New blog format for the crimson cactus

When I started Crimson Cactus, I started up a blog for it. It seemed to make sense, and I could keep the company posts separate from holiday pictures and musings and whatnot that way. As its turned out, I find that I want to cross-post. That is, I want to be able to post to both of my blogs.

There are a couple of ways of doing this, but I think it just goes to show that I'm doing it wrong. What I really want is to continue posting to my personal blog, but tag those posts that are of interest to the crimson cactus, and then have my web page pick up that tag. This is exactly what I've done now, so now all of the old posts have been imported into my personal blog, and thats what you'll be seeing from now on.

For those of you that follow via RSS/Atom, The new link to use is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/brucecooper/Pqee

Fitbit review on engadget

Engadget have released a review of the fitbit networked pedometer. I remember first seeing this about 12 months ago, when it had just launched at techcrunch 50. I like the idea of the device, but it is yet another thing to carry around, and yet another thing to charge.

It makes me thing of the belt valet computers in David Marusek's Counting Heads (Thanks for the reccomendation @doctorow). One day, not too far away, we will have computers that we carry, strapped to our person (perhaps in belt form), that can handle all of the biometric sensing that we want. It will be able to count our steps, work out our heartbeat, and record everything that we hear and see for future reference.

I'm really excited about the prospect, even if it does open up a lot of privacy concerns. It will be important that we as individuals retain control of the information that is being collected. I'm pretty sure that google having access to all of my heartbeat (which is basically an EKG) information would be a bad idea. David's sequel book, Mind over Ship shows us a very good example of the mis-use of complete information on people.

Costumes from fancy dress party

Melissa and I went to a Royalty themed fancy dress party last night, so we went as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Here's a couple of photos.

Gizmodo AU running a blog theme of fitness for geeks this week

Gizmodo are running a theme of playing with balls this week, which fits right up the alley for Bleep. In the linked article, they mention heart rate monitor gadgets in particular. At least my approach will be relatively inexpensive. What a pity that Bleep isn't ready for the publication yet. I'll be following their posts with interest.

Ahh, there _are_ heart rate monitor accessories for the iPhone already

I was operating under the impression that nobody had created a heart rate monitor system for the iPhone yet. This seemed illogical to me as it is such an obvious thing to do.

As it turns out, there is one. I found it today at Smheartlink's site. It looks like a great product, but it is a lot of money to spend, especially after you have already purchased a HRM belt.

Its a bit disappointing to see this considering my app will do much the same stuff, but I still see a niche for my app, as it doesn't require you to charge and carry another device around with you, plus it will be a bit cheaper :)

Apple approves how many apps a day?!?

I saw an article on gizmodo a few minutes ago that says that apple approved almost 1400 iphone apps last friday. Even on the slow days they approve hundreds of applications.

Its massively impressive that Apple have got so many applications. It just goes to show how much of a runaway success they have on their hands. I can't help wonder though how hard it will be for anyone to find the app that they want when there are so many apps to choose from. I suppose thats why we've got app review sites popping up now, like the App store equivalent of gizmodo... Here's hoping I can get them to review my app when its finished.

In Bleep development news, I got it running on my iPhone 3G last night (rather than just the simulator) and it works okay. There are some performance problems which I think I can rectify fairly easily, and then there is just user interface tweaking to go.

Progress on Bleep

I had hoped to finish Bleep to the point where it could be submitted to Apple over the weekend.  Sadly, I've run into some problems causing the application to crash on the iPhone, even though it runs fine in the simulator.  I'm also trying to polish the user interface to make it a better experience for users.

In the mean time, I've uploaded a sneak peek video of Bleep in action.  Bear in mind that this is an early version of the software, and it is still being tweked. Have a look: