tremendous drought, the water was running clear and fast, and we had beautiful visibility as we swam under waterfalls, through valleys of endangered Texas Wild Rice, and past a variety of water creatures. Emily filled a bag with treasures she found in the water, and I reveled in the opportunity to see the river as we never had before.

After our swim, we regrouped at the house while eating big Subway sandwiches, and then Emily and I went north for her first Master Pancake Theater show: Back to the Future. The lads did a terrific job with it, and we had a great time eating, drinking, and laughing our heads off. We even got the surprise treat of getting to overhear some of a Young the Giant show as we walked past — a favorite of Emily’s that she hadn’t even known was playing that night.

I had a terrific time getting to enjoy each of our kiddos individually, and treat them to some unique experiences they all enjoyed. Thanks, squirrels, for the great time. Now, let’s get cracking and plan this year’s adventures!

Grafik Intervention

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Last night, Kathy and I stopped by a neighborhood in downtown San Marcos to see this:

The project was done by a typography class at Texas State University, and included this historical home, a neighborhood church, and an old jail. Students had researched the history of each of the structures, and then devised projected sequences that told about the history of and future plans for each structure. It was a surprisingly engaging way to learn a bit more about our fair city.

Read more details about the project here.

Hero Revisited

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A while back, I wrote a bit about Two Heroes of mine. Now, the San Marcos paper has a story about Thrine Soto, one of the people I wrote about. She’s a 93 year old woman who volunteers regularly at the food bank, and has been doing so for 30 years. Enjoy!