Jul 21, 2008
Posted by: Kacper Sulisz, Product Manager
Aren't we all lucky here at Psiloc!
This week marks a big day in our company's history.
We have moved to a new headquarters. The new office is located in the strict city center, in a A-class office building located at the XII floor of the Eqator Building at the exact address:
Al. Jerozolimskie 94
Warsaw, Poland
The post code is 00-807 in case you might need it by any chance.
You can see it on Google maps here
You can check out the collection of photos from the new HQ below.
Jun 30, 2008
Posted by: Kacper Sulisz, Product Manager
As of today the 30th of June we are introducing a makeover of one of our products, the famous GSync. Psiloc's new child takes the name of XSync.
XSync becomes GSync to infinity, a universal tool for archiving all your SMS and MMS messages to any of your e-mail accounts.
XSync can sync your messages to any e-mail account supporting SMTP (currently most e-mail providers support this technology). The most popular accounts (that is GMail, AOL, Hotmail and MSN) have predefined settings, so it's easier to use them just after switching the application on.
You can download a brand new trial copy from our shop.
Never lose those messages again!
May 26, 2008
Posted by: Jakub Lipiński, CTO
Psiloc as one of the Polish mobile market pioneers is co-founding the MobileMonday events in Poland, known simply as the MobileMonday Poland. We strongly believe this will of benefit to the whole of the mobile industry.
Just as a quick note, the first ever MobileMonday Poland is taking place today, the 26th of May. If you happen to be in Warsaw do drop by! We're starting at 6 pm at the Melodia Club on Nowy Swiat Street. You can refer to this blog as an invitation at the entrance.
See you there!
May 14, 2008
Posted by: Łukasz Grabiec, Senior Software Developer
Nokia phones are known for their user friendliness, at least that's what everyone is convinced. However things have changed a bit since they were last redesigned and the S60 was created in a differernt reality than we have now. One of the things that has been lacking considerable improvement, is the way we connect to the Internet on those devices. With the Internet nowadays being everywhere, and with the users increasingly needing access to the Internet on the go, to check their e-mail, their favourite websites, the RSS reader, to make a post on their blogs, or to check what their friends are up to on their social networks, the connectivity becomes a must. Whether it's WiFi, HSPDA, UMTS or the crawling EDGE, Nokia manages to squeeze them all into those shiny new devices, however it forgets about bundling it all with some ease of use and user experience. Yes, the connection is established in a snap on the S60 devices, yes, the connection is stable, but it's a bit awkward to get it set up in all those applications. You need to actually know which access point you need to use, and the phone usually comes with several of those, all of them with some hi-tech names. Besides that, you additionally need to know which ones are WiFi access points and how to define them, if you don't want to toss all that money on Internet access.
Now up till some time ago, everyone was pretty content with the state of things, judging that, if you want to use advanced technologies, you need to have at least the basic knowledge of what you are doing, so everybody went by with this, and took it for granted. Up until one device shook the industry upside-down. The idea behind it when it commes to connectivity was, that it really shouldn't be the users concern which access point is the optimal at the moment, nor was the user expected to know which WiFi is in range at the moment and which one has the strongest signal. The users should not be bothered with switching the access points whenever they leave their houses or workplaces. The connectivity on the S60 could use some improvement and Psiloc thought this is exactly the job for it, using this opportunity to create "Psiloc Connect".
Psiloc Connect is the application that needed a proof of concept before we engaged in it. After some time when we were almost certain that this could really work, we started making some buzz to prepare it's launch. That's how Psiloc What? was born, which by itself is a topic for another post. Since the functionality build into Psiloc Connect is not what the platform was designed in mind for, some really heavy testing was required. The testing phase took a lot of time, and we experienced some unexpected hick ups. In the end though, we did manage to get everything ironed out.
So how did we go about it technically? Well the road there wasn't all paved with roses, but in a life of a software developer, you know that nothing is. Calling rarely ever used methods, finding workarounds for simple stuff, getting those internal modules to work as required, it was a journey to the moon and back! Sometimes days had gone past without any progress, but then you put that extra flag in there and it all starts working again!
The Connect engine is really made of two separate entities, an agent working in the esock/nifman system process, which is responsible for instantiating the connection. It's there asleep most of the time, up until the point the user chooses the "Psiloc Connect" access point. The second module is the application's daemon, it's responsible for searching your surroundings for WiFi access points and picking the optimal one, if none are found, it'll use the 3G/GSM network, that is if you want it to do that. It then hands over the correct settings to the Psiloc Connect access point, and off you go!
Apr 30, 2008
Posted by: Kamil Trzciński, Software Developer
iQuickBlock is a simple, intuitive yet extremely addictive iPhone game. It has been developed in a few hours of programming time during the Newest Mobile Technologies Lab at the Warsaw Technical University. It is one of the first Polish iPhone applications, and to our knowledge the very first Polish game written for this device. It has reached up to this day an astonishing 82331 (still counting) of downloads!
This might be even more surprising if you consider that the game was written specifically for the needs of explaining Objective-C and iPhone Dev to other BRAMA members. The total development time was only 6 hours, using the Cygwin iPhone Toolchain and Notepad++. The testing phase using WinSCP and PuTTY included.
From the technical side all the rendering is being carried out using the UIImageView, whose state is refreshed several times (on the order of tens) per second. The smooth graphics rendering was left to the hardware acceleration, it handled it with astonishing grace. Having some experience in GUI coding, I found the iPhone "way of doing things" much simpler than for example the S60 AVKON.
For example, popping up a dialogue asking for the player name is just a matter of the following few lines:
NSArray *buttons = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"OK", nil];
UIAlertSheet *alertSheet = [[UIAlertSheet alloc] initWithTitle:@"Game over" buttons:buttons defaultButtonIndex:1 delegate:self context:self];
[alertSheet setBodyText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"Your time is %.1f second(s)", m_gameTime]];
[alertSheet addTextFieldWithValue:nil label:@"Your name"];
[alertSheet popupAlertAnimated:YES];
The same is true for the iPhone smooth transition effects, using the UITransitionView class:
typedef enum {
UITransitionShiftImmediate = 0,
UITransitionShiftLeft = 1,
UITransitionShiftRight = 2,
UITransitionShiftUp = 3,
UITransitionFade = 6,
UITransitionShiftDown = 7
} UITransitionStyle;
[m_transitionView transition:UITransitionFade toView:m_menuView];
This seems unbelievably straightforward if you consider the visual effect on the screen itself.
Have fun coding, have fun playing!
Credits for the game idea go to Mariusz Ostrowski and Marcin Maksymiuk who developed the game for UIQ some time ago.
You can read about it here