The Ripple…(Story)

A man was sitting by a lake. He was throwing small pebbles into it from time to time. A young boy happened to cross by. He was intrigued to see that after every few minutes or so, the man would toss a pebble into the lake.
The boy went up to the man and said, "Good pastime, this stone throwing, he?" "Hmmm," said the man.He seemed to be deep in thought and obviously did not wish to be disturbed.

Sometime later, the man said softly, "Look at the water, it is absolutely still."The boy said, "Yeah, it is."
The man tossed a pebble into the water and continued, "Only till I toss a pebble into it now do you see the ripples?""Yeah," said the boy, "they spread further and further.""And soon, the water is still again," offered the man.The boy said, "Sure, it becomes quiet, after a while."The man continued, "What if we want to stop the ripples? The root cause of the ripples is the stone. Lets take the stone out. Go ahead and look for it." The boy put his hand into the water and tried to take the stone out. But he only succeeded in making more ripples. He was able to take the stone out, but the number of ripples that were made in the process were a lot more than before.The wise man said, "It is not possible to stop the movement of the water once a pebble has been thrown into it. But if we can stop ourselves from throwing the pebble in the first place, the ripples can be avoided altogether! So too, it is with our minds. If a thought enters into it, it creates ripples.

The only way to save the mind from getting disturbed is to block and ban the entry of every superfluous thought that could be a potential cause for disturbance. If a disturbance has entered into the mind, it will take its own time to die down. Too many conflicting thoughts just cause more and more disturbances. Once the disturbance has been caused it takes time to ebb out. Even trying to forcibly remove the thought may further increase the turmoil in the mind. Time surely is a great healer, but prevention is always better than cure."

MORAL: Before you allow a thought or a piece of information to enter your mind, put it through the triple filter test of authenticity, goodness and value.

Neembuu Uploader featured in "Linux For You" magazine

Loads of Thanks to my amazing inspiring super-awesome senior Jeyanth for informing about this matter and also to his colleague who informed him first.

Neembuu Uploader is featured in "Linux For You" magazine November 2011 edition page 12.

(Sorry for the bad quality.. Someday I'm gonna buy Android phone with HD camera.. hmm..)

As soon as Jeyanth bro told me, I went out, bought this 100Rs magazine, searched. Without any suspense, it was in 12th page itself. The content seemed like taken from some review site I don't remember now. I'd have been more happy if it was featured in my favorite magazine "Digit". Expecting that to happen.

 

This is the front cover of this magazine.

I have released version 2.5 last month but didn't blog about it. It was just a small update like iPhone 4S over iPhone 4. 5 more sites and 9 more translations.

 

All nice things happen to Neembuu Uploader but its creator don't have a satisfying job. How ironic?

Posted via email from Art, Science & Technology

Concept to implement a mouse-over equivalent for touch screen devices

If you used touchscreen devices, sometimes you might have felt that it would be nice to have something like the "mouse-over" events in computers. It would be a nice feature to have but after all these years neither Apple nor Google did anything about it. Recently I had this idea for "finger-over" in touch screen devices. I don't know Electronics Engineering so my concept may be wrong. Or may be it's already implemented. Watch out for my ugly (mspaint) drawings.

 

Almost all touchscreen phones have proximity sensors. Replace it with 4 proximity sensor (or whatever best suited for the purpose) on 4 corners of the screen behind the screen. They should be of different frequencies and should point towards the center.

 

Now if we put our finger 0.5-1.0cm above the screen, the waves emitted from the sensors will reflect back to them. In this diagram, it looks like sensor 4 will receive its reflection first followed by 3, 2 and 1.

 

 

Now we can find the exact position of the finger using the differences from the waves. If the sensors are capable of generating a 3d imaging of the finger, then the tip of the finger can be found. Nowadays softwares can recognize faces so finding a tip of a finger wont be difficult. If 3d imaging is not possible, then atleast the tip of the finger can be found by setting a threshold limit (0.5-1.0cm as I said previously). That's all there is to it. 

Edit: This is not similar to what is already done in Microsoft Surface. If you put a glass of Mango juice, the surrounding surface changes to yellow. It looks like surface uses Optical camera on 4 corners to find the color but it depends on touch and not hover. It will work only if you put something "on" it.

 

Benefits to users:

If this is done, then users can enjoy the "finger-over" in touchscreen devices.

1. Websites that use mouseover event in javascript can be expected to work.

2. There is a new System bar in Icecream Sandwich that always appear below the screen. It would be nice if it appears only if finger tip is near the bottom of the screen. The system bar will not be visible, then appears translucently if finger is near the bottom the screen and fully visible when touched. For a nice effect, we can vary the degree of translucence directly proportional to the distance between the finger and the screen. This I really wish to happen.

3. Most obvious use. If user is clueless of what a button does, then he can simply hover the finger over the button for a while until a tooltip shows up.

 

Device Manufacturers:

This will be an extra headache for device manufacturers as it may be require 4 sensors below or adjacent to screen which increases the phone thickness, complex circuitry, reduced battery hours. But this can be an optional feature.

For developers:

Developers can expect methods like onFingerOver(), onFingerOver(customtimeout) :P

Such methods obviously execute before (and may be also after) click events.

Lets say that not all manufacturers support this hardware feature. In that case, the developers need not worry if they used FingerOver events for showing tooltip only. But if they use FingerOver events to display a panel or something like the system bar, then developers (or Android itself) should replace it with Swipe event(like notification area).

Nothing is impossible. Even if my concept is wrong, something like this will happen in the future. Let us see :)

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