This post in Dutch is about a Auvibel, a tax imposed on the sale of hard disks, usb drives, flash cards,...

Naar aanleiding van de discussie over de Auvibel taks las ik de blog posts van Bart Caron (Groen!) en Vincent Van Quickenborne (Open VLD) met de gebruikelijke diepe zucht wanneer het over de combinatie politiek en technologie gaat.


Bart Caron's argument komt neer op "Laat ons allemaal lief zijn voor de muzikanten", wat een nobel streven is, maar is compleet naast de kwestie. Niemand is tegen het vergoeden van content-creators voor het geleverde werk maar de manier waarop dit nu weer aangepakt wordt getuigt van een totaal gebrek aan technologische kennis.

Quote Bart Caron :

Een piepkleine vergoeding op digitale dragers is geen doodgaan voor de consument nietwaar?

Een mep in het gezicht is geen doodgaan, maar als het even zonder kan, graag.


Het argument van Vincent Van Quickenborne komt neer op "We konden niet anders want Europa liet ons kiezen tussen cholera of de pest". Zwak argument, de laatste keer dat ik gecheckt heb zaten er ook Open VLD'ers in het Europees parlement.

Quote Vincent Van Quickenborne :

Om die reden is er Europese wetgeving (“Richtlijn uit 2001 tot bevordering van de informatiemaatschappij”) die onder meer bepaalt dat voor het kopiëren van beschermde werken steeds een vergoeding verschuldigd is, ook al betreft het een kopie die enkel privé wordt gebruikt.

Met andere woorden: ofwel verbiedt de overheid het kopiëren voor privé-gebruik (vb. vanop een CD naar een iPod), ofwel zorgt ze ervoor dat de auteur daarvoor een “billijke vergoeding” krijgt. In België is geopteerd voor het laatste.

'k Heb mijn reactie nagelaten onder minister Q's blog post, maar ter referentie zet ik ze hier ook nog eens:

De oorzaak van deze rel zit hem dus in de foute Europese richtlijn. Ikzelf gebruik _nooit_ meer een CD-speler om muziek te spelen, mijn laptop is daar veeeel beter voor geschikt. Een taks zetten op het overdragen van content van de ene gegevensdrager naar de andere, da's een beetje zoals iedere keer dat je een kast verplaatst opnieuw aan Ikea te moeten betalen.

Alle muziek op mijn computer heb ik legaal gekocht en het zou niets mogen uitmaken met welk apparaat ik naar deze muziek luister. _Dat_ zou "bevordering van de informatiemaatschappij" zijn.

Europa: terug aan het werk, zorg dat mensen legaal kunnen meegaan met de technologie zonder daar iedere keer opnieuw voor te moeten betalen.

Muzikanten: bevrijd jullie van het juk van de grote platenmaatschappijen. Het internet biedt nieuwe kansen om jullie lot meer in eigen handen te houden.

Radiozenders en concert-organisatoren: hou deze onafhankelijke muzikanten nog iets meer in de gaten, het gaat al de goeje kant uit, maar 't kan nog beter.

Consumenten: ga eens vaker naar een optreden, zo kan je een gezicht plakken op die muziek. De prijs van een CD doet al snel minder pijn.

As most of you already know, friday is my last day at Netlog. After that, I'm starting my next big adventure: my very own software company, Plane Tree Software.

Go check it out, and spread the word!

Over the past few months, quite a few people have started to show interest in learning Cocoa development. Most of these people are not traditional Mac developers, but the success of the iPhone has captured their imagination. "Oh it'd be cool if I could write something that could do ... and I could always have with me".

Well, good news for those that want to get started: I'll be giving a 4-part introduction to Cocoa development in november and december, in cooperation with Zeus, the computer science workgroup at Ghent University. The sessions will be held in the S9 building of the Sterre campus of Ghent University, Belgium and will probably be in Dutch (though English is also an option if someone turns up that doesn't understand Dutch).

The best of all? This introduction is - in true Zeus spirit - completely free!

The dates and topics for the 4 sessions (which start at 8pm) are:

05/11/2009: Objective-C, memory management and the Foundation framework
19/11/2009: Simple applications using AppKit and Interface Builder
03/12/2009: Cocoa tricks (key-value coding, animations,...)
10/12/2009: iPhone development

The goal of these sessions is not to give a complete Cocoa course, but rather to get you started, because the only way to really learn something is by actually doing it. So come and have a listen, try things out at home and bring your questions to the next session!

Hope to see you there!

iTunes Connect allows iPhone developers to see sales/downloads numbers from all over the world, but there's currently no official way to look at all reviews. These reviews are an interesting source of feedback from actual users though, so I made a script that allows me to look at all reviews of the Netlog iPhone app.

As I don't understand every language that's being used in the reviews, I added links to Google Translate, which might not be perfect, but at least it helps me understanding a bit better what's being said.

Then I thought it would be useful for other developers, so I turned into a page where you can enter your own application ID:

http://lievendekeyser.net/reviews

Enjoy!

I needed a way to work with EXIF data on the iPhone. There is already an Objective-C library called iphone-exif, but this is only available under the GPL license, which basically means you cannot use it in closed source projects.

libexif is a plain C library created by Lutz Mueller and others, released under the LGPL license.

I didn't manage to get it to build for the iPhone with the provided configure scripts and makefiles, so I created an Xcode project. As a side effect, it can now be more easily integrated with other Xcode projects: just add a dependency, add the folder to your header search path and link to the built product, and you're off.

Download (480kb tgz file)

You can read more about the changes done to the original code in the libexif-iphone.txt file that's included.

Initial reaction to the Netlog iPhone App has been incredible so far!

On the Belgian iTunes store, we're currently #8 in the top free apps (update: make that #5)

Reviews of people all over Europe are overwhelmingly positive. The app is getting mostly 4 and 5-star ratings and I'm learning superlatives in all kinds of languages.

Of course, this doesn't mean we'll get lazy, as we're already working on fixing some small bugs, adding new and improving existing features. But for now it's fun to see the app doing so well. I hope it will also bring Netlog to the attention people who have overlooked it until now, as it's really one of the best social networks out there, and I'm not just saying that because I work there

I took the liberty to copy some of the reviews here:

Quote Maestro_D on the Belgian store :

Marvelous application! Finally my favourite social network Netlog is available on my favourite phone. It works very well and has some really nice features. Now I can share everything, no matter where I am. I really like the direct photo upload and the shouts.

Quote yvesm007 on the Belgian store :

Best app I have ever seen! Finally, netlog has a very good application for the iPhone and iPod touch! I absolutely love it!!!

Quote Ptidam on the French store :

Aussi complet que le site, en plus simple, un petit coup de coeur pour la geolocalisation...

Quote Amolent on the Italian store :

Ottimo programma...

Quote lj-mic on the Swiss store :

Das beste app, f�r Sociale Netze. Die Erweiterung f�r alle Netloger. Das App ist die Erweiterung, die jeder haben muss. An alle Flick, Myspace und Co User, wechselt zu Netlog

For the past 2 months, I've been working on the Netlog iPhone app, and now it's finally live!
Thanks to Lensco for the design, and the rest of the Netlog team for prototyping, testing and more testing!

To celebrate the downfall of the NDA and in response to a tweet from Fraser Speirs, I've written some sample code to swipe through a list of UIImages.

SlideShow.zip (155kb zip file)

I took a different approach than what Fraser seems to be doing. Where he's using a UIScrollView, I just used 3 UIImageViews (current, previous and next image) which are swapped out after each swipe.

The code is pretty basic and contains no comments at all, but some of you might find it useful...

Enjoy!

I just updated the layout of this site a bit. It now has one of these fancy side bars of which the contents are updated a lot more often than the site itself, so this should make things a bit more interesting.

There are probably still quite a lot of layout -issues, especially on Internet Explorer, but only about 15% of my visitors are using IE and even then, I guess most of them stumble upon this page by accident...

I had promised to write some things about my trip through the southwest of the USA, but we haven't had much luck with internet access up until now.
Right now, we're in the middle of nowhere, otherwise known as Kayenta, Arizona, near Monument Valley. Everything is going great, we've already visited San Diego, Los Angeles, Joshua Tree National Park and Grand Canyon. Next up: Monument Valley, Zion and Bryce, Las Vegas, Death Valley, Yosemite, and finally San Francisco.

I'll upload some photos to my Netlog account. Peace!