Location Based Services are hot

Ever since phones have been equipped with GPS devices it's been possible to provide applications with information about the user's location. I used to have a Nokia N95. It had a GPS but other than Google Maps, I never did anything useful with it. When I switched to the iPhone a couple of months ago, I started to use more and more apps that are location aware. The main reason why it works for me on the iPhone is that the iPhone just always seems to know where I am, whereas the N95 only knew where I was when I asked for it. How is this different? If I'm inside a building where GPS signal is blocked, the iPhone still knows where I am, because it remembered the last time it had a GPS signal. The N95 on the other hand would only start to read its GPS device when I started an app, which worst case meant I didn't have a location at all and best case meant I had to wait up to a minute before it had a fix. Usability win for the iPhone.

How is the location generally used? The basic premise is that applications now know where you are, so the most common application is to display maps and your location on them. But what is also fun is that games you play can now compare your score against the score of people in your neighborhood, search engines can show more relevant results based on where you are, shop applications know what shop you are near, travel applications know where you are located so you don't need to enter your start address; the possibilities are endless.

Foursquare is hot

One of the services that draws a lot of attention at the moment is Foursquare. It's basically a game that lets you 'check in' to venues. So you enter a bar, open the foursquare app, it recognizes the bar you are in and finally you press 'check in'. See the official screenshot from the app store:

What's the point? There are several.

• First, there's the game element. You get points for checking into venues, and you can earn badges for special achievements. The person that checks in the most becomes the 'mayor' of a place.

• Second, there's the social aspect. When you check in, you immediately see who else is there, so it provides information on which friends are in the same venue as you. The other way around works too, you can see where your friends are by looking at your friends list.
• Third is the ability to leave behind tips. As it happens I checked into a restaurant at Gatwick Airport yesterday and got the tip 'before you order a steak, have a look at the knife you're supposed to use'. I had a laugh when I looked at the tiny blunt knife on the table in front of me. Tips such as 'order the Mexican style chicken, it's not on the menu but the chef knows how to make it' are as useful as 'Skip the chili, they have no clue what they are doing'.
• Finally, Foursquare is working with partners to provide incentives to visitors. It's the Web 2.0 version of bonus point cards. In the future you'll be able to show your Foursquare status to a shop owner to receive special rewards for frequenting the venue.

There is some debate on the downsides of location based applications such as foursquare. Please Rob Me is a spoof of Foursquare that demonstrates how burglars could use the location information to find out which houses are empty. This however is a matter of responsible internet use. I for instance generally only share my location with friends (I don't accept foursquare invites from people I don't know), and if a robber wants to know if a home is empty, there are much easier ways to find that out.

More info: http://www.foursquare.com

Augmented Reality is hot

Not 'hot' in the sense that everybody is using it, but at least large quantities of people are talking about 'Augmented Reality'. For those who are not yet familiar with the term, augmented reality is when you watch the world through the camera of your phone, while your phone adds real-time information about the objects it sees. See the screenshot on the Layar homepage for an explanation.

What's the point? Again, there are several.

• First, it 'feels like Star Trek'. You point a device at something, and it tells you useful information. This is plain geek fun.

• Second, it sometimes makes it easier to find things than staring at a map and trying to figure out where to go. Just point your phone away from you and the screen will indicate where you are and what points of interest are in the direction you look at. It's compass 2.0.
• Third, it's easier to find tourist (and other) information. Instead of firing up a browser or starting a wikipedia app and searching for the statue you're looking at, you just point your phone towards the statue and it will show you what the statue is. This is especially useful if you don't know its name meaning you have no other way to look at it.

Augmented reality is currently based on location (GPS), direction (compass) and sometimes time. This means that if you point your camera at a statue, it will not actually 'see' the statue but it knows you are near the statue and looking in its direction. If there is an object blocking the statue, it would still show the statue. In the future, it will most likely be enhanced with actual object recognition. StickyBits is a prelude to that; it allows you to recognize objects and attach information based on a barcode you stick onto it. Expect similar services using RFID tags in the near future and actual visual recognition in the distant future.

In terms of Gartner's Hype Cycle, I believe Augmented Reality is just moving from the 'technology trigger' phase towards the 'peak of inflated expectations', which means that it will take a while before it becomes truly useful, but it will draw a lot of attention before that happens.

Layar is hot

There are several augmented reality apps in the AppStore, but the one I like the most so far is Layar. Not just because I'm proud that it is of Dutch origin, but because it's the one that is the most usable at the moment. Layar revolves around the concept of 'layers' that you display on top of the camera view of your phone. There are layers showing nearby shops, points of interest, people sending out tweets, foursquare venues, rental price of appartments you look at, houses that are for sale; there are already hundreds of information layers that you can use in Layar.

As to practical usefulness, so far I've used Layar mostly as a gimmick, showing off its capabilities to friends who then also install the app and use it as a gimmick too. I haven't yet had a need or want to actually walk around a city and use Layar to provide me with necessary information. But read on for a practical review.

Layar is available for several mobile devices including the iPhone.

More information: http://www.layar.com

The reality test - Running around with Layar and the Foursquare Layar

The past 2 days I was on a business trip to London, and since my trips to London usually incur a lot of travel with the underground, taxis, buses and just walking around in central London, I decided to put Layar to good use and use it for a couple of days to see if it will 'stick'. Since I also use foursquare, my main goal was to use Layar's Foursquare Layer, developed by Squio.

In practice, this meant that when I walked up to a venue, I would point my iPhone at it with Layar running and the Foursquare layer activated and then check-in. Here are my findings:

• Phones need a tilted camera for this kind of application. It is very cumbersome to walk and hold the phone in front of you. This means that it blocks your own view and typically looks weird. On two occasions, I had people move out of my way when I was standing on a corner looking at Layar, because they thought I was filming or taking a picture. It would be better if you could hold the phone like you do when you are reading or looking at a map, and the camera would point directly away from you instead of towards the floor. Layar itself has a tilt button that you can use to adjust the display of the layers to how you are holding the phone, but this does not affect the camera view itself.

• Foursquare's GPS information is not very accurate. While other layers do a pretty good job of exactly pointing out a point of interest, the foursquare layer often gets things wrong. This is caused by the fact that the person who first added a venue is not necessarily located on the exact center spot of the location. I had both a pub and an underground station where Layar would not show me the venue that was in front of me. I had to turn around because the venue in the foursquare layar was located 10m behind me. In the regular foursquare app this is ok, as it is nearby enough, but for augmented reality it is problematic. For underground stations in London it's fairly logical that the GPS spots are outside instead of in the station. When I emerge from the underground and want to add the station as a venue, it takes a few meters before the phone restores both its GPS and network signal, so at the moment I check in, the GPS location is outside of the actual station (but still near enough for regular foursquare use). I have thought of a few great ways to make the GPS more accurate but I'm not working at Foursquare.
• iPhone's lack of multitasking inhibits the user experience. When I wanted to check-in when I spotted a venue in Layar, I had to first authenticate Layar with Foursquare, and then use a custom foursquare check-in page within the Foursquare Layar to perform the checkin. This custom screen lacks most of the features that are important to me, such as directly seeing tips and friends at the venue I check in to. (I had an additional problem where the first day the OAuth authentication between layar and foursquare consistently timed out, so I couldn't check-in using Layar at all at first). If the iPhone supported multitasking, then applications such as Layar could fire up the actual Foursquare app to do the check-in, while keeping the layar open in the background.
• Maybe this is just a bug, but in map view (where you don't use the camera but a regular street map) in Layar the compass wasn't working, so the map didn't point me in the actual direction of a venue.
• There are some usability issues with Layar and the Foursquare Layer, where the 'what would apple do' paradigm could help improve the user experience. One is that I always had to do multiple actions: Start layar, select foursquare from my favourites, click through a settings screen even though I didn't want to ever change those settings and then point the camera. Ideally, it remembers the last layer I used and skips settings dialogues and immediately starts with the core functionality.
• The biggest fun is the gimmick value. When I showed someone what I was doing I almost always got a "wow I didn't know that was possible" response.

So will I be using layar consistently to check into foursquare from now on? No, as, fun as it is, it's not more productive or more practical than using the regular foursquare app. I will use it however as a demonstration of what both augmented reality and foursquare can do. What I will be doing with Layar is find out information about the things around me, most notably when I'm on vacation and want to get information on tourist attractions. In this scenario, augmented reality is more practical and more useful than manually looking things up.

It's been a while since I blogged, but I just ran into another zealot pointing me to NoSmarty.net when I mentioned templating.

I think I've said it before. The tool you use should depend on the job you're trying to do. So to say that Smarty is wrong just because it is, does not feel right.

I agree that in many cases PHP can be used as a template language just fine, but there are situations where a Smarty template (or any other templating engine) is just that more pleasant.

Here's a bit of template code that I encountered yesterday. Its use of php as a template language is hideous. Because it's a template for an xml message and because it needs to cope with systems with short open tags on and off, it looks like this:

 
<?php echo '<'; ?>?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<result processed="<?php echo $data["processed"]?"yes":"no"; ?>"
       <?php if (isset($data["orderid"])) { ?>orderId="<?php echo $data["orderid"]; ?>"<?php } ?> >
       <?php if (isset($data["error"])) { ?><error message="<?php echo $data["error"]; ?>" /><?php } ?>
</result>
 

Hideous!

Here's what it would look like in Smarty:

 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<result processed="{if $data.processed}yes{else}no{/if}"
       {if $data.orderid} orderId="{$data.orderid}"{/if}>
       {if $data.error} <error message="{$data.error}" />{/if}
</result>
 

Yes, the first one is slightly more efficient, but the second one is actually readable for the average person.

Anybody claiming that <?php } ?> is 'just as convenient' as {/if} does not think clearly.

In my humble opinion, of course.

In my previous post I collected rumours about the opening keynote. Turns out none of them were right. The announcements were a beta of Zend Studio 7.1 and the beta release of Zend Server 5.0. The latter does get a step further in the enterprise direction with the addition of a Job Queue feature. I personally wasn't too impressed, Job Queues were already available in Zend Platform a year ago, and has since been overtaken by Gearman adoption. The new 'code trace' feature, which adds a kind of 'flight recorder' to PHP apps, looks very promising. Where past versions were already able to pinpoint where the problems were, this version will also give you a complete trace of every function call and parameter up to the problem. According to Andi Gutmans it performs fast enough to do that even on a production environment. I'm definitely going to check that out.

Today I had my own talk, "PHP and the Cloud". I had a godo 45 people in my session, which means that I owe the PHPBenelux usergroup a beer, since they showed up with 63 people for my Try-out last week.

The slides for my session are on slideshare, or you can browse them directly here:

In about 15 minutes, Andi Gutmans is about to kick off ZendCon 09 with his opening keynote. Yesterday during the tutorial day and this morning over breakfast, I've been polling people to see what big announcements they expect this year. "Microsoft buys Zend" and other fun but improbable announcements aside, here's a selection of what people think might be announced today:

• Zend Certification for PHP 5.3
• Zend Framework 2.0
• a Google AppEngine for PHP
• Zend Studio Certification
• Zend Server for OSX
• Zend Server Enterprise Edition

If you follow me on Twitter, I'll probably mention any specific announcements there realtime.

In a few months they will start to build the largest tower in The Netherlands (with 262 meters not a stunning accomplishment on a global scale, but impressive for our little otherwise mostly flat country). This will be very near my home, so I think it will be a nice project to take a snapshot every week of its progress, so that once it's finished I can create a little documentary of the construction.

I'm trying to find out the proper position to take this weekly picture, to ensure that the complete tower will fit in the picture precisely when it's finished, so that I don't have to move back after a while and can remain in the right spot for the duration of the project, and I'm close enough to not waste much pixels.

My camera has a certain viewport, so plain old Pythagoras won't be sufficient; so I'm trying to figure out what the best position will be, and how I can determine this using nothing more than math, some experimentation and educated guesswork. I'm relatively lazy, so it has to be a simple practical method that doesn't take ages or enormous amounts of effort. Also, it has to be a verifiable method so I don't end up moving the position halfway through the project; they're only going to build this tower once.

The position of the tower will be:

View Larger Map

Ideas? I'll throw in a signed copy of my enterprise php book for the most creative or pragmatic approach, or an amazon gift certificate for those not into PHP.

Bonuspoints if you point out the spot on the map, taking into account buildings or other structures

More details (if relevant):

• The camera will be this Canon Ixus 95
• I am able to use a tripod
• Most roads near the construction site are at the same level as the start of the tower (to my knowledge, anyway)
• The A2 highway north of the tower has elevated soundproof walls, so anything on the other side of the A2 is not an option.
• Details on the tower are here.

Have fun!

Update: I might actually use my Canon 450D for this project. Based on this blogpost, the construction company has contacted me that they are interested in the project and would like to cooperate.

Somebody just kindly reminded me that it's been over 3 months since I last posted on my blog. Oh my.

What kept me busy mostly the past months is my new home. I moved to Utrecht (which is more in the center of The Netherlands, so I can get around more easily) with Leoni, and as developers say, the house is "90% done". So it'll keep us busy for a few months.

Things at Ibuildings are hectic as always. Our UK office is growing like crazy and is nearly half the size of our NL operation already. And we're working hard to get our Italian office up and running. Behind the scenes we're already working on things there, so if you're looking for a cool PHP job in Italy, drop me an email (ivo at ibuildings dot com). (Actually Ibuildings NL and UK are looking for senior developers too, if you're interested). After a succesful DPC back in June, we're planning a few more events so keep an eye on the Ibuildings website for news on those.

Another thing that has kept me busy is one of my personal pet projects, Flackr, a twitter based breaking news aggregation site. It has fairly basic functionality at this point (we've been mainly working on the news aggregation and event detection algorithms), but will eventually grow into a 'newsroom 2.0' type application with pro features for journalists. Here's an example of how it tracks tweets related to the Hurricane Bill including pictures. Contrary to many twitter aggregators, it doesn't follow the masses, but trusted sources only.

Finally, I'm happy to announce that I've started work on a new book. Enterprise PHP sold very well and it's not outdated yet, but writing it was addictive and now I just feel like writing another one. The book will be about PHP and Cloud Computing. This time around I'm not working on it alone, I'm co-authoring it with Vito Chin, author of the GMagick PHP extension, among many other things. The expected publication date is early 2010.

That's it for now; I hope to pick up blogging with more actual content after summer.

More and more content on the internet is 'real time'. Twitter messages, news feeds, pictures, facebook, etc.. Where we used to browse the web for things that have mostly been written in the past, more and more of our internet minutes are spent watching things that 'just happened'.

I see this as a threat to Google, and it wouldn't surprise me if they finally manage to buy Twitter, because Twitter helps them become more 'real time'.

To give an example, I was just trying to update my profile picture on Twitter, and this didn't work. For some reason it refused my pic without an apparent error messsage. Possibly I'm uploading something wrong, so first I googled for 'twitter profile picture' and got this result:

Then, I did the same search on Twitter Search and the result was this:

As you can see, this tells me that in the past 22 minutes, multiple people had this problem. (Ironically you can also see from their avatars that it actually is a problem). The Google results on the other hand, have nothing that is relevant if you take into account the 'now' factor.

This is just an example. Searching for 'current content' is getting more and more relevant. Comments on a live show on tv or an address to the nation by the president; Google is useless in finding these things.

So it is my humble opinion that either a) Google will buy Twitter, Facebook or another 'real time' content site, or b) Google will release an updated Google Search that takes the whole 'now' into account in its search results.

I write quite a lot of command line utilities in PHP and luckily PDT makes it easy to debug command line scripts.

The thing with command line scripts is that often they require parameters passed on the command line, and PDT offers an easy way to pass them when you debug a script.

Assuming you already have debugging in Eclipse working (using either XDebug or Zend Debugger, both will work with this feature), here are the steps to debug a command line script using command line parameters:

1. Right-click the script you want to debug and select 'Debug As...' and from the context menu that appears, select 'Debug Configurations...', like this:
   
   

2. In the debug configurations screen that appears, select the 'PHP Script Arguements' tab. In the text box that appears, you can add fixed parameters (e.g. --key=value), but it's much more useful to use Eclipse's dynamic parameters, like this:
   
   
   
   In this case I entered --visitor=${string_prompt:Visitor} which means: pass --visitor= to the script when debugging, but ask me to enter a value named 'Visitor'.

3. You can use the 'Variables' button to enter variables like this using a more visual wizard. There are many different prompts, string_prompt is just one example; you can prompt for folders and passwords as well, and you can inject certain system variables as a parameter using this wizard)
4. After you've saved the Debug Configurations, again right-click the script you want to debug, and select 'Debug As...' and then 'PHP Script'.
5. Eclipse now pops up the prompt, like this:
   
   

Voila, you can now debug your command line script by passing in dynamic parameters whenever you start the debug session.

P.S. This not only works in Eclipse PDT but also in Zend Studio for Eclipse and Aptana (in theory, haven't tried either yet).

P.P.S. No, I didn't create a script that allows me to track individual visitors, it's an archive processor for Flackr that uses the Visitor design pattern to make it easier to write multiple processors. I love Design Patterns.

It's about 2 months until the next Dutch PHP Conference in the Amsterdam RAI.

It's a step up from last year, with one additional conference day. The speaker lineup is awesome: people such as PHP core developer Scott MacVicar, Andrei 'Unicode' Zmievski, php|architect's Marco Tabini, Xdebug's Derick Rethans, Zend Framework architect Matthew Weier O'Phinney, security guru Stefan Esser, Restful Ben Ramsey, Paul 'KISS' Reinheimer and many, many others. See the full schedule here. It will all be hosted by our own Cal Evans.

I don't have to speak this year, I just get to do the closing keynote together with Cal and Marco. That'll be fun!

From all the DPC's I've visited before, this is the one I most look forward to. It's also nice to see industry adoption of the conference, with big names such as Microsoft and Oracle sponsoring the event. (Microsoft has xboxes and tickets to Las Vegas to give away, see their WinPHP Challenge.)

Oh, and if you order your tickets before April 30, there's a significant Early Bird discount. Register here.

Last Saturday I was at the 4Developers Conference in Poland, as I mentioned before.

There weren't many PHP developers at the conference, and I could really feel the language barrier was a problem (many of the English speaking speakers drew much smaller audiences than the Polish ones), but I met some nice people (such as Neal Ford, Ted Neward and Raymond Lewallen), and in terms of speaker treatment this was by far one of the best conferences I've been to. If you get a chance to speak at one of the conferences that ProIdea organizes, don't hesitate and go!

The amount of speaker dinners/lunches, and long nights in bars with countless Vodka (in the form of so-called 'Polish Mad Dogs') and other alcoholic beverages, and in general the way speakers were supported was amazing! Andrzej, Anna and Magda: thanks for making this a great experience for us, and if you ever do a PHP conference, ping me

Here are the slides from my presentation:

Those who have seen me speak before will notice that this is a more generic version of my "Enterprise PHP" talk, catered to a mixed audience.