Interface and design

The first thing you’ll notice after Opera has started is the speed dial – a signature function feature on the desktop version as well. The speed dial is basically a screen with 9 icons on it, each one of these representing a user specified website. The icons are filled with a screenshot of the website, but the results can be a little off: in TechHaze’s case, only the “aze” of haze was visible, and there’s no option to resize or change the icon.
On top of the screen is the navigation bar, in which you can type an URL. The bar remembers your previous trips on the net and also displays the websites you’ve saved on the speed dial, which is a great time saver. On the right is a search box in which you can specify the search service. Included are Google, Dictionary.com, eBay, IMDb and wikipedia. You can manage the search engines, but there’s only an option to remove some, not add them.
Right below is an other, rather irritating input box, “Recommend to a friend”. I did try to recommend to a friend to see if the box would then disappear, but it does not. This isn’t a good thing, as every pixel on the small iPhone screen counts.

On the bottom are five icons: two arrows for back and forward during browsing (one of which transforms into a zoom out button in case you’ve pinched and zoomed into a page), a reload button, a setting button, and a tab button. That’s right, Opera handles tabs. Not in the same way a desktop browser would, but it does a fairly good job at showing you the webpages you’re browsing on. Basically, a small popup shows up when you hit the button, displaying the websites just like the speed dial does. The settings menu opens a world of options:

• Bookmarks, as you may have guessed is a bookmarks manager. No surprises here, the usual folder/add/delete functions are here, but I do miss the ability to display favicons in the list, as the default bookmark icons looks like a corrupted windows file icon.

• History is also very familiar, displaying your previous browsing activities. There’s a handy little “Clear all” key for those of you who just refuse to follow Apple’s anti-porn crusade.
• Start page takes you to the speed dial, but without opening a new tab.
• Saved pages allows you to save pages for offline use and browse them.
• Settings is another submenu that will allow you to choose wether you want to load images or not, choose the image quality, the font size, fullscreen, mobile view, to set privacy options such as password memory and cookie acceptance, to activate “Opera link”, a bookmark synchronisation service, and to access advanced options such as http or socket protocol selection.
• Find in page is a handy page searcher that will highlight content matching your input.
• Help will display a not so helpful menu displaying version info and copyrights.

The overall UI is well designed and quite snappy. The grey interface reminds me a lot of the desktop version, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, there are few flaws – the lack of control on the speed dial icons and the “recommend to friend” field spoil the experience a little. I prefer Safari’s simplicity, and I also prefer the way safari handles the multiple open windows.

Browsing experience and speed

But an good UI and good bookmarks management isn’t all users are looking for in a browser: if it takes ages to load a page, the best user interface in the world will be useless. The browsing experience is a complex mix of usability, speed, responsiveness and good settings management.

First of all, it’s worth pointing out that Opera Mini has one big roadblock for iPhone and iPod touch users: Apple doesn’t allow you to set any other application as the default for web browsing, so if you’re opening links from other applications, like Mail, you’ll still launch Mobile Safari when you click that link. (To use Opera Mini, you’d have to copy the link, close Mail, open Opera Mini, and paste the link.) That’s not so convenient, but it’s not the end of the world, especially since more and more apps display links in-app unless you explicitly choose to open a link in Safari.

• Boot load time is a little bit tricky to measure because Safari is conserved in the iPhone’s RAM once it has been opened, giving it a clear advantage for warm starts. Opera, on the other had, performs much better on cold starts.
• Browser speed difference leaves no room for error: Opera is really faster than Safari, which can be explained by the fact that it uses a proxy to connect itself to a server that will size the requested website down before sending it to the phone. Tested while connected to wifi, average of 20 pages such as BBC.com or NYTimes.com.

The proxy system may speed things up, but the sad truth is that the website display quality suffers from it immensely. The gradients are broken down, CSS markup is messed up, text is not displayed correctly and when in zoomed out overview mode, it forms tiny black blocks that are just not readable. Safari may take a few more seconds to load pages up, but at least they are displayed correctly (Safari left, Opera right).

Verdict

I still have hope for Opera. After all, they’ve been on the iPhone for just one day, and they have plenty of time to make improvements till the release of iPhone OS 4. One of its strength is the speed, and this may appeal to people who live in areas with poor network connections or who would like to cut down on roaming data costs. If you’re looking for a desktop-like browsing experience though, you might want to stick with Safari for the moment.
Opera Mini 5 is free. Here’s a short video, enjoy:

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Meet FourTrack by Sonoma Wire Works, the developers behind DopplerPad and InstantDrummer, two highly acclaimed musical apps. FourTrack is currently in version 3.1.2, which indicates a maturity that can instantly be seen when you start the app: The loading time is minimal, the interface is gorgeous.
As the name indicates, FourTrack is a four track audio recorder. The main screen is straight forward: four tracks, four faders, four pan wheels, rec/arm buttons, a shuttle wheel, and record/play buttons. To record something, just select track 1, arm it, slide record and slide back when you’re done. Want to start recording track 2 at a specific point in track 1? Use the shuttle wheel. The learning curve here is really minimal. The interface is absolutely gorgeous, well organized and easy to understand.

But there’s more than meets the eye. The song tool button opens world of possibilities: tap it, and eight icons will appear. The first one, the metronome, is probably the most important one. This is where you’ll determine the speed of your song. The metronome features 7 sounds and 4 time signatures. It has wheel to adjust the speed, but there’s also a tap function, which can be useful if you’re just starting with the recording. Digg a little deeper, and you’ll find a pan/volume screen as well as an on/off button, which is a nice addition.
Next on the list of song tools: duplicate. This one is simple, it will just duplicate a song. This can be useful if you’d like to keep a safe copy of your work before playing around with it.
The next tool, called bounce, is where the power of FourTrack resides. Tap it and a dialog screen will ask you if you want to bounce within the song, or to a new song. If you choose within the song, all four tracks of that song will be merged and reduced to two tracks, track 1 being the left channel and track 2 the right one. That’s right, your iPhone can now record a virtually unlimited number of tracks. Just bounce bounce bounce.
The next icon is called Mixdown. As you’ve guessed, tapping it will merge all you tracks into one .wav file, but it doesn’t just stop here. Once the mixdown is complete, a wifi sync button will appear which you can tap to access to the connection screen. An IP adress will then appear on you iPhone. Just type it into your browser, and observe in awe as a fully fledged interface allows you to download the full mix or just the individual tracks. That’s right, your iPhone-based recorder just mutated into a webserver. Wire Works also provides a desktop based software called RiffWorks that will simplify the workflow if you want.

Moving on: the next tool, MasterFX, will allow you to modify the equalization and sonic range of your tracks. Anyone who’s used a basic equalizer shouldn’t have any problems here, again thanks to the beautiful interface and easy pinch/zoom gestures. But it gets quite interesting: click on the little window icon in the bottom and a neat OSX exposé-like feature will appear, allowing you to browse to another window, the compressor. Apple, have a look at it, this is exactly what multitasking should look like on the iPhone.
The compressor will affect the dynamics of your mix. Threshold defines the level at which the compressor begins to work, the attack changes the time it takes (ms) for the compressor to respond to high sound levels, release controls how long it takes for the compressor to stop acting on the high sound levels, and the ratio defines the amount of compression applied to a signal once it exceeds the threshold. The result? A clean, well balanced sound.
The two next tools AudioPaste and PromoTracks allow you to respectively import audio from other supported iPhone apps, and to listen to what people have created using FourTrack. Here is a video of Stephen Poff explaining and using the app, enjoy:

Impressive, huh? Other artists, like the great Al Di Meola have also used this app.

Finally, the settings screen: The tempo setting is a mirror of what you put into the metronome screen, the display option lets you chose between min/sec or bar/beat indicators, and snap will help you use audio paste.

Sonoma Wire Works proudly advertises a 16 bit, 44,1 kHz quality, which is standard CD quality, but don’t be fooled: you won’t achieve anything close to CD sound. Why? Well the first thing is that you’re recording using your iPhone’s internal microphone. It’s much better than I expected it would be (really, Apple should advertise it more), but it’s still not comparable to a studio microphone. Also, the iPhone doesn’t have a dedicated sound card, nor does it have a compressor. If you’re familiar with desktop recording software, you probably know that unless you buy an “interface” (which is usually audio to USB), the noise level in your signal will just be too high. No wonders here, the iPhone doesn’t have any of this, and you can hear it.
The app doesn’t come close to software like Logic Pro or Cubase, but it doesn’t try to. With a pair of good headphones (don’t use that Apple junk), you’ll be able to achieve a lot.

So what is this app good for? Well, pretty much everything that doesn’t require studio-quality recoding. You can record a quick demo with it, a rehearsal with your band for later analysis, you can use it as a scratchpad for riffs or songwriting, hell, you can even use it as a memo. The app is refreshingly simple and clean, bug-free, easy to use and incredibly versatile. In addition to GuitarToolKit, FourTrack is a musthave for the musician on the go.

Of course, this comes at a price. FourTrack is available for 9,99$ at the Apple AppStore.

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Designing a shuttle simulator for the iPhone is bold for various reasons: the platform may not seem appropriate, mostly because of its small screen. Certified pilots say that even with a simulator like FSX, 30″ screens aren’t enough, and that the limited field of view is the biggest obstacle to realism. Also, the lack of physical controls doesn’t seem to be suitable for flight simulation, which is extremely input-critical. Most simulator enthusiasts will tell you that unless you use a joystick, not to mention a yoke and pedals, flight simulation is just a game.
Then, there’s the craft that’s being simulated: How can a sub-1GHz processor seriously try to simulate the most complex object ever designed by mankind? Read on if you want the answers.

As you may know, F-Sim shuttle isn’t the first attempt at bringing the Space Shuttle to the iPhone. Laminar Research, known for their famous cross platform X-Plane desktop simulators, already released an app called “Space Shuttle”, in which you are able to control the orbiter during docking, reentry, final approach and landing. I was actually on the verge of writing a review for this app because I love the concept, but a few days ago, I stumbled upon F-Sim Shuttle, which really blew my mind.

As soon as you start the app, you’ll notice how polished the user interface is compared to Laminar’s app. It’s glossy, clear, beautiful to look at and well organized. Four options are available: “Quick flight”, “New flight”, “Manuals” and “Credits”. Select “New flight” and the flight planing screen will show up. Here, you can choose where you want to land at: right now we’ve got the choice between Edwards Air Force Base and the Kennedy Space Center, both landing sites that the Shuttle has actually landed at. Edwards is usually used as a backup landing facility in case the weather at KSC isn’t good enough. Anyway, once you’ve selected the facility, you can select the runway. For those who aren’t familiar with aeronautics, the runway number corresponds to its heading. Runway 33 has a heading of roughly 330 degrees for instance. While there is only one physical runway at KSC, you’ll have the choice between two approaches (33 and 15), depending on the direction you’re landing in. The runway is chosen according to weather: always land into the wind.

Once you’ve chosen the runway, you’ll have to decide between flying the full approach or the final approach. Contrary to Laminar’s app, F-Sim Shuttle only simulates the last stages of the orbiter’s flight: final approach will put you fully aligned in front of the runway, on the glide slope, ready to fly the final few miles to the runway, to pre-flare, flare, touch down and de-rotate. The full approach will put you at roughly 40,000 feet. In order to align the shuttle with the runway, you’ll have to fly the Heading Alignment Cone (HAC) first. Both flight phases are beautifully explained in the developer’s manual.

Now that you know what the settings mean, it’s time for your first flight. The first thing you’ll notice is how beautiful the scenery is. I got used to Laminar’s FS95′-like pixelated brownish mesh with a runway in the middle of nowhere, but F-Sim really raised the bar, thanks to satellite imagery. It just looks incredibly realistic. For those of you who watch NASA TV, you may have seen a live landing once. My favorite camera angle is when the Heads Up Display (HUD) is visible, because it gives you an idea of how fast and high the orbiter is flying. Well, F-Sim Shuttle will give you exactly that view, and if you don’t look carefully, you can really mistake it for a real world video of a HUD perspective.
But all the graphical realism in the world doesn’t help if the flight dynamics aren’t accurate, and this is certainly an area where F-Sim’s simulator shines. Not that I have ever been in control of Atlantis, but the orbiter behaves exactly like I imagined it would. The controls are slow yet quite accurate. It’s quite easy to guide the shuttle along a specific path, and flying it is a real pleasure. But beware: try to keep your movements smooth, because otherwise you might trigger “pilot induced oscillations” which will require some time, distance and energy to correct. The Space Shuttle was one of the first “fly-by-wire” aircraft ever built. This basically means that the flight stick isn’t directly linked to the flight surfaces, but that the input commands first go through the computer, which analyzes what the pilot wants to do and calculates the correct movements of the flight controls. This allows the computer to restrict the pilot’s actions in order to protect the flight envelope. The most basic form of flight envelope protection is a protection against stalls: the computer will lower the nose of the aircraft if the airspeed is too low. On the iPhone, the computer also controls the speedbrakes.
The flight envelope protection and fly-by-wire systems are quite hard to test on the iPhone because the the device controls the calibrations of the tilt angle of the device, which in some way is like a trim function. On the X-Plane apps, a menu dialog would allow you to calibrate the tilt of the iPhone so that you could play in virtually every position, but F-Sim seems to have implemented this automatically.
As you can imagine, I have tried to stall the orbiter. The maneuver is quite simple: just hold a positive pitch (10 degrees or so) and observe as the airspeed drops. At about 180 knots, the orbiter’s nose will start to pull down but I can’t tell if this is due to a simulated fly-by-wire (I guess fly-by-wire would have pulled the nose down earlier), or due to to the Space Shuttle’s quite unique aerodynamics.
It is however quite easy to pull excessively negative Gs, and an “excessive load limit” alert will show up. Overspeeds have their own alarm too. There’s also basic simulated damage. Touch down too hard and a tire will blow for instance.

The Heads Up Display is a gem. X-Plane uses the same HUD on a Cessna, 777 and the Space Shuttle, which creates obvious limitations. F-Sim, however, features a beautiful (gorgeous!) instrument, that has almost all the indications of the real thing. As for the flight maneuvers, the developer has compiled a very useful manual on the various de-clutter modes, indicators and guidance systems. It’s a must read before you attempt the landing. The only thing missing here is a runway overlay on the HUD, which can be quite useful if you’re doing the approach with low clouds. It turns out that both the clouds and the runway overlay are planned for an upcoming update (see screenshot), which is great news. Additional airfields, external views, replays, failures and night landings are also planned.

Even though the the Space Shuttle is a uniquely complex vehicle, it’s basically just a very heavy glider in the final stages of its flight, which is why a device like the iPhone can simulate it surpringly well. Also, keep in mind that the the computer in the Apollo capsules were less powerful than a 10$ solar-powered calculator you can find in any store nowadays.

As for the controls, the iPhone is actually convenient for flight simulation because its physical state (bank and pitch) will reflect the aircraft’s attitude.
F-Sim Space Shuttle may not simulate as many situations as its X-Plane counterpart, but what it does, it does way better. The sounds (altitude and navigation shout outs), the visual aids (PAPI and ball/bar) and landing analysis are some of the many impressive features you’ll find in the app. The combination of photo-realistic graphics, smooth user interface and amazing flight dynamics made this app one of the most spectacular pieces of software I’ve ever come across. If you’re an aeronautics enthusiast it’s must have, and if not, you should buy it anyway just to see what the iPhone can actually do.

F-Sim Shuttle is so amazing that I just had to get in touch with Sascha Ledinsky, the Austrian developper of the App, and ask him a few questions.

TechHaze: Tell us more about yourself. What professional field do you come from?
Sascha Ledinsky: I’m 35, happily married and we’ve got two lovely kids: A five year old girl and a three year old boy.
After college I started to work as a network engineer. The Internet was still relatively new by that time, so it was quite exciting. Later I focused on software development. I’ve always been interested in mathematics and computer science and did a lot of self-study in these fields. I’m also working on an open source 3D modeling and animation tool called JPatch. It’s idling along these days, but I hope that I’ll find the time to continue development soon.

TH: What compelled you to develop F-Sim Shuttle? Is this you first iPhone project?
SL: I’ve always been interested in space flight, and I remember watching the first shuttle launches live on TV when I was six years old. I’m also a huge fan of X-Plane on the desktop. You can land the shuttle there too, which is pretty cool. But it had no guidance information, no flare indicators, etc. in the HUD (compared to the real orbiter’s HUD, as seen on the landing videos on NASA-TV). So I started writing an “external” Space Shuttle HUD that connected to X-Plane and displayed the missing information – just for fun, I’ve never planned to release it. Later, when I bought an iPod touch and realized its tremendous 3D graphics performance, I had the idea of porting it to iPhoneOS and developing it into a full blown flight simulation.

TH: Why did you choose the iPhone over other platforms for F-Sim Shuttle? Do you plan on releasing an android app?
SL: Short answer: The App Store. I’ve read a lot of different stories about it, some about successful projects, others about projects that failed commercially. I already had a MacBook, so I’ve downloaded the SDK and decided to start a little experiment to find out for myself.
Android is interesting and I’ll definitely keep an eye on it (and other mobile platforms), but right now my focus is on the iPhone and the iPod touch.

TH: Tell us more about your design process. What did you start with?
SL: I had the HUD and a very rudimentary flight dynamics model on the PC when I stared porting it to the iPhone. I had to learn to write for the iPhone first, so I developed the graphics related code on the iPhone (I knew OpenGL quite well from my other project) while improving the flight model on the PC in parallel. I had to write a lot of extra code on the PC as well: Programs that took the ortho-images, pre-filtered them and converted them to textures, programs for visualizing the forces that act on the vehicle (to debug the flight model), even a “virtual wind-tunnel” to get some data I needed for the speedbrake logic.

TH: The Shuttle is one of the most complex objects ever built, yet you managed to design an astonishing simulator that runs…  on a phone. Where did you get your data from? Have you ever ridden in a full flight space shuttle simulator? Did you get feedback from an actual astronaut?
SL: There’s a lot of data available on the Internet, but my primary source was NASASpaceflight.com. There’s an incredible amount of information in their “level 2″ area, including original NASA documents and a lot of videos. I watched all the landing videos and read some chapters of the “Space Shuttle Crew Operations Manual”. There is also a detailed description of the HUD and all its display functions in the “Guidance And Navigation Systems Brief” which provided invaluable information. I’ve watched all of MIT’s iTunes-U lectures about the shuttle and read “From Runway to Orbit”. Last not least there’s a paper about energy management which contains very detailed information about the guidance system: The guidance in F-SIM basically uses the same equations as the real Shuttle computers. The orbiter’s mass, its center of gravity, the surface area and geometry of the wings and control surfaces, even its moments of inertia are all modeled accurately in F-SIM. I could not find any wind-tunnel data of the actual orbiter, so I had to guess there. But I knew a lot of other figures, like its lift over drag, turn rate in the HAC, the deceleration in level flight above the runway, etc. so whenever I had to guess I tried to match those performance numbers. I’ve never got a chance to ride a space shuttle simulator, and so far there’s no feedback from astronauts. But I’ve got very positive feedback from a shuttle engineer working at KSC.

TH: F-Sim Shuttle is a wonderful app, and some already see it as a foundation for a whole family of  new sims. Do you plan on developing a powered aircraft sim for the iPhone?
SL: There’s still a lot of things I’d like to add to F-SIM Space Shuttle first, like an external view and landing replays. But if it sells well (and things are looking quite good) I’d love to develop a sim for powered aircraft.

TH: There has been a lot of buzz about Apple’s new device lately, the iPad. Do you plan on endorsing the device? Also, do you plan on developing a desktop simulator, now that Microsoft Flight Simulator is dead?
SL: The iPad looks promising. All iPhone Apps should run on the iPad out of the box, but with the larger screen and better performance I could use even higher resolution textures and perhaps a full 3D cockpit. So yes, I’m thinking about a special iPad version, but I can’t make any promises yet. Right now I don’t have any plans for a desktop version. What’s interesting is WebGL: A trimmed down version that runs in a web-browser, that could be fun.

TH: Tell us about your experiences with Apple, as a developer. Are you satisfied with the way the App store works?
SL: X-Code is a very nice IDE and the Interface Builder is a powerful tool. I’ve got about 7 years of experience as a Java developer, but switching to C/Objective C and the iPhone platform was easier that I thought. It’s a very interesting platform with a powerful SDK and good documentation, so from a developer’s perspective you can’t ask for more. As for the App Store: Well, everything is automated and works fine. At the beginning I was a bit confused by all the certificates you need to digitally sign your apps, but the documentation is OK and you can also find help on the net. I was positively surprised by the app review process. I’ve read a number of horror stories about Apps being rejected constantly or in-review for several weeks. But with F-SIM I just uploaded it and four days later it was “ready for sale”, so I can’t complain.

TH: Sascha, thank you very much for your time. We can’t wait to see your fantastic project evolve!

F-Sim Space Shuttle is available for 1,99$ at the Apple App store. Go get it.
Update (03/29/2010): Version 1.2 now includes full runway overlays, night landings, a cloud layer and adjustable visibility!

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