I just  tried out the sencha touch examples  on the android 1.6 simulator and the performance is pathetic. Seems like google forgot to properly implement their javascript V8 engine onto their OS.

Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile and Sencha touch are 2 different frameworks which address a totally different set of audiences. Comparing them is like comparing apples to oranges. But, to a person who has never eaten fruits ever and wants to just try tasting one (analogy to creating a simple app which doesnt do much of processing) and not try juggling with the fruits (analogy to creating detailed games or apps with lot of processing involved), they appear the same. So here’s a post attempting to compare them and help out those who have to make a choice when it comes to building a  simple app.

Titanium Mobile Kitchensink app running in iPhone simulator

Sencha touch examples app running in iPhone simulator

.

Here’s where Titanium Mobile wins :

1. Titanium is open source and free. Sencha touch follows dual licensing model like extJS, i.e. it is open source, but if you use it for commercial purpose, you need to buy their license.
2. Titanium builds native apps. So you have access to almost every feature in the phone, like say reading phone contacts, accessing accelerometer, GPS etc. Sencha will work inside the phone browser .  ALthough it can be made to work as a pseudo-app by embedding it inside a webview of an app made using Titanium/Cocoa. I suppose it can access GPS coordinates to some extent with the users authorization, but I am not sure about it. Also Titanium will support (in near future) running the app in the background and PUSH notifications which cannot be done using Sencha as it runs inside the browser.
3. When an app made using sencha loads , it has to load the framework first and then the content. So it will be a little slower in terms of loading time compared to Titanium built apps as it has to download the 300 KB sencha framework and the images for the buttons. Although the download process can be bypassed (Thanks to James Hughes for pointing it out) by including the framework in the Phonegap or Titanium resources folder, the javascript parsing time taken by the webview might become noticeable at the user’s end. On the iPhone simulator, it takes around 2-3 seconds for the sencha’s simple Nested list example to parse and display even when the Sencha framework is store along with the app.

Sencha touch runs in the any simulator, be in iPhone, android or blackberry. You do not need any kind of separate sencha touch simulator as such. Hence Sencha touch has its own set of advantages, namely :

1. Sencha gives more control in making changes to your UI after the app is published. Since all the code is getting loaded fresh from the server each time the user accesses, you can virtually modify the entire app without the user’s knowledge. But when it comes to a native app built using Titanium,  the changes have to go through apple’s review process and the user must manually update the app. In short Sencha requires a lesser turnaround time when it comes to bugs/updates.
2. Sencha works on almost all webkit based browsers which includes chrome, safari and opera. So you can be sure that it displays the same UI in iPhone,Android,Blackberry,iPad and also desktop browsers. So once IE and firefox fully supports HTML5, then you can have a single code which will work on all desktop browsers and all mobile devices uniformly. Titanium apps make use of native controls. So it gives a different UI on different devices and are currently limited to iPhone,iPad and Android devices (Blackberry devices soon)

Although both the frameworks use simple Javascript syntax , the choice of the framework will depend on the project under consideration. If the app just makes HTTP requests to some servers to fetch the results, then sencha touch should be good enough. But if there are plans of improving the app later on to make full use of the phones features like running the app in the background , accessing GPS data continuously , sending PUSH notifications, stream music & videos, write to Files & Databases etc then Titanium should be used. But a perfect mashup between them is what developers look out for.

Titanium too does not come without limitations. After playing around with titanium sdk 1.4 , I have realized that the guys over at appcelerator care more about the iPhone than android. Titanium android sdk does not support many of the functions provided in iPhone. Some of the most common ones are : Phone contacts, Animations, Horizontal Layout etc. Also the nature of android platforms limits the framework from providing some functions like WIndow transitions, webview for reading pdf,doc etc. I will keep adding more revelations about Titanium as I come across them. Cya later.

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Update as of 5th June 2011 : Source code for the game has been published on this page. Now you can change the game as you wish, using Swishmax (www.swishzone.com)

Update as of 20th Dec 2010 : I have been noticing quite a lot of visitors reaching this page through google search.  So drop in a comment if you would like me to add any new features onto the game.

This was a simple game I created using SWiSH in 2005. The questions appear randomly with no logic for the levels of difficulty and the “Phone a friend” lifeline is a dummy lifeline with no real purpose. You should check out the game here. The game was hosted on a free domain kbc2.be and also on openflash.be initially which got a decent amount of hits. Those domain names dont exist anymore, so I have published it here. You can download the source code and read the instructions below if you like to edit the game to suite your needs.

Play the game

To play kbc flash game, click on the image below.

KBC flash game source code

I have also noticed a few visitors to this blog searching for terms like “kbc game source code”. I am not sure whether anyone want to modify the existing flash game to accomodate new lifelines or game rules.
Anyway, you can download the source code for this game and a sample questions database (20 questions only) using the link below. You will need Swishmax v3 to open the .swi source file and edit program logic. If you just want to edit the questions and answers database, you can edit the core.kbc file in the zip archive.
If you modify the game using this source code and publish it elsewhere, you should retain an always visible text which reads “thekirankumar.com”

(91667 hits) Kaun Banega Crorepati Flash Game (Download removed on 6/11/11 to reduce server load) Download

How to add your own questions or edit the questions in KBC ?

The questions database (core.kbc is included in the KBC.zip package) contents are as follows :

&totques=183&
&ques1=What is capital of India?&
&a1=Bombay&
&b1=Delhi&
&c1=Calcutta&
&d1=Madras&
&ans1=2&
&ques2=Who is known as the father of the nation?&
&a2=Lal Bahadur Sastri&
&b2=Mahatma Gandhi&
&c2=Bal Gangadhar Tilak&
&d2=Rajiv Gandhi&
&ans2=2&
…

The first line &totques=183& in the file can be changed to specify the total number of questions you have in your database. If you plan to put only 20 questions, change the line to &totques=20&

The first question is in a variable called quest1, the second on quest2 and so on…
Similar naming for options . Variables a1,b1,c1,d1 will contain the text for the options for question 1. a2,b2 etc for question no 2

Answer is specified as &ans1=2& where the value 2 says the answer for question number 1 is option b (i.e, the variable b1). Similarly ans1=3 means that the answer is c.

Hence, by editing the core.kbc file using an text editor, you can modify/add new questions to the game.

You can access the source code of the flash game by opening the KBC.swi file using SwishMax. Post the URL of your version of the game as a comment in this page, I would love to see them.

kon banega crorepati game
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But the state of 3D animation as a career in India wasnt too luring at that time. The standard choices of Engineering & Medical practice as a career were the only ones which defined a successful person. So I had to stop spending my time on 3D modelling and concentrate more on my studies which eventually made me curb my dream of becoming an animator. Although later on I used my 3D modelling experience when working on Google Sketchup to model my college in 3D for use along with the multi avatar chat based website for Incident 09, I dont think I would ever go back to 3dsmax again.

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The idea hit me when I realized that the only advantage of Google talk / XMPP status messages over facebook/twitter status updates is its dynamic nature. Static status messages are boring and people make an honest effort to flick a quote or a joke from somewhere to get rid of the “Available” status message. XMPP status messages(also called presence/away messages) which can be dynamically changed or animated to give rise to some interesting possibilities.

I wrote the entire XMPP logging in through SSL and roster fetching mechanism using simple PHP. And then ran the script from command line. Then I wrote a couple of functions to deal with some crazy status messages. These functions where implemented in a API fashion so that people can write their own “mini apps” which feed the status messages.

• First I made a scrolling status message “I am not here right now” with a horizontal marquee effect. Then I modified it to provide a basic animation effect by using special ASCII characters to provide a transition to the next status message in the queue.
• I also set an auto reply which would respond to any incoming messages and redirect them to me as text message on my cell phone using my service provider’s (Airtel) Email2SMS gateway.
• Later I put in a function which would randomly pull out a quote, joke or a riddle from funtoosh.com and then display it as a status message changing every 2 mins.
• I also tried out displaying my current location & distance from my home, and the approx time in which I would come online whenever I was travelling. This was done using the Google maps API coupled with Google latitude API where my cell phone kept broadcasting the GPS coordinates which is inturn used to calculated my distance from home and approx time to reach home. This would be an interesting idea to be taken forward some time later as it would give the user’s friends an idea as to when the user will come online next. Also a good idea to show the exact location and a link to the page where google latitude public badge is shown…. just another way to show-off if you are travelling on a holiday.
• I also made used of google shared status method to implement a pseudo menu into google talk. It was done to implement a mechanism for the user to select his dynamic status from the “recent status” dropdown found in google talk. This would eliminate the need for a separate web page or a separate installation for google talk to select one’s dynamic status message (see screenshot). As soon as a user selects a menu item, the script will change the status back to whatever was present before, and would display the new menu.

Some other possible use cases would be :

• A Simple Countdown to new year/christmas/birthday as status message. For eg: Your status message could read 2 days, 10 hours, 24 minutes, 40 seconds to new year 2011, and the timer can decrement every second. This can be a good new year status message
• “Where am I right now” idle message using google latitude. Google latitude does provides an approx location as status message but something more useful would be to provide “Home” , “Office”, “at the grocery store” etc
• “What am I listening to” or “what am I watching” on youtube/grooveshark or any kind of streaming website. I think a few websites already do this.
• Live cricket score/football score for some real sports fans.
• Total visitors on my blog… yet another show off tactic
• Text Ads as a status message based on what is being discussed on chat. Could be a privacy issue, but an interesting way for people to make some quick bucks by showing a text ad at the end of the status message using bit.ly links which will be based on the current custom status or the keywords on the chat history.

The fate

The project has now been inactive for some time as I got busy with other projects. Thus it was never used anywhere. I wanted it to be published as a free service, but the server costs could not be borne by me alone unless there was a way to make some money out of the service. Although I will be happy to continue the project and run it as a service when I can get my own server

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The goal of this project was to create a complete real estate component for Joomla 1.5 using ExtJS framework. Watch out for search engine friendly URLs even for dynamic search results. There is an admin side for managing the whole component. Real estate agents and normal users have separate logins and separate priveleges.
The ExtJS framework provided ready to use components which made the website look very professional without putting any effort on the aesthetic side of development. When the user first reaches a website which uses this component, he will be greeted with a google search like homepage where he could choose the city to search. Optionally, one could specify the number of bedrooms in the house, and the type of apartment to further filter the search. Once the search button is clicked, the search results are displayed using a sortable , paginated EXTJS grid component, which will show a small thumbnail of the apartment and also give you other details. There is a small slider at the bottom of the results which will help the user scroll through the different of paginated results. Clicking on any of the results will open the detailed view, where a small photo gallery of the apartment is shown along with more details about it.
The administrator’s section will allow the admin user to add properties along with the photos. These photos are cropped to the right aspect ratio and then compressed to various sizes and stored in the server.

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Later on , some additional features were integrated into the site like :

Some interesting things in the backend : (which you probably wouldnt know even if you used the website)
The chat avatar character was assigned based on the IP. If the IP address was in the range for girls hostel , a female character was assigned, If it was from the boys hostel block, a male character was given. Otherwise it was totally random.
The ALICE chat bot was trained to answer hundreds of questions like “What is Incident”, “When is Incident” etc and would respond to commands like shut up, keep quiet etc. It would also detect when someone would try to use abusive words and then ask them to kindly restrain from repeating it.
Someone or the other person would always stay online to moderate the chat messages being broadcast and ban users who spread hatred on the group chat.
To aid in modelling the 3D maps, I had to go around the campus clicking photographs on my phone from different angles for different buildings and then model them on sketchup. There were plans to model every building , but the plan never worked out due to lack of time.

Some technical details :
The flash client in the browser connects to the PHP based socket server running on port 80 on the NITK student server and communicates using raw XML sockets. The PHP server separated the users into different rooms(based on the map chosen) and forwarded the messages in realtime.  Running it on port 80 ensured that firewall intrusion was minimal. A chat bot (based on ALICE chat bot) was integrated into the map. Moderators could see the activity of any room by adding a jabber user (incident@jabber80.com) to their google talk list. The text content on the website was managed using a simple CMS like page.

(to be done)

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Basically, instead of displaying “<City name>,<country>”,  this script will display “<Road name>, <areaname>,<cityname>,<country>”

The internals : As soon as the script is executed, It uses the google latitude developer api to get your current co ordinates, then it makes use of the google maps v3 geocoding api (previously called reverse geo coding) to get the info about the co-ordinates of your current location which includes the street name/road name etc.

Steps to add this cool thingy onto your own site:

1. Install google maps application on your GPS mobile phone having GPRS connection (symbian s60,iphone,android)  and then enable Latitude inside google maps app. Ensure that detect location is selected inside the latitude settings under google maps.

2. Goto google latitude web page (http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge) and select Enable and show best available location.

3. In the javascript embed code section of the badge config page, select zoom level automatic, and choose the map type, size of map.

4. Put the generated embed code on your blog to display the map and an approx city level address (we’ll fix this in a moment)

5. Now to display a more accurate address (which includes the roadname,streetnames, areanames) , extract the userid for latitude from the javascript embed code and put it in the below PHP code (line 2)

6.Add this PHP code into a file named “mylatitudelocation.php” and upload it into your webserver root.

7. Add this iframe code into your blog widgets sections to display the accurate address of your current location

<iframe src="mylatitudelocation.php" width="100%" height="50" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Here’s the PHP code:

<?php $latitudeUserid=”-4xxxxx….” // change this and insert your latitude user id (available from the public badge embed code ”

function ago($tm,$rcs = 0) { $cur_tm = time(); $dif = $cur_tm-$tm; $pds = array(‘second’,'minute’,'hour’,'day’,'week’,'month’,'year’,'decade’); $lngh = array(1,60,3600,86400,604800,2630880,31570560,315705600); for($v = sizeof($lngh)-1; ($v >= 0)&&(($no = $dif/$lngh[$v])<=1); $v–); if($v < 0) $v = 0; $_tm = $cur_tm-($dif%$lngh[$v]); $no = floor($no); if($no <> 1) $pds[$v] .=’s'; $x=sprintf(“%d %s “,$no,$pds[$v]); if(($rcs == 1)&&($v >= 1)&&(($cur_tm-$_tm) > 0)) $x .= time_ago($_tm); return $x; }

$latitudeAPI=”http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge/api?user=$latitudeUserId&type=json”;

$locationDetails=json_decode(file_get_contents($latitudeAPI)); $lat=$locationDetails->features[0]->geometry->coordinates[0]; $lng=$locationDetails->features[0]->geometry->coordinates[1]; $timestamp=$locationDetails->features[0]->properties->timeStamp; $when=ago($timestamp);

$latlng=”$lng,$lat”;

$geocodeAPI=”http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?latlng=$latlng&sensor=false”;

$locationDetails=json_decode(file_get_contents($geocodeAPI)); $locationString=$locationDetails->results[0]->formatted_address;

echo “$when ago, I was in $locationString”; ?>

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Update as of 17 June 2011 : I have changed my phone from Nokia E71 to iPhone 4 and I found a better way to display my location. In Nokia Symbian Phones, the Google maps app itself included a feature to auto update in the background, but the battery drain was considerably high . Also , whenever I reboot my phone, I forget to enable tracking after bootup. Now in iPhone 4 in addition to the google latitude app, you could use Apple’s implementation of mobileme.com find my iphone tracking service right from iOS. I found this really cool script sometime back called playnice (PHP script run as a cronjob). This script will manually initiate a mobileme.com “find my iphone” request which will fetch my iphone’s current location instantly and use the data to update my google latitude location. This way, the battery drain is negligible because there is no background app running on my phone tracking my location, instead … my server initiates a location update request at a frequency which I specify and this request reaches my iPhone more or less consuming data as much as a PUSH notification only . This way I am always getting tracked even if I reboot my phone and there is no need of any app to be running in the background. Also there is no location history in mobileme.com, but with playnice, my server maintains a complete geo co-ordinates history in a text file, which will help me better track my phone , in case it gets lost.

My location data is automatically fetched using Google Latitude Location API. The Google maps app on my phone broadcasts my location automatically and thus you can see my current location on this page

The iframe displayed below uses google location API to fetch the address of my current location. You should head on to this post to read a tutorial on adding this to your own blog.

The mapme.at widget here shows all the locations I have visited in the last 1 week and can pull the data from both Google latitude and Foursquare servers. Pretty cool widget if you switch between foursquare and google latitude/maps on your phone very frequently.

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Please wait till the widget loads

The php curl script will automate a user login to google sms channel ( define username/password in the php code ) and then will send an invite sms to the number specified through the iphone UI. I also had written a script which will send a group sms to all your sms subscribers without actually logging-in to Google sms channels. I will try to find the script and post it here soon.

(573 hits) Flash sourcecode (.fla) file for the iphone widget Download

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