Google’s Self driving cars have been doing well. If you’ve ever wanted your own self-driving car, this is your chance. Sebastian Thrun, instructor of the Stanford AI class is opening up a new class that will teach everyone who enrolls how to program a self-driving car in seven weeks. That’s right within 7 weeks, you will learn all the algorithms, and Data structures required to make it possible.

The robotic car class is being taught alongside a CS 101 “intro to programming” course. The lectures start from very basics of programming and you will go all the way to how to make a search engine from scratch in seven weeks. The “Building a Search Engine” class is filled with awesomeness.

Programming a Robotic car is going to be a 7 weeks tutorial as well. You can start registering now to receive a notification when its ready.

This class, taught by one of the foremost experts in AI, will teach you basic methods in Artificial Intelligence, including: probabilistic inference, computer vision, machine learning, and planning, all with a focus on robotics. Extensive programming examples and assignments will apply these methods in the context of building self-driving cars. You will get a chance to visit, via video, the leading research labs in the field, and meet the scientists and engineers who are building self-driving cars at Stanford and Google.
Prerequisites: The instructor will assume solid knowledge of programming, all programming will be in Python. Knowledge of probability and linear algebra will be helpful.

Syllabus:
Week 1: Basics of probability
Car localization with particle filters
Week 2: Gaussians and continuous probability
Tracking other cars with Kalman filters
Week 3: Image Processing and Machine Learning
Finding objects in sensor data
Week 4: Planning and search
Determining where to drive with A* search
Finding optimal routes with dynamic programming
Week 5: Controls
Controlling steering and speeds with PID
Week 6: Putting it all together
Programming a self-driving car
Week 7: Final Exam
Exam testing your knowledge

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us @geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage, Google+:

Right now developing apps for Jailbroken iOS devices hasn’t been streamlined. One had to include several dependencies manually.  iOSOpenDev aims to help Tweak developers to convert the ideas into app for Cydia Store in matter of minutes.

iOSOpenDev is essentially a ‘template for tweaksters’. iOSOpenDev makes development of  Jailborken apps a breeze whether they’re based on Activator, MobileSubstrate, Notification Center or command-line. It does all the routine jobs like building debian packages (.deb files), and provides all the necessary facilities in order for you to submit your tweak into a Cydia repository: BigBoss or ModMyi repos.

Prior to iOSOpenDev, you had to do a lot of steps with Theos manually. iOSOpenDev comes packed with Xcode templates for creating jailbreak-style tweaks, including Activator listeners, command line tools, dynamic libraries, NotificationCenterwidgets, SBSettings toggles, and Mobile Substrate tweaks. It does not use ‘Theos’, however. Normally, jailbreak app developers do not use Xcode or other development tools of Apple iOS to create their packages. And since AppStore App developers use Xcode extensively, this is a golden opportunity for them to learn how to prepare packages for Cydia distribution and create tweaks for the jailbreak community.

iOSOpenDev is currently at a beta stage, but it should get better with time, of course its the first step towards Open development on iOS, way to go.

Video of a template for building SBSettings Toggle:

James is currently finalizing packaging and testing across multiple OS X installs to iron out any critical bug and ensure stability. The templates (along w/ a config for Xcode & SDK to allow such builds) will be publicly available in a few days.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us @geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage, Google+:

Such security is really consumer grade, its secure in the real world but may not be secure enough for driving Top most secret tasks like the ones Government agencies like NSA is involved with.

The National Security Agency (NSA) released the first version of their custom build of Google’s popular OS, called Security Enhanced Android. The system is designed to minimize the impact of security holes on Android. The SEAndroid project is enabling the use of SELinux in Android in order to limit the damage that can be done by flawed or malicious apps.

SEAndroid is born with robust support for:

• Per-file security labeling support for yaffs2,
• Filesystem images (yaffs2 and ext4) labeled at build time,
• Kernel permission checks controlling Binder IPC,
• Labeling of service sockets and socket files created by init,
• Labeling of device nodes created by ueventd,
• Flexible, configurable labeling of apps and app data directories,
• Userspace permission checks controlling use of the Zygote socket commands,
• Minimal port of SELinux userspace,
• SELinux support for the Android toolbox,
• Small TE policy written from scratch for Android,
• Confined domains for system services and apps,
• Use of MLS categories to isolate apps.

You can integrate SEAndroid into your own Custom ROM. First, you should make sure that you are able to successfully download, build and run the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code by following the instructions starting from http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html

Once you have successfully built and run AOSP, you can obtain a local manifest specifying the SE Android git trees from http://selinuxproject.org/~seandroid/local_manifest.xml. Copy this file to the .repo subdirectory of your AOSP clone, and then run repo sync. Your tree should now include the SE Android modifications. For further dev info, visit the official Wiki.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us @geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage, Google+:

After a sufficient amount of reverse engineering, enough understanding has been made regarding the Siri Protocol. To tap the app communication with the cloud, hackers setup a rogue DNS server that manipulates and tracks the interactions.

Siri communicates with server at port 443, to a server at 17.174.4.4 which is nothing but https://guzzoni.apple.com. The connection, obviously, is over https that uses SSL certificates to verify if the domain and the client are both authentic. Hackers managed to create custom SSL certification authority, added it to their iPhone 4S, then used it to sign their own certificate for a fake “guzzoni.apple.com”. This proved to be successful – Siri was happily sending commands to a faked HTTPS sever, which, as stated before, can be replicated again and again. Using this data, they managed to understand the data thats transmitted for every command.

Siri’s protocol is opaque. Let’s have a look at a Siri HTTP request. The request’s body is binary but headers look like this:

ACE /ace HTTP/1.0
Host: guzzoni.apple.com
User-Agent: Assistant(iPhone/iPhone4,1; iPhone OS/5.0/9A334) Ace/1.0
Content-Length: 2000000000
X-Ace-Host: 4620a9aa-88f4-4ac1-a49d-e2012910921

Facts about Siri Header :

• The request is using a custom “ACE” method, instead of a more usual GET.
• The url requested is “/ace”
• The Content-Length is nearly 2GB. Which is obviously not conforming to the HTTP standard.
• X-Ace-host is some form of GUID. After trying with several iPhone 4Ses, it seems to be tied to the actual device (pretty much like an UDID).

Siri Body payload (binary data)

When Siri binary data is looked in a hex editor, you would notice that it starts with 0xAACCEE. Oh, seems like header ! Unfortunately, nothing after that is readable coz its compressed using zlib.

To be more precise this AACCEE header in the request body is 3 bytes, but actual data payload starts after 4th byte.  Unzipping data after 4th byte yields actual data that is sent over the network.
Unzipped data still has some binary artifacts plus some human readable text in form of bplist00 i.e. data is some binary plist.

Here is the description of the payload chunks:

• Chunks starting with 0x020000xxxx are “plist” packets, xxxx being the size of the binary plist data that follows the header.
• Chunks starting with 0x030000xxxx are “ping” packets, sent by the iPhone to Siri’s servers to keep the connection alive. Here xx is the ping sequence number.
• Chunks starting with 0x040000xxxx are “pong” packets, sent by Siri’s server as a reply to ping packets. Without surprise, xx is the pong sequence number.

Deciphering the content of binary plists: Its easy, you can do it on Mac OS X with the “plutil” command-line tool. Or in ruby with the CFPropertyList gem on any platform.

How iPhone 4S talks with apple Servers:

The audio data: The iPhone 4S sends raw audio data compressed using the popular VoIP codex Speex audio.

Signature: The iPhone 4S sends identifiers everywhere. So if you want to use Siri on another device, you still need the identfier of at least one iPhone 4S. You would need one of the tools from below tool chain to extract that. But beware, Apple could blacklist an identifier.

The actual content: The protocol is actually very, very network chatty. Your iPhone sends a tons of things to Apple’s servers. And those servers reply an incredible amount of informations. For example, when you’re using text-to-speech, Apple’s server even reply a confidence score and the timestamp of each word.

Writing your own Siri-based Application for Android, iOS

You can download Applidium’s tool chain and get started with your own app that’s Siri enabled.

Update: Spire: Install Siri on iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Progressing further, we are about to yet another Web technology taking over the desktop. You can now run a full fledged OS called Carbyn in HTML5 alone. Imagine running a UI based OS running inside your Browser.

What that means is that you’ve absolutely nothing to be installed, it runs in any “modern” browser. Logging on to browser is as easy as opening a browser and pointing it to Carbyn and you’re all set. It runs well on all Tablet browsers as well: iPad, Android tablets, Paybook, HP WebOS.

All apps are straightaway built on HTML5, obviously. There’s a SDK for developing apps ont his platform and if you know how to write HTML5, writing one of this OS is no different.

Its like nothing else anyone has ever seen. We’re used to HTML5 webapps but not a HTML5 OS which can run HTML5 apps as well. When you close a Carbyn app, you’re taken back to the Carbyn homescreen. But the key is that there’s much better multi-tasking thanks to their SDK which allows different apps to talk to one another in a way that traditional web apps can’t.

Carbyn is more like Chrome OS minus the underlying browser and customize Ubuntu. Carbyn will run anywhere, just login and instantly you get access to your homescreen and your apps from anywhere: Mobile (soon), tablet, PC.

Carbyn is working hard to get what they really need to be successful: Apps. They are working with key developers to tailor apps for their platform through their own App Store.

See the video coverage from TechCrunch:

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

All these Robots specialize in their activities, some are meant for  climbing, and object interpretation, others are good on ground transport, atmosphere analysis, and even flying.

Swarmanoid  is a result of 4 years of research project coordinated by Marco Dorigo.

The main scientific objective of this research project is the design, implementation and control of a novel distributed robotic system.

The Task

The task give to Swarmanoids is to find a book lying on a shelf, above the ground, in a work area with multiple rooms. Swarmnoids distribute the tasks and parallalize activities in order to find and grab the book from the shelf.

Watch the video below:

You can grab the official white papers and publications with fields of study in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and communication here.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Edge brings a Flash-like development environment to HTML5. With timeline and direct scripting, developers can dig into HTML5 features without having to play much with the code.

Edge Features:

It is a comprehensive HTML5 Visual Editor

• Edge provides visual drawing and text tools, image importing, and a Flash-style timeline.
• Create animations of HTML content.

Eventualy, Adobe would bring more to the platform, especially on the canvas side of things. What’s coming more is the support for local storage, using which you would be able to create superb HTML5 web applications, within minutes.

This is the first HTML5 editor of this kind. Adobe sees the future, and won’t leave a chance of letting RIA web development go into another hands. Whatever, happens, consumers and developers are gain.

Watch an overview of Edge:

You can download the Edge beta right now, or just check out a few sample animations.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us @geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Oracle announced this morning that Java 7 has matured because of the hard work done by open review and extensive collaboration between Oracle engineers and members of the worldwide Java ecosystem.

“Java 7 is the release everybody has been waiting for quite a long time,” said Ben Evans of the London Java Community (LJC). Evans, who also is the LJC’s representative on the Java Standard Edition/Enterprise Edition (Java SE/EE) Executive Committee, added that Java 7 is “an enabler” that will give developers more options for building better Java applications.

Java 7 New Features

Java 7 gives the Java platform a significant facelift not just in performance benchmarks but also on bunch of new features. Below are the features, enhancements in detail:

Full feature set is available here, you also checkout other features that were included to Java 7 a while ago.

Dynamic Language Performance Boost

Java 7 gets a new InvokeDynamic feature, enhancing the support for dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python and JavaScript to run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). InvokeDynamic is responsible for making these languages trun at a much faster speeds on top of JVM.

The JVM was obviously designed for Java, and all the invocation modes are organised around Java semantics, however, low-level support and a stronger under girding for other language features has now been officially added to JVM.

API for Parallel Programming / Multicore programming

Java Development Kit (JDK) 7 also features a new API for parallel programming or building applications for multicore systems. The new Fork/Join Framework enables developers to break down problems into subtasks that can be executed in parallel across a number of processors.

New I/O optimized for different Filesystems

Java 7 adds a new I/O for working with different file systems, new networking and security features, and backward compatibility with other versions of the platform.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@taranfx on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Skype is the undisputed leader in VoIP services both in quality and security. For years, hackers had been working hard to crack the strong Encryption Skype Protocol uses to Obfuscate its voice packets.

Encryption was so good that almost no one has been able to reverse engineer it out of the numerous Skype binaries.

The developer claims that most of hard things have already been done for 1.x/3.x/4.x versions of skype arithmetic voice compression. The source code is now available along with the binaries. This is a working code for “send message to skype”. However, it is based on old skype 1.4 version protocol, which no longer compatible with the server.

Skype Downloads:
skype_part1_binaries.zip
skype_part2_ida.zip
skype_part3_source.zip

If you look carefully at the source code, you will observe that it uses strong AES and RSA encryption with public key infrastructure. You can also download it via torrent.

Checkout the discussions at hackernews.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us @geeknizeron Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

However, the new trend is to actually run Android apps on different platforms and Blackberry was the first one to Run Android apps on Playbook Blackberry tablet using Alien Dalvik. And the good news for the iPhone lovers is just around the corner, actual android apps can now be run on iPhone using In-the-box VM. However, its not as straight forward.

In order to run Android apps on iPhone, you would need a good understanding of both operating systems and nuances required to port applications from Android to Apple’s OS.

While the porting process may not be as smooth or as easy as one might hope it to be, the idea is indeed a good start. Anything that gives developers more time to code great apps instead of spending time writing the same one twice is a good thing.

In the box is a dalvik vm ported to iOS that can run any android app, for now just the basic apps. All you have to do is write your android code, convert it into dalvik executable (Dex) and then package and deploy to In-the-box on iPhone. Build the binary application, sign it and submit it to App Store.

You can watch it in action below and get started with a hello world app written in java (Android) and run on iPhone.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us @geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Qemu is popular and open source emulator that lets you virtualize nearly any OS on any other OS. Qemu has now been ported to a new platform: Browsers. Most modern browsers like Chrome 11 and Firefox 4 can run this javascript based Emulator making it possible to run an actual Linux in your browser.

Since javascript is slower than native code, one would expect slower boot times for the Linux, but it boots amazingly fast. With a very minimal download and couple of seconds, your browser window boots into an actual Linux based on commandline. Ofcourse CLI-only makes the OS snappy for executing all your shell commands.

If you aren’t excited so far, read this again: “A PC emulator written in javascript, and running solely in browser“.

Try it now

Technical details of the Javascript based Qemu (read full)

This PC emulator is written entirely in Javascript. The emulated hardware is:

• a 32 bit x86 compatible CPU
• a 8259 Programmble Interrupt Controller
• a 8254 Programmble Interrupt Timer
• a 16450 UART.

The code is written in pure Javascript using Typed Arrays which are available in recent browsers. It was tested with Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 on Linux, Window and Mac. It doesn’t work with Opera.

CPU Emulation

The code is inspired from my x86 dynamic translator present in QEMU, but there are important differences because here it is an interpreter. The exact restrictions of the emulated CPU are:

1. No FPU/MMX/SSE
2. No segment limit and right checks when accessing memory (Linux does not rely on them for memory protection, so it is not an issue. The x86 emulator of QEMU has the same restriction).
3. No CS/DS/ES/SS segment overrides. FS/GS overrides are implemented because they are needed for Thread Local Storage in Linux.
4. A few seldom used instructions are missing (BCD operations, BOUND, …).
5. No single-stepping
6. No real mode
7. No 16 bit protected mode (although most 16 bit instructions are present because they are needed to run 32 bit programs).

Most of these restrictions are easy to remove.

Linux distro & kernel

It runs 2.6.20 Linux kernel with configuration available here.

Boot

The disk image is just a ram disk image loaded at boot time. It contains a filesystem generated with Buildroot containing BusyBox. I added my toy C compiler TinyCC and my unfinished but usable emacs clone QEmacs.

Javascript Performance

PC emulator is about 2 times slower using V8 than Jaeger Monkey on 32bit desktops.

I still have to try this on mobile browsers, let me know if that works for you.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

iRobot has developed a new series of autonomous Robots called Ava that are equipped with array of sensors like 3D cameras (like Kinect), scanning laser, ultrasonic transducers, driven by omnidirectional wheels. They are powered by base hosts batteries, motors, as well as electronics and supports a telescopic mast that carries a pod containing touch ribbons, speakers, and a microphone.

iRobot Ava is based on Intel Core-based computers with a tilt capable head on top of with is basically an Android tablet. Ava is capable of roaming around by studying the ambiance, even with people walking around, it can save itself from actually hitting anyone. The onboard computer does all the computations to let it walk without trouble.

Google and iRobot have worked together and created APIs that allow Android developers to write apps — from telepresence to roaming testimonials — that control Ava wirelessly from the docked tablet. This would bring new projects which combine the power of robotics and Android devices. Its hard to talk about prices and timelines at the moment, but they are about to hit the market and developers sometime later this year. Stay tuned.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Update: Keynote Video now available (scroll to bottom)

Here’s a list of things that were announced:

1. Movie Rentals:

You can now rent and watch movies on any android device or via browser as low as $1.99. The rental is valid for 30 days and 24hours after starting the video first time. You can even download the whole movie, and watch it offline on your tablet or phone.

2. Android Honeycomb 3.1

• Full support for Google TV along with Tablets. Same UI, same apps. New Google TV PArtners: Samsung, Vizio in addition to Logitech, Sony.
• Resizable widgets on homescreen, plus other ui improvements.
• USB host mode that will let you connect any USB device with your Honeycomb device beit be  importing photos from your digital camera, or an Xbox 360 controller.
• Google’s new Movies app that will let you rent thousands of movies from the Android market, and it will be available on Google TVs as well
• New Apps: Books
• New graphical transitions, animations, more GPU powered (hardware accelerated), faster, better UI.
• Data storage encryption.

3. Google Music

• A free beta service for you to upload 20,000 songs to google’s cloud, free of cost
• Playback anywhere: Browser, any android phone, Tablet.
• Cached locally on phone/tablet.
• iTunes, Media player compatible desktop clients that syncs your playlists.
• “No wires, no painful syncing — it’s all just available instantly.”

4. Android IceCream Sandwich (Android 4.0)

• Unified for Smartphones + Tablets goodbye fragmentation
• New innovative features like face-tracking and camera focus shifting based on voice recognition.

5.  Guaranteed updates:

Manufacturers and carriers committed to making sure their Android devices receive the very latest updates. All four major US carriers (and Vodafone) as well as HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola are on board, and all will guarantee you timely upgrades to the latest version of Android for eighteen months after release, provided the hardware’s capable.

6.  Android Hardware accessory support:

• Use any external hardware/accessory with your Android device e.g. workout machine or a massage chair.
• Full sport for DIY Arduino based hardware projects using ADK.
• Several hardware accessories to be available soon.

7.  Android@Home

• Google wants to think of “every appliance in your home” as a potential accessory for your phone. this brings endless possibilities. You cna do nasty stuff like turning on and off based on calendar events, applications talking to washing machines, games automatically adjusting for mood lighting, and basically little green dudes taking care of all the menial duties in your house.
• One amazing demo was a concept, Android-powered device hub called Tungsten. Using NFC tag embedded into CD cases the device was able to detect the CD and add it to your library. Another touch and it started automatically.

Google has really taken a step further in Openness of Android, the excitement is sky high. Keynote video after a break!

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Your HTML5 webapp can be powerful enough to compete with the desktop version, but you might be limited byt eh performance advantages as your app runs in the browser, instead of native code. But good web development practices can definitely help you reach there.

Pau irish, a Google Employee, gets into details on how you can cut down the processing required for creating common things in Webapps: HTML5, CSS. He concentrates on CSS reflows, taking benefits of hardware aceclerated CSS, optimiations for Animations, and benchmarking techniques.

You can also checkout the full series of Microsoft’s presentation from MIX10 about HTML5 High-Performance best practices:

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@taranfx on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

James Gosling, previously an employee of Sun Microsystems, had left Oracle as he thought staying with the company wasn’t good for him or the industry.

Gosling announced his new job at Google “I don’t know what I’ll be working on. I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon,” he said.

Oracle’s ways evidently didn’t agree with Gosling. He called Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison “Larry, Prince of Darkness.” And, he said, “During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle.” It was definitely against the ethical limits of Sun or Gosling. Suing is the last part Sun thought about.

Google had been sued by Oracle over Java patents in Android, Gosling being a true Open source professional punched Larry Ellison’s face by joining Google. Gosling’s choice was obvious since it has the same research-intensive practices that built Sun, but only more successful. And unlike Sun, Google has managed to become famous for endorsing ‘Open’.

Over the last year, he was all on his own and now after a year he claims that “One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying ‘no’ to a bunch of other excellent possibilities.”

Outside of Oracle, Google is the no. 1 contributor for Java and Open source standards. With Gosling on the board, the internet giant is bound to make things better.

We write about Open Source, Programming, Java, Latest Tech news as they happen, get them@taranfx on Twitter or Facebook Fanpage or subscribe below:

Haptic feedback has a different history. Haptic feedback began with the introduction of the Nintendo Rumble Pak and its use in Star Fox 64 and GoldenEye.

Immersion SDK from Immersion Corporation has long provided haptic feedback technology for a variety of other applications. They have no come up with an SDK targets Android game developers. And the best part: its free to download.

The SDK is capable of making native Android OS’s interactions feel more real with right kind of triggered vibration. The SDK comes with a bunch of pre-defined haptic responses which developers can simply plug into their games, but there’s also a tool called MOTIV Studio that lets you design your very own rumbles. Checkout the feel in the video after the break:

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Android, iPhone, Tablets,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@taranfx on Twitter OR:

Adobe acknowledges this value and that’s why they have launched a product called “Wallaby” an experimental Flash-to-HTML 5 converter tool. Wallaby is a cross-platform Adobe AIR application that allows users to instantly convert Flash output (FLA files) to HTML5 via a simple drag and drop. It is available free for download.

Wallaby, which was first previewed last fall at Adobe’s Max 2010 developer conference, is a great tool.

Watch the demonstration from Adobe:

“We are making this available free on Adobe Labs as experimental technology; it’s something we hope to continue to iterate and get feedback on from customers,” said Tom Barclay, senior product manager for Flash Professional. “I’m interested in how useful this output is, what people intend to use it for, and whether this is something we should be supporting longer term in Flash Professional as another output option or publish setting.”

Since apple has always banged Adobe on flash, its actually a good tool to counter all those concerns. Now all the existing Flash apps, animations/content can be run on iOS devices like iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, without any pain.

However, not all elements from the Flash files will translate into HTML5. But users would get the benefit of the overall design and motion graphic animations. What will not get translated would be the dynamic part like blend modes, filters, audio, video, and even ActionScript.

The output from HTML5 converter tool is essentially a combination of HTML, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and CSS. The tool is mart enough to translate Vector graphics into SVG & bitmaps into JPEG files. Text can optionally be converted to SVG text, which is converted to plain text, otherwise. The Flash timeline is converted to a group of CSS animations. Scripting allows for batch processing of multiple FLA files.

To summarize:

Supported Flash Professional features: vector art and images; classic text; keyframes; MovieClips and graphics; classic, motion, and shape tweens; rollover buttons; and instance names.

Unsupported Flash Professional features: filters (except simple alpha); blend modes; dynamic masks; some TLF (Text Layout Framework) text; 3D transforms and 3D tween; audio and video; and ActionScript.

Wallaby is believed to work perfectly with Webkit based browsers: Safari, Chrome, iOS devices, Android, blacberry devices.

Adoobe says that by usign this tool you can get your baseline and get the animations, additional actionscript like features using Jquery in Dreamweaver.

In any case, this a great tool, and a great initiation from adobe which shows Adobe’s enthusiasm to develop better and richer web. Will this tool support full Flash Professional features in the future? We’ll know.

Related: Html5 Video Player that works on All Browsers, compatible with Flash

We write about Open Source, Programming, Web, Apple, iPhone, Android and latest in Tech @taranfxon Twitter or subscribe below:

Decompiling binaries for Java and other languages has been around for a long while. There are large number of tools that let you decompile app binaries back to the source code which in most cases is readable and understandable with some effort.

XdaDeveloper Brut.all has been working on a decompiler for Android apps for a while now. He had find the first workaround for enabling Google Maps Navigation outside US by actually decompiling Google maps for android. The tools is called APKTool and is obviously open source.

Method 2: Alternatively, you can use a tool called dex2jar ,which is made by a chinese student. It will translate dex to jar file. For the next step, you can use jd-gui, the source code is quite readable as dex2jar makes some optimizations.

Method 3: Another Option is to use Smali (http://code.google.com/p/smali/). It provides BAKSMALI which is a most excellent reverse-engineering tool for DEX files. The tool is made by JesusFreke, he’s famous for making popular ROMs for Android.

Method 4: Android comes with a dissambler called dexdump. The location of this tool is not intuitive, it runs on the Linux platform that hosts Android. Details here.

Lets talk about APKTool in detail since its more popular:

It is a tool for reengineering 3rd party, closed, binary Android apps. It can decode resources to nearly original form and rebuild them after making some modifications; it makes possible to debug smali code step by step. Also it makes working with app easier because of project-like files structure and automation of some repetitive tasks like building apk, etc.

It is NOT intended for piracy and other non-legal uses. It could be used for localizing, adding some features or support for custom platforms and other GOOD purposes. Just try to be fair with authors of an app, that you use and probably like.

Features:

• decoding resources to nearly original form (including resources.arsc, XMLs and 9.png files) and rebuilding them
• smali debugging: SmaliDebugging
• helping with some repetitive tasks

Pre-requisites:

• JRE 1.5+
• aapt command in PATH environment variable
• Basics of Android SDK

How to Install APKTool

Windows:

1. Download apktool-install-windows-* file
2. Download apktool-* file
3. Unpack both to your Windows directory

Linux:

1. Download apktool-install-linux-* file
2. Download apktool-* file
3. Unpack both to /usr/local/bin directory (you must have root permissions)

Mac OS X:

1. Download apktool-install-macos-* file
2. Download apktool-* file
3. Unpack both to /usr/local/bin directory (you must have root permissions)

Installation of framework files

• See FrameworkFiles

Usage:

• Open terminal/command line and type “apktool <enter>“. Then you should see usage help.

Video Tutorials:

Update: A new Tool: How to Modify Android APK file [APK Edit]
For more Android, apps, Tips n Tricks, Android, Gaming, Tech News, catch us @taranfx on Twitter.

Google has launched a new tool for Android developers that will address the fragmentation issues.  This tool is a static library called the “Android Compatibility package,” and it’s an extension of the Fragments API that was first introduced with Honeycomb.

The Fragments API plans make it easier for developers to extend their tablet applications to other devices, including those with different screen sizes and resolutions. It also addresses a number of pain points with Activities, that Google mentioned. So what does it mean for developers? It means that apps compatible with Android 1.6 or later can use fragments to create tablet-compatible user interfaces without breaking compatibility with any android device.

Fragmentation had been the buzzword scaring developers and users alike, even when it was not that big issue in practice. But with introduction of two different flavors of android: Tablet and Mobile i.e. Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) for smartphones and Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) meant for tablets. Fragmentation could have been serious, but Google handled it just before it happened. Going further, google has plans to merge these two flavors.

Various Android versions are tracked here.

Going by the facts Android 1.6 is near extinction runnign only on 6.3% of Android devices. Meanwhile, Android 2.1 (31.4%), Android 2.2 (57.6%) and the newest, Android 2.3 (0.8%) take up most of the pie chart below. The reason is obvious, Gingerbread has just been released with Google’s own Nexus S, and is expected to be seen on other newer android devices this year. However, moddign community has already made it possible to install Gingerbread on any android device.

The Android Compatibility package available via SDK Updater here.

For more Android, apps, Tips n Tricks, Android, Gaming, Tech News, catch us @taranfx on Twitter.

Peer-to-peer streaming i.e.  voice/video frames are streamed directly between peers, without any server in between is actually possible with HTML5 specification. The result is lower latency and optimal network utilization.

Checkout the demo of HTML5 P2p communications below by ericsson:

ConnectionPeer API

ConnectionPeer API is under works for establishing direct connection between two peers, which is web browsers in this case. ConnectionPeer is a very thin protocol as it shunts out signaling and connection stuff to traditional HTTP.

ConnectionPeer establishes peer-to-peer connectivity, using the following steps:

1. Each peer sends out its own reachability information using the getLocalConfiguration method.
2. Next, they add the information about the other peer (obtained typically over HTTPS from the chat server) using addRemoteConfiguration method.
3. Next, p2p connection is established, allowing for streaming data to be exchanged between the peers. When established, an onConnect event is generated and allows the application to respond with the data it wants to send out. ConnectionPeer includes methods for streaming data over the connection. These are used to add real-time voice and video streams and even HTML5 p2p file transfers.

The ConnectionPeer works almost everywhere, whether you are behind proxy, NAT or firewall. Whether you are on a desktop browser or a mobile (Android, iPhone, Blackberry), it doesn’t care, works on all WebKit browsers.

The good part of the whole story is that  IETF and W3C are standardizing this peer-to-peer support in browsers to enable real-time voice and video communication without plug-ins.

Code snippet:

Swarmplayer is one of the examples of doing HTML5 p2p video. It adds a P2P transport protocol to Firefox that allows <video src=”p2p://” > functionality. P2P transport is BitTorrent compatible.

More to come on HTML5, Open Source, Youtube, Google via @taranfx on Twitter or Facebook Fanpage.

Java and Objective C have their own programming syntactical paradigms. I’ve been a programmer for both the platforms and I understand the effort required to rewrite whole app to make it work on another platform. On one side where iPhone/iOS platform demands MVC patterns everywhere, Android revolves heavily around UI/Activities. Games in particular use similar Open GL standards, but dies to syntactical differences can be painful for porting.

How to Port iPhone/iOS Games to Android

Unity Technologies made its Unity Android software to ease the pain for developers who are porting iPhone/iOS Games to android. According to the company, the process of porting a game from iOS to Android can be as simple as changing the target platform and clicking “Build.”

I’ve been testing their Unity software for few months now, and as far as I know, using Unity Pro for Android, over 50 game developers have ported titles from iOS to Android. Some of these include Rocket Bunny, Abduction, Samurai II: Vengeance, Breakout Kings, Castle Warriors, Doodle Bowling and others.

I just wish this app was free, but its not. Unity software is free but the Android add-on costs $400. Unity Pro goes upto $1500. Checkout about their licenses over here.

For those who heard the name “Unity Technologies” for the first time, they are quiet old and currently have over 400,000 registered users  including major brands and indies, students and hobbyist developers, too that use them for building games for the Web, mobile and consoles as well as to create other interactive 3D content including training simulations and medical and architectural visualizations.

Unity 3D game demo:

Getting started guided video:

Unity Features:

Integrated Editor — Users can deploy a single project to multiple platforms, including Android, using a one-click solution that just works. Porting a game from iOS to Android can be as simple as changing the target platform and clicking “Build.”

Support for upcoming Android devices, including Tegra Tablets and the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY Smartphone — Users can be among the first to benefit from releasing games on the exciting range of Android-based gaming platforms.

Optimized Graphics Pipeline for OpenGL ES 2.0 — Unity Technologies has been working directly with hardware manufacturers such as NVIDIA and Qualcomm to get every last bit of performance out of Android so that users can create stunning games without worrying about the subtle difference between devices.

Android Remote — Developers can use their actual Android phone as an input device to view and test their game directly within the authoring tool.

You can download the Unity SDK from here.

Know a better porting technique? Tip us @taranfx. We’ll be happy to include it.

Related: How To Develop iPhone Apps on Windows

For more Android, Programming, Open source, Windows, Mac OS, Tech Guides and Tech News catch us on Twitter @taranfx or subscribe below:

HTML5 is the most beautiful that that happened to the web. HTML 5 would eventually make webapps powerful and as capable as native apps, with Chrome’s Native client.

HTML5 Client-side Local Storage provides a great solution for database storage on the client side. There are some other interesting things that can  be done on the client side.

Improving site performance by caching in HTML5 Client storage

By intelligently storing web page CSS, Javascript files or Images locally, you can avail benefit of reduced network and server usage, resulting in page loading time improvements.

The HTML5 localStorage provides a basic client-side key-value database, storing only String objects, which does fine for Javascript and CSS, however it would not store binary data like Images.

The first step to achieve this is to encode binary image data into base64 ascii. Using OpinionatedGeek, you can base 64 encode your images. Once done, you would have to implement the Javascript and localStorage API to read & write your Images from the local client:

source: developerWorks
<script>
var hero;
if ( localStorage.getItem(‘heroImg’)) {
hero = localStorage.getItem(‘heroImg’);
}
else {
hero = ‘/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAgAAZABkAAD/7    /…/    6p+3dIR//9k=’;
localStorage.setItem(‘heroImg’,hero);
}
document.getElementById(“hero-graphic”).src=’data:image/png;base64,’ + hero;
</script>

The corresponding HTML Image element:

<img id=”hero-graphic” alt=”Blog Hero Image” src=”" />

The caching in HTML5 local client storage is way more effective than browser’s caching.

However, through the implementation of HTML5 Local Storage, the browser now provides a mechanism to permanently store large chunks of data, while giving server side applications control and intelligence over the data store itself.

The possibilities of speeding webapps are just endless with this style of local storage for web components. You can save swf, css, js, anything that can be heavy for your website.

Refer toHTML5 localStorage API, visit the W3C specification page for Web Storage.

Download complete HTML of this example: HTML 5 Image caching.

p.s. there are certain Vulnerabilites in HTML 5 implementation with certain browser, watchout!

More to come on HTML5, Open Source, Youtube, Google via @taranfx on Twitter or Facebook Fanpage.

At this early stage, Gingerbread-x86 project is fully compilable and it just works. Gingerbread-x86 runs on your PC using a Virtualization of Qemu, just like Virtualbox or Vmware.

You can get started on a Linux or a Mac by checking out the source code from GIT repo using the following commands:

 $ repo init-u git://git.android-x86.org/manifest.git-b gingerbread-x86
 $ repo sync

SourceForge mirror:

 $ repo init-u git://android-x86.git.sf.net/gitroot/android-x86/manifest.git-b gingerbread-x86
 $ repo sync

Features in Gingerbread-x86:

• Gingerbread-x86 will use kernel 2.6.37.
• Sound and Wifi.
• Ethernet and mouse inputs are buggy

Note from the developer: In order to reduce the revised rate, I will move a number of common files device / common / directory, including the keymaps and firmware. If you want to join apk, can be placed on device / common / app / directory, build system will automatically add it to iso file.

You need 64bit OS with Java 1.6

Note to the changes of build system:

* AOSP has merged Intel’s generic_x86 target. But it sucks,
and conflicts with our efforts. Anyway, I’ve tried to minimize
the conflicts, and move common files like firmwares and keymaps
to device/common/.

* You may also put prebuilt apks in device/common/app/.
They will be included in the iso_img or usb_img automatically.

* Wifi is on by default. To disable it in your target, set
BOARD_WPA_SUPPLICANT_DRIVER :=

* Touchscreen is on by default. To disable it, set
BOARD_USES_TSLIB := false

* Gingerbread uses ext4 as the filesystem for /system.
If you create a customized kernel config, make sure
you have set CONFIG_EXT4_FS=y

NOTE: In case you are not a developer or donot understand any of this, behold, I`ll prepare a new tutorial for non-geeks in the near Future. You can follow our updates on twitter @taranfx or Facebook page.

We write about Android, Apple, iPhone, iPad, Android, Open Sourceand latest in Tech @taranfx (Twitter) or subscribe below:

What this means that development and QA have finished all the planned feature and test development work in the release. Up next, they will be testing and bug fixing on all supported JDK 7 platforms. This is a major step towards JDK 7 General Availability (GA).

Java 7 has been delayed several times, as per the last schedule, it was suppose to go FC on 12/16.

The FC milestone allows for exceptions to be integrated later. Such new features would come from updated JAXP/JAXB/JAX-WS and integration of the enhanced JMX agent from JRockit. However, these won’t affect the current Roadmap.

However, the factor that can delay JDK7 further would be introduction of modifications in JSRs which are controlled by Expert Groups for the JSRs 203, 292, 334, 336.

Related: Java 7 What`s New, Performance Benchmark 1.5 1.6 1.7

Java JDK 7 Features:

Features are listed in order, more or less, from lowest to highest in the overall JDK  software stack.

• vm – JSR 292: Support for dynamically-typed languages (InvokeDynamic), Strict class-file checking [NEW]
• lang – JSR 334: Small language enhancements (Project Coin)
• core – Upgrade class-loader architecture , Method to close a URLClassLoader, Concurrency and collections updates (jsr166y)
• i18n – Unicode 6.0, Locale enhancement, Separate user locale and user-interface locale
• ionet – JSR 203: More new I/O APIs for the Java platform (NIO.2) , NIO.2 filesystem provider for zip/jar archives, SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol), SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol), Use the Windows Vista IPv6 stack, TLS 1.2
• sec – Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC)
• jdbc – JDBC 4.1
• client – XRender pipeline for Java 2D, Create new platform APIs for 6u10 graphics features, Nimbus look-and-feel for Swing, Swing JLayer component
• web – Update the XML stack
• mgmt – Enhanced JMX Agent and MBeans [NEW]

For Latest Tech updates in Open Source, Programming, Java, Tech News find us on Twitter @taranfx or subscribe below: