InCaffeine

07/10/2023

Still a while before the website is done, but giving Weebly a try. This product will be available for orders starting in September.

Your 24/7 Watchdog

08/20/2020

Free iOS Workshop tomorrow. Come and see how we manipulate virtual objects in an AR world:

Fri, Aug 21, 2020, 10:30 AM: Due to the current pandemic conditions the iOS developer group is going to be meeting virtually. We're still working out the details but if you RSVP to the event you'll ge

08/20/2020

When Apple introduced ARKit in 2017, they really raised the bar for augmented reality software development tools. Each year, additional capabilities were introduced at WWDC (Worldwide developer conference) to further enhance the capabilities. As of 2020, ARKit provides a very rich set of tools needed to render scenes with virtual objects including positioning them in the scene as viewed by the camera. ARKit includes tools to with powerful World Tracking, Scene Understanding, and Rendering capabilities.��World Tracking uses a concept called Sensor Fusion. As the name implies, Sensor Fusion melds data from various sensors together including vision based inertial navigation and triangulation. What would otherwise be an extremely complex undertaking, is made very accessible with a single code directive. All the developer has to do is make a call to a function called « ARWorldTrackingConfiguration() ». Once that’s done, iOS starts tracking the device location, orientation and movement using data from multiple sensors.

Scene Understanding is equally complex and combines Computer Vision, Plane Detection, Hit Testing. Surface Estimation, Feature Detection, and Feature Matching. For example, a developer can specify horizontal plane detection if detecting a table-top is desired. Hit Testing can then be used to determine if a virtual object is resting on the table-top.

Rendering creates and places your virtual object into the scene. In the last iOS Workshop we rendered a scaled down version of the Solar System, by rendering the Sun, Earth and Moon and animating the orbits or the Earth and Moon around the Sun. We used open-source textures for each celestial object’s appearance and ARKit provides easy access to set those properties. The « SCNNode » object gets created with a single line of code, and the SCNGeometry property is used to create spheres. We then position the nodes (Sun, Earth etc) and with two more lines of code, set them in orbit around the Sun.

It’s extraordinary what can be accomplished with so little code. And with the added capabilities each year since 2017, we look forward to WWDC 2021. In the meantime, why not join the free iOS Workshop on Meetup and see what you too can accomplish?

01/17/2020

Mind Journal for your mind's journey is in the App Store

01/17/2020

Classic Find v1.0 is in the App Store

01/11/2020

Classic Find, an app for classic car collectors is now available in the App Store

11/02/2019

Working on a "Business Dashboard" app. Pretty cool for business owners to be able to see how their biz is doing in real time, and even better to be able to take actions if needed.

09/20/2019

This app was developed by a local iOS developer. It's amazing

09/05/2019

I recently had a discussion with a fellow iOS developer about how to resolve a warning in the logs. This came about while we were testing an app prior for App Store release. The warning seemed important to resolve to me, but my co-worker advised me to simply turn off a setting in Xcode to suppress it. This post is about developer views towards suppressing VS fixing warnings:

I recently had a discussion with a fellow iOS developer about how to resolve a warning in the logs. This came about while we were testi...