Journey of Pauls Barkans

Geocaching review staff recently published my geocache named “Forgotten Temple”. If you happen to be in Latvia, be sure to check out this cache. It’s hidden off from the road in an old church which is grown-in in the forest. Scarry and beautiful at the same time.

It’s been just one week after we launched iMeet and we already have a new iPhone app published on the App Store. It’s called TweetMonitor and main idea is that it allows you to monitor twitter messages (tweets) from all users across all twitter network.

Twitter proved that it’s a very fast network when it comes to information spreading but as there are so many users who tweets every day, it’s hard to follow exact information that you’re interested in. TweetMonitor solves this by allowing you to define custom search keywords that you want to monitor. It will then automatically (or manually) refresh content and indicate new tweets that matches your criteria.

Whether you’re an individual who is passionate about interesting topics, or an enterprise, that want’s to monitor it’s brand and products, we believe that TweetMonitor is a very valuable iPhone application that will give you mobile and fast access to the latest information.

Using TweetMonitor I just stumped on article about “why brands should monitor twitter“. These, among other things, are reasons why we created this app.

Here’s a text from the App Store (somewhat repeating):

TweetMonitor is a twitter client that allows you to monitor all user tweets by defining your custom search keywords. App will indicate new tweets so you don’t have to go into individual search results each time. TweetMonitor is used by individuals and corporations for information monitoring across whole twitter network.

Features:

• Simultaneously monitor new tweets for all defined searches;
• Replay to tweets using public or direct messages (requires twitter account);
• E-mail tweets to yourself or any other person;
• Save tweets for later review and action;

Get TweetMonitor on the App Store.
Price - 0.99$

Follow us on Twitter for updates on this and other our apps: http://twitter.com/MelleneApps. Below are screenshots from the app.

Alright. Today I want to tell you all about our latest iPhone App that is now available for download on the App Store. It’s called iMeet and the main idea is to see where your friends are at current time. This App updates your position and sends this information to all your accepted friends. And vice versa- you get positions of your friends.

Basic scheme how this app works (from user perspective) is somewhat like that:

• Open iMeet and register for the first time (name & e-mail are needed).
• Invite friends by providing their e-mail address.
• If your friends currently isn’t registered with iMeet, he will get an email with invite request and a link to App Store. Otherwise he will get and email + notification in the app.
• Your friend then can either accept or decline your request.
• If user accepts your invite, you both can now share your location and see each other on map.

You can change privacy setting at any time. You can share and disable position sharing at any time and with any friend(s).

As for the features, i don’t really want to retype all of them so I will just copy text from the App Store.

Description From App Store

iMeet is a tool which allows you to see you and all your friends on the map in real time. It uses iPhone’s GPS receiver and WiFi / GPRS to send positions to other friends. You can add unlimited amount of friends and see all of them on the map at once.

Imagine that you want to meet a friend in a foreign country or an unknown region. There’s no more simple way to meet with him/her than using this app. Or what about large crowded areas full with people, like outdoor music concert? It’s very simple - switch to satellite view and meet with your friend in moments. In more simple situations you can use iMeet to meet friend in the middle of a road when driving with car. Everyone will come up with a solution in different situations. iMeet is simple in usage, robust and straightforward app without information clutter.

Other app features include:

• Watch friend location updating on real-time;
• View all friends on map or choose just some of them;
• Allow or forbid any friend to see you on the map at any time;
• Show information that you are interested in at the moment - locate yourself on the map, locate individual friend or group of friends;
• Change map type from Google Maps Standard to Satellite or Hybrid;
• Send instant messages to friends in the app;
• Change friend icon’s color;
• Get information about any friend, e.g. GPS position accuracy, location information (street, address), last position update time;
• Show online as well as offline friends on a map;
• Settings and friend pairs are stored on the server so you can share your iPhone with your family and log in with different accounts with no worry about data or setting loss.

Some screenshots from the app are below.

It’s easy to start using iMeet- open the app and tap on “Register” button. There’s also a simple guide / help in the app. Just tap on the “i” button and you will be presented with more information about features and app usage.

Follow us on Twitter for updates on this and other our apps: http://twitter.com/MelleneApps

Current price: Free.
Get iMeet in App Store NOW!

I decided to publish a brief version of my CV on this site for potential clients and partners. It’s not done by all standards but I was too lazy to redo it. You can get PDF version from CV section of this site.

For now I will leave hardware part aside and concentrate on software improvements, that I think that Apple should implement in future OS versions. So here goes the list in no particular order:

• Adding bookmark on home screen quits Safari - It is very useful feature that lets users to add a bookmark on iPhone’s Home Screen, but I think that creating a bookmark should never quit browser. Period.

• Hard time replaying to SMS’s - When iPhone is in unlocked state it’s really easy to take an action on the incoming SMS (Text Message) because user is presented with two options regarding a message: “replay “and “close”.  But when the iPhone is locked then only message content is displayed on screen. After unlocking the phone SMS disappears and you have to go to Messages to make a replay. I think that it would be better if SMS stayed on screen with the same two actions available in interface.

• Safari page caching - Right now there isn’t any setting that controls page caching in Safari. I know that it isn’t big deal for US data plan users but outside US it’s a problem because in a lot of countries people are paying for consumed MB’s.

• Easier way to make call forwards - Call forwarding option is burried deep down in settings. Also, it asks you to input a phone number and doesn’t allow you to choose it from an existing contact.

• Method to cancel calls with locked phone - It’s easy to cancel incoming calls with on-screen “button” when iPhone is in unlocked state, but when iPhone is locked there really is no way around this. I understand that there is no button because you could cancel a call accidentally and showing action buttons after unlocking phone is just unhandy. Maybe second slider (the “cancel” slider besides “unlock” slider) is a way around this? Well, apparently you can cancel call by pushng the “lock” button twice. So really, no need for a slider. Thanx, jam!

• No way to search for keywords in web page (Safari) - There’s simply no “find in text” method in Safari browser. I think that overall it’s outstanding browser but can’t really imagine why such simple feature is left out.

• Coordinate displaying in Maps App - When opening coordinates from email or writing them manually in “search location” bar, Maps App shows location mark on closest road but not where real coordinates are. This is very very problematic for me. Given the fact that I regularly participate in geocaching.com and need to send/receive friend coordinates, I’m forced to use different software for that.

• Problems regarding file attachments in Mail App - You can open Photos, look for a picture and send it to email. The same is true with sound recordings. What if I’m composing an email and later decide to attach photo to it? As for now it can’t really be done. Also, you cannot add both- sound recording AND picture for the same email message. It is really annoying to compose multiple emails just to add multiple pictures or other files.

• Public file folder - I can understand reasons, why Apple restricts App access to system resources but at the same time they should make some kind of a public folder which all Apps could access. Maybe even with explicit user allowance for individual Apps in iPhone’s settings but such feature really is needed. It would save data traffic and make Apps even more useful as they are now.

These are just some of things that comes to my mind right now but I will update this post as Apple fixes these or who knows- maybe even some new will come to my mind.

Sometimes it really is so. I haven’t written here for months but I have good explanation for it. The thing is that did spend all my free time for learning Objective-C and developing my iPhone applications. And you know what - I already have two apps on the Apple’s App Store. Both are basic dictionaries, first one is “English - Latvian” and second one is “Russian - English”. Check em out on App Store if you need translation for these languages (you can find them by keyword “mellene”). I’m selling them with brand name “Mellene.com“, although the homepage is not ready yet.

So, Hopefully I will not be such a lazy person and will finally start to write more about things that I promised :)

I’m not a painting artist, but that doesn’t forbid me to draw on my iPhone from time to time. Check out this drawing I did while I was bored after writing billion lines of code :) Drawing and recording was done using BrushesApp and Brushes Viewer. There’s more information on BrushesApp website.

Today, I got my iPhone Developer Program subscription approved and so I can finally start to dig into all the additional documentation, test apps on the real device and start to sell them :) Well, probably I should learn more Cocoa Touch before that but that’s not the point.

It took me about three weeks to apply. I am outside US so I needed to fill out a form with credit card data among other things, sign it and FAX it to Apple. At the first time I filled out my credit card data wrong, so I had to FAX it again. They’re support is somewhat slow and at the first time they didn’t even notify me and probably just handled my first request as a credit card fraud or something. Everything is OK now so I hope to write some cool applications soon.

In just couple of hours I managed to install everything (iPhone SDK 3.0, iPhone OS 3.0 beta, all certificates, etc.) plus wrote a simple app that’s interacting with user input, shows some data on screen and all that runs on the real device.

Although this is my first post on this blog, this really isn’t a beginning. I have a lot of previous experience in some areas and also I’ve been writing posts already for quite some time in my native language on my other Blog but so far it’s almost never been in a serious way. I hope that this Blog will be just the opposite from that. I will do this one in english to reach out to more people and hopefully get better with my English language skills as well.

Here I will cover various topics that I’m interested in. Particularly these will be topics about technology (in general), web programming languages (like XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP) and other OOP languages like Objective-C, plus I’ll write some tips on Linux server administration, etc. I’ve fully switched to Mac platform recently (both- the computer and iPhone) so I guess that I will cover topics about that as well.

But this is just a technical side of me. I’m really not that geek. I just see how these technologies can help me solve different tasks in life. My heart belongs to photography and music so I will definitely write about these topics as well. Maybe even more than about technology.

One more thing. I wonder whether I should have called this Blog or just a website because I will not write by calendar but rather focus on quality of each individual post. Hopefully I will not abandon my old posts and will return to them and correct them when needed. On the other side, I will also write about general topics, thoughts and events in my life so I guess that you can consider this half a blog, half a website.

If you’re interested just in one topic (like photography), feel free to check out that particular category and leave the rest out. Also you can subscribe to RSS feed for my entire Blog or just one topic. There are category and category RSS links on the right site. Your RSS reader probably should automatically understand feed if you put there my full address (http://www.paulsbarkans.com/blog/) as feed. If not, there’s a link to entire blog’s feed on the very bottom of the page.

See you, Paul.