He was subscribed to Micro-Hobby; each month we saw the magazine punctually standing out of their postbox, wrapped in plastic cellophan. His face when collecting the magazine was one of anticipated joy. I could just imagine –maybe even envy– what he was about to experience. Games, demos, utilities. Digital sounds, colours. The novelties, the excitement of new things to come. All in the accompanying tapes, or in the listings inside the magazine.

I had to be content with turtle graphics, and a ridiculous beeper.

Granted, even though it was monochrome, it was extremely cool anyway –almost no one else in the school had ever put a finger over a computer keyboard ever–, but the rest of the world was trying hard to make me feel green with envy. There was no way I could escape knowing that there were other sorts of computers which could make noises and show colour graphics.

One went to buy a dishwasher and there were several Spectrum models, games and accessories for them, side by side with fridges, ovens and whatnot. Even newsagents had a stand or a couple of shelves with Spectrum tapes at quite cheap prices.

Talking about newspapers, one of the most popular –”El País”– published the usual week-end supplement: interviews, opinion columns, fashion, cooking, etc. There was also a little sort-of leaflet in the center of the magazine, called “Pequeño País”, which roughly consisted in a handful of pages covering topics that children and youngsters could be interested in: movie and book reviews, a couple of comic pages from some well-known author (e.g. Blueberry), and maybe some more by an unknown but promising author.

As home computing grew in popularity during the 80s, in 1987 they started a new section, El Tebeo Informático, where they would review computer games. Probably even accompany the review with some cheats, in the shape of BASIC ‘pokes’ or loaders. Of course, none of those games was published for the PCW, so I could only look at the screenshots, read the descriptions and dream with that day in which I would be able to experience those games myself.

One of my birthday presents was a cassette tape with the original soundtrack from a famous animated series (at the time), David el Gnomo. Of course, I was cursed with the best of the bad luck: the latest track in the B-side was a computer game for the Spectrum. In my innocence, I ended up one day subversively sneaking in the computer room and carefully examining the PCW’s disk drive, trying to find out if there was a way to fit the tape into the 3″ drive, and thus play the game. Evidently, that didn’t work, and unfortunately there’s no available dump for the game, so the only thing I have ever seen to date are those screenshots from World Of Spectrum.

Sometimes, when we went to department stores, I was left on my own so that I could peruse the book shelves in order to find something I liked, while the rest of the family did the same. I loved going to the computer books section, and finding all those books on computer graphics, sound, and games… but I was then quite disappointed when finding that most of them were written with Spectrum Basic in mind, and thus even if I got the book I wouldn’t be able to type in and play with its listings.

The situation regarding technical press was more or less the same. Since no magazine was published exclusively for PCW users in Spain, I got to read Amstrad User. It was only about Amstrad at the beginning, but when Amstrad acquired Sinclair they ended up writing more and more about the Spectrum, even covering that PC200 sort of strange hybrid fiasco between PC and Spectrum.

Around the summer of 1990 Amstrad released a series of super attractive Spectrum packs. They consisted in the computer, plus six games and a joystick! Woooow! I tried –in vain– to get one. I argued I had got my best marks ever, and if we got the Spectrum I would use the joystick to play games, so no keyboard would get damaged with repetitive kick-kick-kick-kick motions (such as when playing Last Ninja 2) but that didn’t work. Instead, we got a PC that I was occasionally allowed to use. Granted, it was way faster than a Spectrum could ever hope to be, with its humble Z80 at 3.5MHz, and the VGA graphics were way better, but somehow the Spectrum aesthetics had grown on me. I had heard and read so much about the Speccy, that I was missing it already.

Years later, emulators became feasible, but alas!, I didn’t have an Internet connection to download one…

However, there was a way. It was quite a feat itself, now that I recall it, and certainly shows the lengths curiosity can drive people to. I used to buy a PC magazine, PCMania. The publishers, HobbyPress, maintained an Ibertex node. Ibertex was the Spanish network equivalent to the French Minitel. Each month they included their client software in the accompanying floppy disk. This client was quite advanced compared to the standard Ibertex clients, as it not only handled downloads but also was able to fragment them in parts, and therefore downloads could be resumed, a very nice feature as the phone line quality was fragile, so to speak.

Using that system, I downloaded Pedro Gimeno’s Spectrum emulator, and a couple of legendary Spanish Spectrum games: La aventura original and Army moves. I still can’t understand how that could even run and be playable. I mean, an emulator for a 3.5MHz machine, running under a 12MHz machine! Spectrum emulators for nowadays phones can hardly process user input without lagging. I don’t know how Pedro did it, but I certainly played those games for weeks. It was great! And it was also certainly funny to be discovering the joys of the Spectrum while everyone in the media was already talking about the Internet, Mosaic, or the WWW.

However, I learnt a lot about the Spectrums since then; and all thanks to the Internet. I played more games thanks to emulators and sites such as World of Spectrum; I have listened to lots of Speccy music (the so-called beeper music). Also I have enjoyed some glorious demos that pushed the envelope quite further, such as Aah… the tape loading era:

or the revision 2012 invtro:

I even went as far as learning how the attribute clash worked, and implemented a “ZX Spectrum” effect for my 8 bit retro camera application for Android, Nerdstalgia. Yay!

At the end I never owned an Spectrum, but I feel like I owe them a little bit of my computer curiosity/motivation. So… here’s for 30 more years of retro-computer inspiration and achievements! Long live the Speccy, and all his cousins!

Right after I went out of the check-in area, a woman handed me a box with pills. I guess those are freshening mints, but I didn’t dare trying them. For some reason they looked suspicious and I’ve always been taught not to eat whatever strangers give you in the streets ;-)
Then I located a couple of my coworkers who were idling in a corner nearby, where we had agreed to meet.

It was pretty surreal to see the exhibition area transformed in the way it is when there’s such an event happening. I had been at this area a couple of years ago, as it actually is a public avenue leading to the Museu Nacional de Catalunya (or Catalunya’s National Museum), and it’s also famous because of its fountains, so people can walk up and down the street “in normal conditions”. Today there were lots of tents and lorries installed in the street, and lots of people in suits. Like LOTS! Quite a contrast with the usual tourist-comfy clothes one would expect here!

Because a coworker wanted to say “hi” to someone he knew in Hall 7, we visited that one first. Coincidentally, it was home to several interesting companies such as… Canonical! They were presenting their Ubuntu on Android, Ubuntu TV and I don’t know what else. Thus I had the opportunity to check Ubuntu on Android by myself and ask the guy in the stand several questions about it. Such as: how does it actually work? and… is it much of a hack? He told me that yes, currently it’s a bit of a hack, but they expect to reach an agreement with device manufacturers so that phones ship with Ubuntu on Android. They are using the same kernel as Android, so it’s not like they are “another app” on top of Android, but it’s more like they are running side by side with the rest of Android stuff. In the future they expect to be able to offer a downloadable image so that “people with enough know-how” can install Ubuntu on their Android phones. I also asked him which sort of setup does it require; actually it’s running on a Gingerbread dual core phone. Regarding connections, it uses an HDMI port for output, and a USB port in the phone for connecting peripherals… although the demonstration machine was using a dock to which things as the keyboard and mouse were connected. Everything is stored either in the device’s SD card or “in the cloud”, using Ubuntu’s cloud servers.

He told me they are aiming to people who do not have a computer yet but are about to get one–these phones could very well be their phone and computer at the same time. They are also aiming at corporate environments too–give your employees a work phone which is a computer too. He showed me a remote desktop application which was running Excel on somewhere else’s server, as the type of stuff that could be done if processing requirements were huger than what the phone with Libre Office could afford. The performance was quite decent, but nothing spectacular. Again it depends on what your needs are; I personally consider that having a full blown desktop in quite a high resolution and with the Unity desktop running in a “simple” phone is quite of an achievement, so well done Ubuntu!

We also were approached by someone from Nokia who wanted to show us the new and shiny Nokia I-don’t-remember-its-number phone, i.e. the one who could take pictures at 41 Mega pixels. She initially started showing me how I could take a picture and –wow–share it to Twitter! Or Facebook! Or even send it by email! After a while this got a bit silly so I just told her that I was more interested in knowing if this phone could replace carrying a proper full-blown camera and a phone, so could she just show me a picture in “normal” mode, without all “auto” settings on? She did and frankly, I’m not sure if it’s a matter of the preview quality in the phone or what, but I was seeing blurry images with a lot of interpolation on them in order to artificially increase the “megapixels”. I think my “old” Nikon D40 takes better pictures. Even my pocket Canon does, so I was not impressed by this. The interface wasn’t specially intuitive either, requiring lots of touches on the screen in order to take a picture or focus, so it’s not the sort of phone/camera that you can use when wearing gloves. She insisted that for best results I had to use the “PureView” mode, so maybe that’s the reason that this test wasn’t as nice as I expected it to be. It has been a bit of a disappointment, all in all.

Mozilla was in that Hall as well, but it seems they were just serving coffee (?!?!); unfortunately I didn’t have much time to investigate what they were up to.

From there we went to Hall 8. I got the opportunity to test the Samsung Notes devices, both the phone and the tablet versions. The phone is still running Android 2.3, even though it sports quite a huge screen -probably at the same size that the latest Nexus-. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst was that the flagship application, and the reason why the hall was filled with people dressed as French painters of sorts, with the usual French hat and all, making caricatures of attendants, or in other words, S-Notes, was laggy like there was no tomorrow. It was the worst that can happen with a tablet –where tablet means a Wacom-style tablet, not a tablet-style device–: you move the pointer on the screen and some time after, something gets drawn. It was a huge letdown. I mean, didn’t anyone notice before releasing it?! It was unbelievably laggy. I can’t feel comfortable drawing with that, and I’m not a pro!
Fortunately, the tablet device was a bit more decent, with less delay between my actions and the response in the screen. It is such a pity, as they even implemented pressure sensitivity, which is something other devices do not have -or don’t sport prominently! The phone looked very nice, but there’s no way I can use that for taking notes, much less drawing. I tried writing a word: I was boring myself to death waiting for it to complete the first letters in order to continue with the rest of the word. Nope, it’s not ready yet.

We reached the Android area, where there were a lot of stands, Google I/O style, with people showing their apps. There was also an strange installation for “Android design”, with sort of screens or miscellaneous things in place of the screens, such as electrical switches, rubber surfaces and other indescribable objects arranged in a rectangular grid, trying to invite people to interact with them and make things happen, but I was slightly disgusted at the sight of a creepy feathery thing with bumps that moved in a seemingly random but organic way. I didn’t want to look at that, and even less touch it! So I guess that could be one of the reasons why people weren’t interacting so much with it: it was slightly eeeeeew.

There was also a robot assembling covers with Android motifs and jewels (a proper robot), and a sort of amusement park attraction where people could try to grab an Android felt by controlling the crane with the accelerometers of a tablet. It was the first time I ever try my hand at this sort of things so I evidently haven’t won any Android toy! Also–you only had 45 seconds, as the countdown was clearly displayed in a red LCD on the right side. Very retro. Oh, and I have also spotted the Google Data Arts Team’s WebGL Bookcase in a screen tucked in a corner of the upper gallery. Yay! Three.js was at the MWC this way ;-)

After this –and a free smoothie, courtesy of Android– we’ve gone to the Hall 7 again, for the BlackBerry developers event. I didn’t know what to expect as I have never used a BlackBerry device and I had only read that they were programmed with Adobe AIR, which I am not particularly interested in nowadays, but I have got pleasantly surprised by their presentation. I liked their pragmatic approach to getting developers to produce apps for BlackBerry: “there’s native, there’s AIR, there’s HTML5 -with access to native capabilities, and hardware accelerated WebGL support–, there’s Android compatibility, and if there’s something else that you find missing, let us know because we want to hear about it”. They understand that people have invested time and effort in their code bases and don’t want to (or can’t) just throw it all away and rewrite using the platform’s owner language of choice (e.g. Objective C in iOS or Java in Android). I also liked the numbers they provided regarding device updates. It seems updates on the BlackBerry platform are frequent and do happen, so as a developer you can expect that most users will have an updated version of the operating system. Oh and something else that I loved was the focus on responsive UI right from the start: everything is hardware accelerated and the application’s default design paradigm avoids blocking the UI thread with things that shouldn’t run on it.

It was a pretty solid session and I’m now curious about this BlackBerry stuff. I am happy that they gave us a free PlayBook device at the end of the event, so I will be able to investigate and report about my findings any time soon. Will it stand up to its promises? The answer, on future posts!

Sorry if you expected a more in-detail post–I didn’t had time for staying longer at the Congress!

Robot Media just moved to a new shiny office in Barcelona’s Eixample and we had a welcome party to celebrate with friends. While discussing the party “features”, we had this crazy idea where we would assemble a video out of many other videos with robotic stuff.

I immediately thought that was a job for ffmpeg, as cutting the videos manually would be super tiring and we didn’t have much time for that.

So I assembled a quick script that read a text file with a list of collectively sourced YouTube URLs, then used youtube-dl for downloading the videos, and finally called ffmpeg to extract three second slices from the videos, resized and padded them as required (to create a Full HD version), and finally appended all of them together using the amazing MP4Box.

After that, I placed the half gigabyte file in the very capable hands of mr. Eyeclipse, who added the Robot Media watermark and a tint of “corporate blue” with After Effects. Maybe that could have been done with ffmpeg too, but getting the right tint hue wouldn’t have been as interactive (and immediate) as with AE.

We then placed the video on loop in the office TV. Party guests were challenged to identify and tweet the name of ten robots appearing in the video. Only one person managed to do that, and he got a full set of robot stickers!

The script is slightly messy so I haven’t got round to publishing it yet. I’ll do that soon, so that you can create your own crazy randomized mash-ups with just a couple of YouTube URLs.

Few days after the party I remembered the supersupercut project that was unveiled at past seven on seven project on New York. Back then, they mentioned they had used already “cut” scenes in the project they showed, so the scene detection process was manual.

This time when I checked the supersupercut website, it turned out they are now using something called Shotdetect, an open source piece of software that can detect scenes in videos! Damn! I should have checked it before! That way I would have been able to select slices from different scenes, as sometimes there are several clips from the same scene and it looks like it’s the same clip.

Though it would be even more interesting if it could detect things such as faces or objects appearing in the scene and then filter scenes according to that (e.g. return scenes that contain robots). Surely there’s some sort of academic thesis on this waiting to be implemented by Adobe on the next CS iteration!

In any case: food (or software) for thought. It goes to the list of “things to revisit” at some point; hopefully it will get into my “bag of tricks” too, just as MP4Box and ffmpeg did :-)

By the way, it was a pleasure to find out that both ffmpeg and MP4Box are available in ArchLinux’s repositories, and they are very recent versions too. Excellent! No more compiling from SVN just to get things such as WebM supported! Beat that, Ubuntu :-P

And while most of the attendees brought their laptops, I went oldschool and brought a trusty notepad and a ballpen to jot down whatever caught my attention.

First in the morning was the HTML session. I didn’t write anything down about this one, since I was concentrated on looking at the stuff Paul Kinlan was showing. I knew about most of the stuff he talked about, but it was a nice reminder. It was cool that the slides were interactive themselves, so he could demonstrate things without getting out of the “slides environment”. Then went Mr.doob and his short GLSL + WebGL talk. I think it was too short for the topic! Anyway, people were quite impressed with the patterns one could generate by writing a shader, and since he’s released an improved version of the interactive GLSL sandbox tool he used, you can now experiment in the same way he did! :-)

Then came the break time and I got talking and after that I sadly missed much of the talk about Google+ from Ade Oshineye, confiding that I would be able to catch up later on by looking at the docs :-P

I entered the conference area again for the Android sessions with Bruno Oliveira. I was quite interested in hearing what they had to say, after the recent “events”: 4.0 announced, the Android git repo being taken down, the (in)famous fragmentation chart, etc…

… and what I heard was a bit disappointing. It seems to me there’s a fundamental disconnection between what Android developers want and what Google/Android has to offer. It was very obvious when questions time arrived and most of the attendees were asking questions about monetising the apps (or in other words, being able to recover the investment on the platform), and pretty much all Bruno had to answer was that Android intended to be a democratic platform, focused on what the user wants, and not forcing them to do something like entering credit card information when turning on the device for the first time. He also added that Android wasn’t targeted to any specific income range as other platforms do.

When asked about “fragmentation” he said that:

[...] diversity is a feature of the platform, is not really fragmentation. Different operating system versions [...] is what people call fragmentation [...]
It’s a consequence of being open source [...] we don’t want to put pressure on manufacturers. Maybe in a friendly way, releasing cool inspiring phones like the Nexus S, etc… [...]

He was also asked about the agreement between Android and manufacturers regarding updates that was announced and widely discussed on past Google I/O, but after digressing for a while he didn’t give any definite statement on that matter.

Then he went on to give some advice on how to make great apps, suggesting we should detect the available features on each device and act accordingly, activating or deactivating features in our apps, because not being compatible with a certain phone is being arrogant, like saying to the user that he bought the wrong phone.

This is something that particularly irks me, as sometimes there’s no written specification that app developers can consult and be confident will be followed to the letter, as each phone diverges a lot on its behaviour. It’s impossible to know in advance what will happen unless you test it with the real phone. Yes, there’s the emulator, and that famous esoteric compatibility suite that a phone must passed in order to have the Google apps (Market, Gmail…) installed, but that doesn’t guarantee that a real phone will have a proper, complete GL ES implementation, for example.

So making that type of statements did actually sound wildly arrogant on his side. And he went on, happily adding there wasn’t no excuse for not creating all the different versions of resources for all the different screen sizes and densities. This was followed by a general moaning and mumbling in the public, as with each new release of the SDK not only are there new features that need to be used if you want a “cool app” that uses the latest stuff in new phones, but there are also new resources to be created and maintained, thus increasing the complexity required to build something “great” for Android versions ≤ X.

Something else that really worries/annoys me is the insistence in showing raw activation and installation numbers in every presentation they do. It doesn’t make much sense on the long term: I have probably activated four devices but that doesn’t mean I use all of them (as I use them for testing), or that I am four different potential users. Another use case: people using carrier-subsidised phones change them quite often, but that doesn’t mean a new user is created from void each time a new phone is activated. It’s still the same user and he’s not going to expand the market–it actually stays the same, as the old phone will probably get thrown in a drawer. Same goes for installation numbers: that you install an application doesn’t mean you actually use or keep it on your device. They could show uninstallation numbers too, and the ratio between installs and uninstalls would be a way better indicator (but probably not as attractive).

Moving on, it was lunch time, which we used to discuss the above points. Most people dismissed Bruno’s compatibility strategy as it’s plain unrealistic (unless you have an infinite number of testing resources, or simply build very basic and unexciting apps). Some jokes were made about the fragmentation “feature”: it’s not a defective phone, it’s a feature!.

After lunch we got Paul Kinlan again, explaining several strategies for “making a business out of apps”. Again he relied massively on AdSense, which has proven to be a very unreliable and arbitrary source of income. He also mentioned the Chrome Webstore, of course, but it’s not very widely extended yet. This session wasn’t as enlightening as the HTML session, as the concepts weren’t new and … well, you can imagine the rest.

Next was Danny Hermes with an strange session on the Shopping API. He sounded slightly apologetic and felt like out of place since there wasn’t even a “Shopping” icon on the banner, whereas there were G+, Android and Chrome icons, but at least was really enthusiastic about his topic. I guess this talk could be interesting for people integrating Google’s Product Search with online shops, but this is not something I’m currently interested at so I didn’t pay much attention.

Sam Dutton’s Chrome Dev Tools session was way more interesting. It was funny that we were commenting: it would be cool if you could save the changes you do live… And then he said: here’s this new feature: now you can save the changes you made to the document!.

It also made me slightly envious: the Chrome developer tools are an amazing platform for developing, and the Android toolset pales in comparison. It’s all “hacks” here and there: a separate app for tracing, another one for viewing the layout, an app for debugging… Seems like Google should invest more in the Android team ;-)

It was time for “snacks” again. I had a coffee, thanks to the help of @thespite which showed me how to use a Nespresso machine. Yes, I had never used one before–I’m a slow-food sort of person and generally use a french coffee maker instead ;-)

And finally it was time for more Ade Oshineye talks, this time on the Google+ Hangouts API, but for some reason (saturation?) my brain squarely refused to pay attention. I’m so sorry Ade! See, if the talks had been recorded I might be able to watch them ;-)

After the talk finished, it was “Pitch your app” time, where several attendees tried to convince us that their app was the best ever. The best demonstration got a voucher redeemable for a Nexus S, since the phone is not available for sale yet. I was nicely surprised by the level of English demonstrated by the guys pitching the app. They still have a lot of Spanish accent but they aren’t kicking the grammar like a punch bag every two words, and that’s something you can’t say about most mono-English speakers! So well done on that front!

Regarding the apps, I was a bit less impressed, as most of them weren’t really surprising: weather aggregation services, GPS tracking+Maps, cloud CMS integration, a football game, a chess game, bike rental locations aggregation/visualisation… nothing that got me enthusiastic about :-P

What did surprise me in fact was that one of the pitchers connected his laptop to the projector and I could see how he opened a terminal and wrote “pm-suspend” prior to disconnecting the computer from the projector. Now that is hardcore! Who needs widgets to suspend the computer? A terminal is all you need! \o/

So to sum up, it was quite an event-packed day, quite professionally organised. Thanks and well done, Google! It not only provide me with some new ideas and tricks, but it also got me thinking about the true Google strategy on Android. Unfortunately the post was getting too long, and that discourse seemed slightly out of place, so I cut that part out and will refine and publish it in the near future as a separate post.

Here’s hoping there’ll be a future DevFest BCN 2012! :-)

So I’ve been thinking a lot about whom to write about and I’ve finally decided on an almost unknown woman: Sofia Watt.

You won’t be able to find much about her on Google, but her work helped me learn programming when I was 10 years old.

Back then, she and Miguel Mangada published several books on programming for children, in Spanish. They were titled Basic para niños, Logo para niños and Basic avanzado para niños (note: “para niños” means “for children”).

They introduced a fictional fluffy and colourful pet character, Arturo, and used him to guide the reader through very simple exercises that were a ton of fun too, although nowadays children in their 10s might find hard to believe the notion that printing “X”s on the screen is funny!

When I first started computer lessons we didn’t use any particular book. The teacher would just explain a bit about some new feature of Logo on the whiteboard, and we would play with it, see what we could come up with.

We were only two or three girls in the otherwise male classroom, but I remember occasionally looking at the cover of the book and thinking: Hey, a woman wrote this! It’s not only men in computers! I’d can totally do this too!

I learnt quite a lot with the book, so much that I ended up being quite respected among the rest of classmates, which hardly knew much about computers. It was pretty peculiar, because at first they bullied us, but then they wanted us to teach them our Logo tricks. Sometimes even a crowd would gather around our computer, when we got it to show flashing colours in the screen and what not, and the teacher would have to tell people to go back to their seats!

The next year we were told to use a mandatory BASIC textbook. It was a book sponsored by the Education Ministry and it was also DEAD BORING. So what did I do? I kept bringing my Basic for children textbook to the classroom, and used it for reference.

Years passed, and I stopped using these books, but their spirit still inspires me. When I have to document something, I always remember Arturo and the way things were introduced, trying to relate to the audience and making the concepts fun.

We need more Sofias!

***

If you want to take a look at the BASIC books, someone has kindly scanned and uploaded them to World of Spectrum.

The Logo book was way more colourful and had plenty of graphics, but I haven’t found it online, and don’t have a physical copy here, so you’ll have to take my word for it :-P