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Too late for RevMobile?

Chipp Walters — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:53:10 +0000

From the Ansca Mobile website, creators of the Lua script based authoring tool for Android, iPhone and iPad:
http://anscamobile.com/faq/

“Can I distribute my app on the iPhone App Store?

Just purchase a one year subscription to the Corona Developer Program and you’ll be able to submit your very own app to the iPhone App Store. In fact, Corona developers are already distributing apps on the App Store. Check out some of the apps created by our customers at our Customers Page.”

Many of you know my longtime business partner, Chris. He’s the original C coder of revBrowser and revSQLite and dabbles in Rev, but spends most of his time in the bowels of lower level languages and server api’s. He’s also spent time using Objective-C and Xcode– even building iPhone apps. Frankly, it’s hard to impress him– and I’ve worked with him since the mid 90′s. I asked him to take a look at revMobile and imagine my surprise when he came back seriously enthused about the app. I don’t remember his exact words, but he did mention he thought it had more potential than even Rev, and he had never seen something so easy to use to create iPhone apps. He was seriously pumped about the potential and future of the platform.

And that was why I was so very sad, and MAD at Apple for what is now clearly no more than a change in licensing to only keep Flash off of iOS. Sadly, our dear revMobile was a casualty in what we all know was nothing more than a childish competition to see who’s was bigger. Certainly RunRev, nor Kevin were at fault.

And the Apple apologists, like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, with his carefully crafted messages citing the protection of the platform’s integrity, first to market advantage, and lack of proper API support, are all silent– and missing. I’m sure they’re onto the next agenda item for Steve as he’s inviting them to top secret secret tours of the acoustic testing chambers in Cupertino, all the time his hand further up their posterior making their mouths move and fingers type. Bravo. Bitter? Yeah. A little.

Still, is it really too late for revMobile? I spent a good part of last week reviewing the options out there and couldn’t find anything which works with the feature set I want, which includes a WYSIWYG IDE and editor, and is relatively simple to learn. Nope, doesn’t exist for the iPhone– not at least as far as I can tell.

So, if all these other apps get a free pass on the license issue, then why shouldn’t RunRev try again? And not in 3 months, but now. I’ll gladly build an app for a client client of mine and submit it and see what happens. But, we need the tools. So, to CEO Kecin Miller, and others… What do you think?

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Our website is up! (mostly)

Chipp Walters — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:14:30 +0000

Dan and I have finally gotten around to finishing up the start of our website. You can see it at:

http://shaferwaltersgroup.com

Posted via email from Shafer Walters Group

Shot off: Vue and HyperShot

Chipp Walters — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:36:08 +0000

I've been following Bunkspeed's Hypershot for some time now. It's a very easy to use photoreal renderer, but a bit pricey for what you get. It turns out Bunkspeed ran into some licensing issues, and the HyperShot developers started their own new company, KeyShot. Meanwhile, Bunkspeed licensed another third party renderer and teamed up with NVidia to create their new product called "Shot."

HyperShot, KeyShot and Shot all tout super fast rendering speeds with photoreal results as their most significant feature. Here's a video which shows Shot in action:

Recently, I downloaded a trial copy of Shot to put it through it's paces. I don't have a fancy NVidia setup so I have to use the CPU only rendering mode. That said, it did seem to perform rather fast and I was able to crank out this basic quality level rendering in just 90 seconds. Here's a sample:

So, off I went to Vue to try and figure out how it would fare competing with Shot. Here's the render I created. It was rendered using Superior mode and completed in only 51 seconds.

There are differences for sure. The Mental Ray renderer of Shot seems to do a bit better on some of the light dispersion, but it also took twice as long and still has noise artifacts. Also, it really isn't an apples to apples comparison as Shot uses HDRI lighting while the Vue render uses my lighting rig from a previous post. I was able to use Shot's HDRI's inside of Vue, but they didn't work on this scene very well. This is because Shot has the concept of a "plate" which is sort of a seamless background / foreground and doesn't show the horizon line. The Vue render outside the rig using the same HDRI just didn't work. This is a feature I'm hoping Vue will one day have.

Also, I was able to do a number of smaller renders matching the Shot website with DOF and they took between 30 seconds and a minute on Final setting, which surprised me. They even had blurred reflections. Here they are:

So, what does this all mean? Well, it appears to me while Shot has a really cool 'rez-in' render feature, it's not really any faster than Vue. Of course one may say the quality of the Mental Ray renderer is superior, but I believe I can achieve some pretty good results in Vue, as evidenced above. I'll keep playing around and see where it takes me.

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Atomic Web: Must have for iPad

Chipp Walters — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:52:13 +0000

At 99 cents, this is a must have for serious iPad users who spend a lot of time surfing. This mobile browser can replace Safari for accessing the web. The two best features are full screen mode and tabs. You can open up as many pages as you like, each in a different tab. And they can even load in the background.

Aromic Web has settings for Privacy, Disabling page advertising, and setting it up to look like a different browser to different websites. This last feature is especially handy for those websites which insist on showing the mobile version of themselves on the bigger screen of an iPad. Highly recommended!

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