XLabz Technologies is pleased to announce the release of HealthTracker PRO, a new iPhone application which helps users track their Blood Sugar, Blood Pressure and Weight all within a single application. The app gives indications on the users health condition, auto computes BMI and MAP and allows to send their health reports to the doctor – all within the app. HealthTracker PRO is designed for users who would like to constantly keep a tab on their health and thus improve it.

HealthTracker PRO is a comprehensive and complete health tracking application which helps the user to keep track of all the three common health problems which can be tracked at home:

• Blood Sugar
• Blood Pressure – Systolic, Diastolic, Resting Heart Rate (Pulse) and Mean Arterial Pressure
• Body Mass Index – Weight, Height and BMI

HealthTracker PRO has individual screens for each of these categories and the inferences are color coded to give a fair understanding of potentially risky values and safe limits. The application automatically computes inferred values like Mean Arterial Pressure and Body Mass Index based on the values entered by the user, thus making it easy for the user and the doctor to quickly understand health patterns.

A separate charting page shows health trends in a visual graph which can be toggled to see individual values, switch between ranges and a snapshot of the screen taken and stored on the iPhone for future reference.

The "Email Reports" feature allows the user to email selected or all recorded values to the doctor or to his own email address.

Individual notes can be added for each of these readings to keep a record about the type of reading (fasting sugar etc.,) or anything else which might be relevant to the user or for the doctor’s reference. Each readings have individual indicators to show the time and date of the readings.

Key features:

• Color coded values and indicators to get an immediate sense of values.
• Ability to track Blood Sugar/Diabetes
• Ability to track Blood Pressure – Systolic, Diastolic, Pulse Rate
• Automatic computation of Mean Arterial Value which is a key indicator of one’s heart’s health.
• Ability to track Weight & Height.
• Automatic computation of Body Mass Index (BMI) which is a key indicator of obesity.
• Individual graphs to show health trends
• Snapshot feature to store the graphs as pictures for future reference
• Customizable date export feature which allows sending the recorded readings to the doctor.

Device Requirements:

* iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad
* Requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later
* 0.5 MB

Pricing and Availability:

HealthTracker PRO 1.0 is only $1.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Medical category.

Though eLearning in its current form is considered to be interactive, such interactions are limited to simple click-and-show’s, avatar based feedbacks, simulations and such which isn’t interactive enough for people to engage with a courseware. The main reason for this is that the learning system is pre-programmed to offer specific feedbacks in a non-intuitive fashion which doesn’t give the user enough space to “experiment” with or try out newer possibilities.

Let’s consider a simple scenario in which a kid is being taught about addition. Most of the learning modules will be preprogrammed to teach specific cases like say 2 + 3 = 5  or say 10 – 2 = 8 but what if the kid is curious to know what is 2 * 10? In a standard courseware you would have to linearly progress until the section which teaches Multiplication and then see what happens there or go with the flow. You are essentially constrained by what the learning module has been programmed to do. Now think of an environment where the kid can actually interact with a tool in a free flow model which lets them experiment with things. An environment where the kid can interactively assemble the pieces to see the output, like so:

The following videos are actual working prototypes of a project name “Augmented Reality Learning Toolkit” which was created by the engineers at XLabz to showcase some possibilities of applying Augmented Reality in eLearning.

The same type of interactions can also be extended to a slightly more complex form where the learner can check for spellings or say assemble meaningful words and see what they actually look like, say C+A+T = CAT

An even complex scenario would be an environment where students can assemble chemical formulas or create chemical reactions in a real-time environment such as assembling 1 Carbon and 2 Oxygen molecules to form a Carbon Dioxide molecule in 3D and interact with it in an experimental tool.

It’s proven that learning by doing has the greatest impact on a learner than a one-way and controlled learning environment. May be it’s time we start looking at eLearning as an engaging methodology to infuse learning into the minds of the user using experimental and interactive techniques like these.

If you are interested in leveraging these technique in your next projects, like to see a demo or simply want to have a conversation, please feel free to drop us a line at hello [at] xlabz [dot] com.

We released our first iPhone application named “Find Near Me” on the app store last week and we should say we are very impressed by the numbers – ~3000 installs in a matter of just 5 days. Considering that it’s available for free we personally don’t see this as a large number but nevertheless the fact that the consumption rate is this good it still something to be considerate off.

“Find Near Me” is a easy to use application which helps you find ATM’s, Bank, Restaurants, Wi-Fi spots or virtually anything near you. The application uses the in-build GPS in the iPhone to find your current location and plots pointers as overlays on a map to show points of interest in the vicinity of your current location. The application is customizable and the user can add and save his/her own search terms for future use. Find Near Me also tells you how far the searched location is from your current position.

If you have an iPhone you can get a copy of this app for free from here.

The long awaited public beta release of Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder) and Flash Catalyst are now available for download from Adobe Labs site.

Just after hours of the release there were quite a lot of tutorials, how-to’s and reviews all over the web from Adobe’s Platform Evangelists and a few other prominent developers. 

Adobe has compiled a very useful set of videos which illustrate the various features in Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst here.

While you are there don’t forget to check out the set of Flash Catalyst tutorials – most of them are pretty interesting.

Here’s a list of some other useful resources which we came across:

• Video Demo of Flash Catalyst
• Top 10 Changes in Flex 4
• Flash Catalyst Skin Library from Ted Patrick
• FREE Flash Catalyst Beta Preview from Lynda.com
• Connecting to WebServices with the Data Centric Development (DCD) feature in Flash Builder 4 – Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3 – Via Raghu’s Blog
• Network Monitor in Flash Builder 4
• Flash Builder 4 demo: Dashboard with Google App Engine – Via Harish’s Blog
• O’Reilly InsideRIA: Overview of Flex 4 (Gumbo)

There might be some confusions and concerns though on this change since all of us are now so used to the word “Flex”. Personally, I think this should have been done much earlier. We hear that Flex SDK and Flex Framework are going to still retain their names.

Many a times we had client who were not ready to use Flex as they thought it requires a  special server or sometimes that it a different technology all together than Flash and needs it’s own player/runtime to work on the client side.

Just to clarify things for those who still don’t understand the difference, Flex is an open source framework and a tag based language (mostly) which eases the development of web applications and desktop applications (based on AIR) but the end result is still an SWF file which runs on the Flash Player. The way in which you generate the SWF is the only difference between Flash and Flex.

Flash is more design oriented but Flex is more code oriented. Unlike Flash, Flex doesn’t have a timeline and other animation related tools but that doesn’t mean you cannot do them in Flex. The underlying programming language (ActionScript) is now so mature that you can almost do everything which you can do in Flash, in Flex – just that you have to do them through code unlike Flash where you can do them visually. In fact even the new Inverse Kinematics (IK) in CS4 can be programmed through ActionScript.

In essence, Flash and Flex are almost the same from a programming perspective and both of them generate an SWF which runs in Flash Player.

So do we have to re-designate all our Flex Programmers to Flash Programmers? No, not yet !

Related Links:

• Next version of Flex Builder will be named Flash Builder 4!
• What is Flex?

From Flash to iPhone

As we have seen in the recent past, a few Flash enthusiasts who have been quite active in the Flash community have started developing apps for the iPhone. A few prominent of them being, Keith Peters who released his game on the App Store recently (heard that it’s doing fairly well), he also has written a few AS3 to iPhone Tutorials and not to miss out our good old Mike Downey (though he is no more with Adobe) who is also planning to release a website which has tutorials for ActionScript developers to develop apps for iPhone. Apart from these two there are a few more from India and as well as from elsewhere who are actively working on iPhone apps.

The recent “Flash On Tap 09 Pre-Interview with Keith Peters” where he spoke about developing apps for the iPhone, for instance saw around 85 people participate from different parts of the world at odd times of the day. We at least knew of a handful of them from India. Note that most of them attending the seminar where Flash/Flex developers and the numbers does indicate that people are actively looking at developing apps for the iPhone.

Now, is that enough data to justify that there is indeed a paradigm shift? The answer is a big NO. But yes, we cannot ignore the fact there is quite a lot of enthusiasm among the Flash developers in building apps for the iPhone.

But why?

The very simple and straight forward answer to this question is – M-O-N-E-Y. Once you actually get a good understanding of Objective-C and underlying Cocoa framework you can quickly build a nice app and put that for sale on the app store. Believe us for this, there are quite some crappy apps on the app stores which people pay money for, which you wouldn’t even care to look at otherwise.

Now, that’s easy said than done considering the Apple’s complex approvals process, the $99/$299 you need to shell out for the developer program and such, but at the end of it, its worth the pain is what most of the “been-there-done-it” guys say. Some developers out there are making 2 or 3 digit figures every hour for apps which you wouldn’t even care to install on your machine even if it were free. This quick money (and fame) is what attracts most of the people to iPhone development.

In our personal opinion, we don’t think that this gold rush might last very long, its only until Apple holds close control over the app store which by itself might not last for long. There are already sites which have most of these paid apps available for download and there are ways by which you can get these apps installed on your iPhone without jail-breaking (voiding your warranty) your phone. Though the procedure to do so are a little trickier for the non tech savvy crowd, it just might be a little longer that those become accessible to everyone. There still will be a fair share of legitimate buyers who would pay for the apps but the numbers may actually fall significantly over a period of time. We have all seen this happening with the Symbian apps – there were times when people paid a whole lot of money to get these apps on their devices and now your get 1000’s of such apps in a CD for less than $2 all over the streets.

It’s always good, as a programmer to understand, learn and adopt new technologies which adds value to our customer, offerings and ourselves. But a trade-off of what you have a mastery on already, might not be that good an idea.

In our humble opinion, if you want to make some quick bucks, capitalize on the mad rush for iPhone apps and have an great idea which people may actual love and pay for – developing for the iPhone may make sense – but it always, always pays to continue as a Flash/Flex developer and do that in parallel as well. 

Having seen and worked with Flash almost through a decade now, without a thought we can say that there is no better development platform than Flash that currently exists. The contexts, platforms and possibilities may be different but the idea continues to be the same.

Flash on the iPhone

This is probably the most spoken about topic in the Flash community in the recent times and Apple hears its loud and clear that this is one of the most requested feature which not only the Flash community but almost everyone who owns an iPhone, is looking forward to. And when Apple says “Flash Player is not powerful enough to run on the iPhone” we all know that they actually mean “iPhone may not yet be powerful enough to run Flash Player”. It’s just a market strategy of Apple to keep it’s dominance of the app store intact but sooner or later they would have to pave way for the Flash Player in the iPhone and that’s the day which we eagerly look forward to.

Some interesting reads:

Why Apple Won’t Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone via WIRED
Why is Apple stalling Flash on the iPhone? via Gearlive

How many times, as a Flash Lite Developer have you come across an iPhone application which used the GPS and did some cool thing with your location or allowed you to use the Accelerometer feature and play a car game. As a Flash Lite developer one has always felt the urge to gain more control of the device and do things at the core application service level which you see iPhone Developers did with their iPhone apps. Now there is an answer to this (at least partially) – Nokia has released an Flash Lite Services API as part of the S60 5th Edition SDK & Tools which allows Flash Lite developers to get access to Platform Services on it’s 5th Edition Phones.

Briefly, this allows Flash Lite developers to:

• Access and launch applications on a device using the AppManager Service API

• Access and manage calendar information using the Calendar Service API

• Access and manage information about contacts using the Contacts Service API

• Access and manage information about landmarks using the Landmarks Service API

• Access device logging events using the Logging Service API

• Access device location information and perform location-based calculations using the Location Service API

• Access information about media files stored on a device using the Media Management Service API

• Send, retrieve, and manage messages such as SMS and MMS using the Messaging Service API

• Access data from the physical sensors of a device using the Sensor Service API

• Access and modify system information on a device using the SystemInfo Service API

Now, these were things which were never possible to do using previous releases (2.0 and below) of Flash Lite. Until now, developers had to use tools like KunerLite, Python for S60 and other third party tools for even simple things, forget about Media management et al.

The usage of the Services API is also as simple as importing the com.nokia.lib.Service object, creating a new service object with a provider name and interface name like this:

import com.nokia.lib.Service;
var messaging = new Service("Service.Messaging", "IMessaging");

You can download the the Nokia ActionScript Services library form here (the package just contains a handful of intrinsic classes, so if you are looking for actual code it isn’t there) and for a detailed usage guide, refer to this link.

The only Nokia devices in the market, as far as I know which can support these features at the moment is the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic but I am sure that there would be more devices based on the 5th edition platform in the near future.

There is also a rumor that there are plans to extend this to older platform phones as well – not sure if its true.

Now coming to a practical use of these features, the potential which these features brings in for FlashLite developers is pretty significant. Some possible usage of these features would be:

1. Location-aware applications in Flash Lite
2. Maps and Travel related applications
3. Native messaging capabilities
4. Learner Tracking in Mobile Learning (mLearning) based applications using the Messaging Service
5. Social Networking apps using the Contacts service

The list can go on and the possibilities are just restricted by ones thought.

The last one in particular is quite interesting – think of an application which can look up on your contacts, map it against the contacts in your friends phone and create a group of common friends or a network visualization. There are some really interesting social networking oriented features you can develop with such possibilities.

From an eLearning (or rather a Mobile Learning) perspective there are quite a few things you can do with these services such as delivering quizzes on the fly, polling, class management, LMS integration/interfacing and much more.

Looks like Flash Lite just got more powerful !

Other Useful Links: 1, 2 & 3

Mike Chambers has created a really cool and neat AS3 API Reference Application for the iPhone. We installed it on an iPhone and its pretty well organized and contains appropriate code examples as with the desktop or web version of the API Reference.

It has the complete class references for ActionScript 3, Flash Player 10, AIR 1.5, and Flex 3.2. The file size could have been a less though – 10.1 MB is quite a big footprint for an iPhone App but considering the amount of documentation in there, its worth the size.

You can install the application directly from the iTunes app store from here.

We thoroughly enjoyed the event and at one point when the audience were asked to voice out the name of the application which they thought won the event, we were able to hear only two names FlexJobs and CloudBuzz.

We thank Adobe for giving us such a wonderful opportunity to showcase our capabilities and the participants for voting us into the Audience Choice Award.

We nominated two applications:

FlexStats – A real-time Web Monitoring Solution build on Flex and AIR

CloudBuzz – A micro-blogging and news data mining software build on Flex and AIR

FlexStats won both the awards for us. These were the prizes:

2 Groovy iPhone 3G’s
2 iPod Shuffles

Here is a brief and some screenshots of the applications:

FlexStats

FlexStats is a real-time web monitoring system build from ground up using the Flash Platform which can be used to monitor real-time live statistics of a website/blog as they happen. FlexStats is build on Flex and AIR. The application can be installed on a desktop machine as an AIR application and any website/blog can be monitored by launching the application from the desktop.

Unlike other web analytics and monitoring tools which runs of the browser, FS runs from the users desktop as an standalone AIR application and live updates are streamed to the tool from the website. All that a web owner has to do is to place two PHP files on his server. For this demo we had hard-coded the application with the URL of our site (www.flexjobs.in).

CloudBuzz
Data Mining on Steroids

CloudBuzz is an innovative tag based data mining and information research tool build completely on Flex & AIR. CloudBuzz pulls data from popular micro-blogging news sources like Twitter, technical feeds like Adobe MXNA, new sources like Google News and thousands of other information sources. It then filters the data using an in build dictionary of words and plots them on a spatial tag cloud which is ranked based on the number of occurrences of a keyword. The application filters approximately 1500 commonly used words and also uses RegEx pattern matching techniques to deduct in-appropriate words which falls within a pattern matching range.

Just to get an idea of the amount of information being processed, at any given minute there are approximately more than 50,000 words (based on the information sources) which are being processed to generate the cloud data. With this application one can easily have a spatial look at the various terms which are making news and also get an idea of how intense the news is. The data-points are color coded based on word density.

Now we are working on taking both of these applications to next level. We have a huge list of features which we want to include in the next versions of these applications.

There were two runners up prizes – one of which was won by a application titled GeoScope – a video searching application and another application which allowed to search for information on nearest hospitals and allowed one to make a call using the Ribbit API. We personally liked the AIR Game which used the Mac Book’s Accelerometer.

Once again, thanks Adobe !