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A Daunting Task – Tiffany goes to Cupertino

Posted by on Jan 20, 2013 in Java

TiffanyScreens in the Mac App Store

I never really liked going to “PowerPoint Meetings”, sharing the screen content with others during a meeting, usually requires to connect a projector to the presenter’s laptop. In a lengthy process, the laptop’s screen resolution and refresh-rate needed to be manually adjusted to synchronize with the projector. What follows is a lecture style presentation, featuring slides being projected, hugely magnified onto one of the meeting room’s walls; often, lights need to be dimmed, and listeners either doze off or start checking email.

A couple years back, I wrote TiffanyScreens, which allows you to share presentations (or any screen content), without requiring a projector.
Imagine a scenario, where every participant brought a laptop computer to a meeting and watched the presentation on that laptop’s display – participants sit on a table facing each other, instead of the wall. No adjustments are necessary; images are scaled automatically on arrival, to best match the receiver’s display-capability. To support lively meetings, everyone participating, can with a single button click, turn his computer into the presenting device.

tsp5

During the development, I had small engineering groups in mind, but it became more and more obvious that instructors, educators, and educational institutions would appreciate TiffanyScreens the most. Listening to users’ feedback, TiffanyScreens has been iteratively improved, refined, and optimized.

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The iLift

Posted by on Sep 16, 2012 in Life

Creating an entirely new design meant inventing entirely new technology

When we envisioned the new stand for MacBook, we landed on a remarkably elegant and stable design. But it’s nearly impossible to make a device so stylish and so firm, without sacrificing features or beauty.
We could have taken the easy way out and designed something more reasonable and less remarkable. But we didn’t. If the technology didn’t exist, we invented it. If a component wasn’t solid enough, we re-imagined it. If convention was standing in the way, we left it behind. The result is iLift: the most elegant, most stable, most stunning MacBook Stand ever.

We care deeply about ergonomics and comfort; iLift is 330 millimeters wide, 260 millimeters deep, and 90 millimeters high. To make that happen, Techcasita Productions’ engineers had to be creative. The conventional approach to building Laptop stands raises the complete laptop, decreases its footprint, thereby creating a wobbly, unstable structure.
iLift raises the MacBook’s screen an unprecedented 165 millimeters (6.5-inches), which puts it right in the middle of Apple 27″ Thunderbolt Display – yet it’s 20 percent more stable and creates 22 percent more desk-space than any stand we have seen before.

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Pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator of public taste?

Posted by on Jun 3, 2012 in Android

I recently had the chance to attend a CommNexus event in San Diego, titled PhoneGap vs. Titanium: What Is the Best Tool to Build an HTML5 Mobile App?”

Two panelists and a moderator were battling it out, comparing the two frameworks, mentioned benefits, and also demo-ed the mobile applications they had built.

The event-title of course was a little misleading, since you would be using JavaScript and not HTML5, if Titanium were your framework of choice. Its heavy focus on JavaScript should make Titanium more suitable for applications that are heavy on processing logic.

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My bag of Development Tools

Posted by on May 28, 2012 in Software

Besides a select few (you know the “I’m only using *”, where * is either emacs or vi) most developers I know have a number of tools, they cannot live/work without. The set of development tools I’m using is ever changing, but a favorite of them all remains IntelliJ IDEA, an unbelievably smart IDE for Java and Android as well.
I might be a little biased; way back in 1999, I was working for Artificial Life in St. Petersburg, Russia and after they closed their offices there, some of the best engineers moved on to Jetbrains, starting to work on IntelliJ – and that’s what they are still doing. If you happen to work with Eclipse a lot, you may want to give IntelliJ a try.
Anyway, I thought I’d share, what’s in my bag of tools today ..

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