01:11 - Azam Sharp Introduction

02:14 - iBeacons 

03:50 - Retail Adoption

05:26 - Apps and iBeacons

05:56 - Can you fake out an iBeacon?

07:12 - Why the slow adoption of iBeacons?

08:48 - Setting Up Beacons

14:21 - Precision

18:12 - Range

19:28 - Life Expectancy

21:08 - APIs and SDKs

30:35 - More Use Cases

Picks

Anker PowerPort 5 (Alondo)
FIRST LEGO League (Jaim)
UIStackView (Andrew)
Rewind (Andrew)
DMG Canvas (Andrew)
Allrecipes (Chuck)
LinkedIn (Chuck)
7 Minute Body (Azam)

 

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 127 of the iPhreaks Show. This week on our panel we have Andrew Madsen.

Hello, from Salt Lake City.

Alondo Brewington.

North Carolina.

Jaim Zuber.

Hello from [inaudible].

Wow, that’s quite a fiasco. I’m Charles Max Wood from Devchat.tv. This week we have a special and that’s Mohammad Azam.

Hey, how are you doing?

Great. You want to introduce yourself?

Yes. So my name is Mohammad Azam. I go by Azam. I am located in Houston, Texas. I work for Blinds.com, one of the cool company there in Houston. I work as a senior mobile developer but work in – pretty much my role is very dynamite so I work pretty much in a .NET environment, Microsoft stuff also, Android and also iOS. But most of the time it’s basically responsive design, little bit of iOS, little bit of [inaudible] all mixed together basically.

On the side, I’m always working on my own projects. Just submitted my Apple TV app, it got approved and it’s available for sale. It’s called 7 Minute Body and hopefully you will download it from the Apple TV store.

Wow. It’s funny because when we have guests and I’m here sitting here thinking, “I’ve used them before,” it’s usually because they work for some tech company. But Blinds.com, I have used them before.

Yeah, I get that a lot. [Laughter]

Well, we brought you on to talk about iBeacons.

Yes iBeacon. I stated developing for iBeacons I would say maybe six, seven months ago. There was a Houston hackathon going on at that time where you have 24 hours and you have to basically finish a product in 24 hours. So one of the projects that I worked was to create an iBeacon app for Houston museums.

So iBeacon, if you have to step back to discuss what exactly it is, iBeacon is a Bluetooth, low energy device and it’ll send you the Bluetooth signal and it can only send; it cannot receive. Each iBeacon then send you a UUID which is like a six digit long number; a major I’d which is like an integer, and then a minor I’d which is often an integer. And your app, Android or iOS app, it can consume those free entities – free attributes and display whatever data you want to display.

During that time I created that for the Houston hackathon, I completed the app, the museum tour we call it. I live in Houston, Texas and we have a very rich museum district which you might be already aware of. So basically the plan was you go near a painting and there is iBeacon behind the painting, somewhere hidden, and as you go near the painting it will automatically refresh on your iPhone or your iPad reflecting the status of the painting, the description of the painting, the history of the painting. So that kind of app I developed for the Houston hackathon.

Oh, very cool. So when they introduced the iBeacon, I heard all these people saying, “Oh, all the retail stores are going to get it and then they’re going to pop up a coupon on your phone.” I’ve never seen anything like that.

So it’s interesting to see that there’s actually a used forum in the sense of pushing data to the phone or having your phone react to where you are.

Yes, that’s a very good question because retail market had been extremely slow in adopting this thing. I think that Target store is one of the only store that I’ve heard that they’re going to introduce and they’re going to utilize iBeacons in the 50 selected stores. I think one of them might be in Austin also but most of them are in New York and San Francisco area. But yes, Target is the only one of these that –.

This has already been used in some of the grocery companies, like little grocery companies, not like Walmart and H-E-B’s but much smaller grocery companies and they have seen a very high return of investment using the iBeacons. And when I was talking about iBeacons in museum, in Netherland/Holland there’s a museum called [inaudible] land and it’s basically a tulip museum, a flower museum, and they have already integrated their museum with the iBeacon so if you go close to a certain display of flower, a certain display of Tulips, your iPhone app or your iPad will reflect where you’re standing and also give you a guidance to how you can get to a certain other part of the museum.

But yes, you’re right. In the retail industry, it has been a little bit slow to adopt but hopefully we’ll see that happening.

I’m also wondering to some degree – well for one you have to have the app installed that actually reacts to the data that’s sent back by the iBeacon, correct?

Yes, absolutely correct.

So the iBeacon can’t say, “Hey, here’s your coupon,” or “Hey, here’s where you’re at.” It’s actually the app that says, “Oh, I detect that you’re standing close to this iBeacon and I know that that means you’re standing next to this collection of flowers or whatever.

Yes, so you have to have the app installed in order for the iBeacons to work. That is true.

One other thing that I’m curious about is what’s to keep me from putting in, say, Bluetooth transmitter on my computer and have it transmit erroneous data, kind of fake out being an actually iBeacon somewhere?

There are ways, yes. There are some ways that you and create a Mac app or an iPhone app and you can step into [inaudible] or you can step into some other store, and if they have iBeacon installed you will get all the information from those iBeacons using the Bluetooth signal. You can do that but you cannot push that kind of app to the app store.

Okay.

So you cannot push an app that will say, “Hey, give me all the iBeacon found in [inaudible],” so you’re not con – that will be basically rejected by Apple. You have to know the UUID, the major. I’d and minor I’d. So if you’re using an Estimote iBeacons which are one of the most popular ones, then they will provide you a certain iBeacons with the UUID and major I’d and minor I’d. If you’re using particle iBeacons, their IDs will be, of course, much different than the Estimote or any other iBeacons.

So you have to know those things in order to work with iBeacons.

It sounds like there’s still has been some slow adoption for using iBeacons. What do you think is the reason for that? It seems like this will be a pretty useful thing to have in your retail outlet.

I think retail outlets – most of the big retail outlets, just like any other giant company, they move like

a glacier – they move really, really slowly. It was quite nice to see that Target is investigating more than adopting iBeacons. According to some research, by 2020, they were saying that more stores will be adopting. When you enter Home Depot, when you enter Walmart or any other store, you will see more iBeacons surrounding that.

It’s also the implementation issue. The iBeacon itself of the – creating an iBeacon app is not difficult at all but you have to be really sensitive of pushing those notification out. So you have to think a lot that where and what and why would I be pushing notification and how many notification do I have to push out to the user. And that’s based of course on the different events that are generated by the iOS STK code. So you have to be very careful not to cross that line of basically spamming the user with a hundred notification that, “Hey, do you want to buy that jeans? Do you want to buy that jeans? Do you want to buy that jeans” It will annoy the users but for the retail companies or the retail environment, the flow adoption is mostly I believe because of this is more of a hardware the you physically have to install somewhere an retail companies are all these big companies, are very slow to move on it.

So if I’m going into a store for example, take a step back, am I getting a notification only when I enter and leave a particular zone that’s in [inaudible] to my iBeacon?

So there are multiple ways of setting up the iBeacon. So Apple has provided the STK which is a location manager STK or location manager classes and once you entered the store, there are some events that is ‘did enter region’ or ‘did exit region’.

‘Did enter region’, people assume that it will be fired instantly once you entered a region that is being monitored by iBeacon but that is actually not true. So it’s not fired instantly; it might take a

couple of minutes for that to fire and that is basically from Apple, that’s the whole purpose of ‘did enter region’ and ‘did exit region’ to fire because sometimes you enter a store and you say, “Okay, you know what, I forgot my keys in there. I forgot my wallet in the car,” or “I forgot this and this” and you get out of the store. So they don’t really want to fire those events instantly. They want to make sure that you have – did enter the region and you have actually exited the region.

Now, if I’m taking example of Home Depot, so let’s say they have some iBeacons on a drill machine shelf. They can provide a certain range using Estimote iBeacons or any other Beacons, they can provide a certain range that this iBeacon will only trigger, then I am very far which can be 60-70 feet. I can be near, which is a couple of meter like five or six feet or something. All immediate which is really next to it, mostly immediate – you will never use. Mostly you will use a nearer part. And you can control those things that you can make the range much larger or smaller remotely so you can test out different things.

When I begin [inaudible] about two years ago, everyone got really excited. The started developing apps or the apps, as you said, were pretty simple and you don’t have to do too much so you go into a region, you listen for things. The initial test of actually getting these systems to work were pretty tough. People ran away screaming from iBeacons because you have a bunch of iBeacons in the room and the one next to you would be that strong and the one across the room shows up a full string so it’s hard to actually get a good location.

Especially indoors like a retail shelf which might be metal and might have right angles and all crazy stuff. That’s part of the reason why there has been a wide adoption of retail because implementation has been difficult from the people that I’ve talked with which since we’re talking about advanced iBeacons, what are some ways that we can minimize those headaches? Because there are people throwing out systems that are working.

Yes, so I’ve tested these two beacons and of course in my scenario I –. Actually one of the scenarios I did have little bit of all the [inaudible] in front of it but I have used a Particle Beacon which is by KS Technologies and I have used an Estimote Beacons which is by the company Estimote. So if I have to test the ‘did enter region’, ‘did exit region’ kind of events, for Particle Beacon what you can simply do is to take out the battery. So you take all the battery and then after a couple of minutes or after 30/60 seconds or so, ‘did exit region’ will fire and once you entered the battery again, then the ‘did enter region’ will fire.

Now for Estimote, they have a really cool feature that you can enable; the sleep. So if you turn the Estimote Beacon upside down, it will actually go to sleep so that way you can test it out the Estimote Beacons if it’s inside the region, if it’s entering the region or exiting the region.

In case of a barrier in front of the regions or barrier in front of the iBeacons like if there’s a ball or some sort of a concrete or steel or something, then you have to make sure that they are installed correctly at the correct location. There’s no way around that because you can have an iBeacon which is a full strength Beacon and a full battery, full power, full signal, but if you have something – a barrier between, then the consumer might not be able to listen to it.

Now, I’ve used iBeacon practically; I was on a vacation a couple of months ago, maybe three or four months ago we went to Denver with my family and what I did – we did an app called Arrived and using the Particle Beacon, I placed the Particle Beacon inside my luggage. So I took the picture of my luggage – the bags and I noted down ‘okay, this luggage is a sports bag, this luggage is a black bag or whatever’ and I placed an iBeacon inside the luggage and checked it in.

So when I landed in Denver, at the carousel I got a notification that hey, your luggage has arrived’.

Oh that’s cool.

So that was a very cool, practical scenario that I used it for and it worked flawlessly. It was actually – some time I was receiving two notifications after a while because sometime the bag was on the carousel and went inside the area where it was away. So I was like – it says that ‘hey, I’ve received my bag’ but I didn’t see my bag on the carousel. So I later found out that the bag was on the other side of the carousel and will eventually return from the other side. And it worked pretty good; I’m going to use it again basically for all my trips.

That’s pretty darn slick, I have to say.

I’m curious to know how good the – I guess the right word is ‘precision’ – of iBeacon’s proximity estimation is. I’ve noticed all of the Apple stores have iBeacons in them so that when you walk into the Apple store, the Apple store app comes up on your lock screen or you get a notification.

I noticed that I’ll be at the mall and really not even that close to the Apple store and the notification will come up as if it cannot really tell that I’m not actually in the store. So I’m curious if that’s a problem or something you’ve seen?

Using iBeacon to pinpoint the exact location of a person, it is extremely hard and Estimote has an indoor STK which is actually designed for this purpose but you need four iBeacons to do that. And even if you have four iBeacons to pinpoint a person’s exact, precise location, it really depends on if there are any barriers in between, if there are any. What is the signal strength of each iBeacon? What is the battery life of each iBeacon?

I’ve never really seen iBeacon to be used as this kind of a purpose to exactly pinpoint unless of course you are in some airport where they have hundreds of iBeacons installed and they can tell you how you can get from terminal A to terminal B. But for Apple store and these kind of things, it can be related, too, if they have programmed it incorrectly. I think they have setup the range incorrectly to say 70 meters instead of ten meters. So there can be a lot of stuff that can be wrong between the iBeacons.

But you’re right; it’s not a perfect – you’re not going to get a perfect scenario all the time. Sometimes, it will be off a little bit and you will see that you will be getting signals which are meant for 70 meters; you’re getting it in 30 meters or ten meters apart.

Now is that due to that stuff that is between you and the customer or something wrong with your phone?

It can be all of these. It can be the quality of the signal that’s – your receiving it could be the RS summing the ‘receive signal strength’ which you can configure that you are sending out a maximum powerful signal strength versus a normal signal strength. It can be your phone also because the new devices like iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s, they will be much quicker to interpret and receive those signals as compared to iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s.

Yeah, I think there’s it’s a wide range of different things that affect the signals.

I’ve talked with people who are doing implementations in a hospital setting where they would have, not specifically an iBeacon but a BLE device to – some equipment that they are using like a scalpel, “Dr. Smith runs off with a scalpel. Where is it? I don’t know.” And they have things moving between floors overnight when there’s no one in there just by random things happening, battery draining. There’s a wide range of things that affect the results that you get.

Yeah, and for moving things, the Estimote also has a – so these are iBeacon but Estimote also has the sticker iBeacons; I think they’re called Nearables. So the concept of Nearables is that they are basically stickers. So you attach the sticker iBeacon which is Nearable onto an object that is moving. So you can attach a sticker to your dog or a cat and then you can track that that if it is moving or not, I mean your cat is moving or your cat is running and all that stuff. So that’s kind of cool that you can track the moving objects also. You can attach it to your bicycle and you can make sure that they are moving.

So one thing that I’m wondering about is exactly how does it range things? Is it near, mid and far or is it more of it’s in range or not within range or is it all of the above? Does it go off of the signal strength or does it actually know that the iBeacon is cranked way up or cranked way down?

It doesn't know that much about the signal strength, I will say that, but it depends on how you’ve configured it. So there are different ways one can be unknown which is if your iBeacon is very, very far away, like more than 60 meters so that it is unknown. Now far can be 60 meters, 50 meters, 40 meters depending on the type of the iBeacon you are using. Near can be two meters, five meters; this can be near. And immediate is like 0.5 meter to basically very, very close to the iBeacon itself. And using Estimote – I’ve used Estimote for basically setting out a different kind of ranges. So using Estimote app like the iPhone app, you can configure your iBeacons to be far, near or immediate based on your scenario or based on your requirement.

I know this is probably vary according to which device but what type of life expectancy can someone expect for one of these Beacons?

So I’ve used a Particle iBeacon and Particle take those 2032 – that particular cell of battery and I have seen it lasting for – of course it depends on many factors of how you are sending your signal or how you are basically populating your signal to other. But I have seen around three months to four months for Particle Beacon.

For Estimote Beacon, I haven’t changed – well, they say that this is around one and a half year, 12 months to one and a half year. The problem – Estimote Beacon looks very nice and polished and cute but one of the problems that I see with Estimote Beacon is you cannot change the battery so you have to – if you have seen Estimote Beacons they have a rubber coating so you have to completely cut off the cording with a knife and then you have to install the battery.

I have contacted Estimote on this that if you cut off those rubber top and they will send you a new one but I think there should’ve been a much better way to change the battery just to completely compromise the Beacon. Pretty much you are destroying the Beacon at that point because you’re cutting the top of the Beacon to change the battery.

There are some Beacons which are much larger which takes AA batteries so that will last at least two years. So each Beacon, depending on their size, is very different for four months to two years.

Now you talked about Estimotes having an API for location if you had four and I don’t remember the other brands you brought up. Do the other ones have similar APIs [inaudible]?

So Estimote does provide their own implementation of if you wanted to use that but I have used whatever the APIs are provided by Apple so I haven’t used classes. So I have used the location manager and all the – basically all the cord that Estimote have actually provided and the same thing that I had done with the Particle Beacon also, but if you want to create an iBeacon app most probably you want to target all the users instead of only the iOS users.

So Estimote does provide APIs which can work with Android apps. Also, it will – so iBeacon will work for Android also provided that you’re using whatever is provided by Estimote STK. Also, they also provide the – well, I’m actually blanking out on the name – eddystone. So eddystone is basically Google’s implementation of the iBeacon protocol. It will work on Android devices as well as iOS devices. Estimote does provide an STK to work with eddystone.

So if you use Estimote’s STK, does that only work with Estimote’s Beacons or will their STKs work with other company’s Beacons, too?

I haven’t used their STK but I’m going to say that it will only work – I haven’t used it so I’m not sure if it will work with other, but it usually depends on those three IDs that you’re providing. So I’m going to say that yes, it should work if you have those three IDs of any other Beacon then you can even use Estimote STK to do that stuff. I think one of the features that Estimote STK provides is the usage of the accelerometer so your Beacon can wake up, your Beacon can throw events if there is some sort of disturbance basically. If you move the Beacon, it’s going to throw an event.

So those are some of the features the Estimote Beacons actually provides. You can write your own things but those are actually built into it – Estimote STK.

I’m going to so use an Estimote Beacon, put it into my house and then it’ll wake me up going ‘Earthquake’! [Laughter]

One question that I have about all of these is that it seems like the iBeacon setup is pretty simple. In other words, your phone detects that it’s there; I’m just assuming that’s just a general Bluetooth, low energy kind of thing where the one saying ‘I’m here, I’m here, I’m here’ and the other one’s going ‘Oh, I found you’ and then they talk and they get that information.

During that information exchange, is there any way that you could actually collect information on the phone that’s passing by the Beacon? Even just some kind of identifier or something?

Yeah, you will. In the – basically, if you’re using Estimote Beacons or any other Beacons, using the APIs provided by Apple, you will receive all the things that are provided by those Beacons so you will receive all that UUID and major ID and minor ID and based on those things you can change anything you want.

Yeah, I was curious if it went the other way though, is there any way that the iBeacon will know my phone and your phone are next to the same iBeacon? Because that might be interesting for a different gaming application or something where you’re driving through town and you’ve set up Beacons throughout the city and you start to – so it’s like ‘George is right by you’ or something.

iBeacon itself cannot listen to anything but if you can program it. Yes, so I guess if you can have some ID related to each iPhone and then you receive those signals, you send the ID to your server and then save the geo tags or latitude and longitude then you might be able to, yes, you might be able to do those things. Passing through that iBeacon – it might get the data for that particular location it represents, get all the people who were passing from that location and tell you ‘hey, five of your friends passed from the exact same location’.

I think one of the other uses that I saw and I heard about it – I don’t know if it is implemented or not but there was one company or I think it was called the Health Department or something. They were implementing iBeacon throughout their campuses and they were encouraging every employee to install their app and then take a walk, like take maybe 10, 20 minute walk and start being healthy and stay fit. So then all of these iBeacons were basically tracking that if have walked a mile, if you have walked two miles and things like that. So basically the same concept as the app that you were describing; when you’re passing through some location, it can tell you that this person has actually passed.

I’d like to talk a little bit about the APIs for using iBeacon in iOS. We talked about how they’re – there’s Estimote STK and Google has their open spec but I think most of our audience are just plain old iOS developers. Can you explain a little bit about what the API for iBeacon looks like?

Absolutely. So the first thing, when you’re using the location manager, the first thing you only have to do starting from iOS 8 is you have to request the authorization. So if you don’t do that, your location manager will never kick in; it’s never going to work. Basically, that is part of the location manager – request all these authorization, protocol or the [inaudible] so you have to call that and you also have to make an entry for NS location or the user description in the [inaudible] list and that particular entry that you’re going to make is going to be converted into an alert [inaudible] basically, and the user has to say, “Yeah, I agree with that. You’re going to be using my location and you’re going to be running in the background.”

So that’s the first step that you’re going to take or else your application is not going to work. But then after you have done that, you can simple register the Beacon with the location manager by saying basically ranging for Beacons and adding the Beacons to that particular location manager. There are different kind of events that are triggered which is ‘did enter region’, ‘did exit region’, and ‘did range Beacons’. And these are mostly all the three events that you will be interested.

I’ve explained earlier, ‘did enter region’ does not instantly get fired; it might take a while for that event to actually trigger. Same goes with the ‘did exit region’, so if you want to say good bye to someone when they leave your store, it’s not going to be inside if your code is inside ‘did exit region’; it’s going to take maybe 10 seconds or maybe a couple of minutes if you are exiting the region.

The event that is fired all the time is ‘did range Beacons’ which is simple saying that ‘are there any Beacons, are there any Beacons, are there any Beacons?’. So this particular ‘did range Beacons’ is actually fired all the time. Now it’s not a good idea to do a calculation or things inside the ‘did range Beacons’ but I have actually done that in the Arrived app because it’s for me, testing; it’s not on the app store and my whole purpose is to find the airport; with two kids who are crying, I don’t want to wait another second. I don’t want to wait for ‘did enter region’ or ‘did exit region’ to get fired; I just want to know if my bag is here or not and just take the bag and go home but you should think in your scenario if you want to implement something inside ‘did range Beacons’ even which is being fired all the time.

So basically these are the three events that you will be needing to fire or to work with the iBeacons, and no matter what kind of app that you are building using iBeacon, these will always be the three events that you will be looking at.

So those three APIs that you’re talking about, all of these is in core location, right? You don’t end up having to drop down use the core Bluetooth APIs at all, correct?

Yes, you don’t have to use that. It’s all in the core location. And if you don’t have iBeacons, some of the iBeacon like Particle iBeacon is like $40 for one iBeacon. Estimote iBeacons are three iBeacons for $100 and if you don’t have those, you can actually convert your computer, your Mac into an iBeacon. So there’s an app; it’s called MactsAsBeacon. It will give you a UUID and a major ID and a minor ID. It’s a Mac app so it will generate that ID and then you can feed that ID into your application so now your Mac is acting like a Beacon. So if you come near your Mac, it’s going to trigger those events and going to send those IDs.

If you don’t have a Mac that has Bluetooth compatible or that does not have a Bluetooth LTE then you can actually buy a Bluetooth LTE USB which is maybe 15 buck or 14 bucks from Amazon and plug it on a USB port and now your Mac will be compatible with the Bluetooth LTE.

So besides some of the use cases that you’ve put out there as possible things you can do with iBeacons, are there any other things that you’ve seen people do with them that are interesting or unique?

I’ve used iBeacon for another purpose also although it’s very similar to the Arrived baggage claim purpose. I’ve put one iBeacon into my daughter’s bag and she goes to school in a bus and of course you have to receive her. The bus comes through, the parents have to be outside to receive the kid. Sometimes I’m upstairs, sometimes I’m in the garden and I don’t really realize that the bus has been waiting outside. Now when she comes, the iBeacon send a signal and then I know that my daughter is here so I just go to the front porch and then pick her up.

So that’s one of the other reason that is very similar to the baggage claim that’s one in Arrived you will know. Then the museum is a very good example; if you have a city where you live in where the very great – a great museum district like Houston, they can take advantage of the iBeacon, install it. And the great thing about installing the iBeacons is that the information that you’re displaying on an iPhone or a Mac or an iPhone or an iPad on a user’s device, it’s all dynamic information. If you find something new about the painting, about the sculpture, about an artefact, you can go ahead and change it and it will reflect on the device, on the customer device.

If you go back to the old school method, you have to enter a museum and then you have to put on those large headsets and listen to some tape or cassette or something; those information, most probably they’re not going to change that; that is recorded once. If they have to change that it’s going to cost thousands of dollars to change that. So that’s another really great usage of iBeacons.

So the effort with the museum, was that something that you just bound here for or is it a desire that come from the museum themselves?

No, I was part of the Arrived, taking part in the Houston hackathon and basically it was 24 hours and develop something. So I developed this prototype and I also talked to the museum districts if they will be – if they’re willing to create something like this, we can help them create something like this. The talks are basically still going on but it was part of the Houston hackathon 2015 where I presented that ‘hey, this idea for Houston museum’. We have a lot of museum – national museum. We have [inaudible] selection and all of national size museum with a very, very famous museum in Houston. They can all benefit from iBeacons.

Other things that I’ve heard is that some area which have mom and pop shops, it will be a good idea to give them a business that they can subscribe to a service and then a person who has an app installed, when that person is passing in that particular area, it will get notification that ‘hey, these clothes are on sale’ or ‘these hair clips are on sale’ or ‘these things are on sale’. So it’s also very good for those small mom and pop shops and they can take advantage of the people that are waking outside their shops to learn more about what is inside.

I kind of want to put one – like what you did with your daughter where you put it in the backpack and then actually build a Devchat.tv app, and then one of the Easter eggs is if you come within a certain distance of me, it’ll ping your phone and say ‘hey, Chuck’s around’.

Yeah. I think all the – there are a lot of iOS events like NS [inaudible] then there’s #Pragma Conference and there was a Release Note conference; there’s a lot of [inaudible] in 360 iDev and all that stuff going on. The iBeacon can be very useful for these conferences also that you just – it can help you locate where the actual section is going on. It can also help you if you’re standing outside, basically the entrance you can see the whole schedule of what sessions will be given in a particular room so it can work in different ways for conferences.

Oh wow. That’s cool. Alright, well if there’s nothing else I know that some of us have a hard stop. Yeah, is there anything else we should cover before we hit some picks?

I think that’s pretty much it. I encourage everyone to try out iBeacons. If they cannot buy – if they don’t want to buy iBeacons, they can always test it out using their Mac with the app MactsAsBeacon. But yeah, you can use that app to try it out on your Mac and see how it works. And if you do try it out, please let us know about the use cases that you are trying to solve because that will be very beneficial. Like the baggage claim or the Arrived app, you can build very similar things of nature or probably different things and that will help innovate in that area.

Alright, well let’s do some picks. Alondo, do you have some picks for us?

Yeah. I have one pick this week and the first will probably be many travel related ones as I get ready for Remote year. The first one and the only one this week is the Anker PowerPort 5 that I’ve picked up in the last couple of weeks. It’s a nice little USB charger; I was running out of spaces; if I only have two USB ports on my laptop so I’m trying to keep all these test devices charged up was becoming a hassle so that is what I’m currently using and I’m pretty pleased with it.

Yeah, those things are freaking nice. I’ve got a couple of Anker things like that. Jaim, what are your picks?

Okay, I’ve got one pick. I’m going to make a pick for the FIRST LEGO League which is a robotics conference for kids, think age four to eight. I didn’t know this initially but FIRST is a part of a larger group that does robotics competitions for kids. I mean the older kids but this is the LEGO League so they build robots using Lego’s; they have a Mindstorm kit. I’ve been working with kids over the past few weeks and they’re really getting into it so they’re getting their [inaudible] robots, making it do things, trying things out, the same type of things that we do in our jobs. I was mentoring them and helping them out and a cool event. You’re probably too late to get to go in for this year because the competition started happening in November/December but if you’ve got kids that you think might want to do some programming, check out the FIRST LEGO League.

Alright. Definitely got to check that out for my kids. Andrew, what are your picks?

I’ve got two picks today. My first pick I an API and it’s new in iOS 9 although the counterpart has been on OS 10 for a little while but it’s called UIStackView. This was introduced at WWDC this summer but I’ve got my first taste of actually using it in the last few weeks where I’ve been converting an older app that was written for iOS 5, going through it and modernizing it and converting it to use all the new layout stuff that they’ve introduced since then. And I’ve been using UIStackView and it’s just a really nice API in comparison to some of the older stuff. In particular it makes so – it handles a lot of the stuff that auto-layout could be used for. It does that for you and it’s just easier to use for doing a lot of UI layout you might not immediately think could be done a stacks of stacks of stack of views but you can do them with UIStackView so check that out if you’re not using it.

My second pick is I think a new app which just came out in the last couple of days but I ran across it today and it’s called Rewind. It’s an app that runs and it’s always continuously recording 60 seconds of your screen. The idea is if something happens on your screen and you want a recording of it, you’ve always got the last 60 seconds of whatever happened. I think this is useful for developers because sometimes you’re using an app during development and something goes wrong, but wait a second, it passes you before you even quite notice it. So being able to go back and see a recording of exactly what happened can be pretty valuable.

And actually while I’m at it, I’m going to pick an app by the same company because I didn’t even really realized it was made by them but it’s called DMG Canvas and I’ve used this for a long time to make disk images on the Mac which is cool, so those are my picks.

Alright. So I have a couple of picks. The first one is Allrecipes.com. The reason I’m picking this is because my wife is very pregnant at this point. We’re within a month of having our fifth child. She just can’t be standing long enough to make a good dinner, so a lot of times the kids have cereal or stuff in dinner so finally I said, “Look, I will take care of dinner.” So I went on all recipes and I found a bunch of recipes that my kids were pretty picky and my wife who is also pretty picky will actually eat. So I’m going to be taking over dinner.

The thing I like about it is I paid for a subscription ad what that does is you can actually then add recipes to your favourites list which I think you can do anyway. But the thing you can’t do unless you have a subscription is put all of it into a shopping list. So I put it all into a shopping list, walk through my kitchen and pantry, make sure I knew what I had and what I didn’t. Went to the store, picked it all up.

So tonight we’re going to have chicken sausage and zucchini pasta. We’re doing that off of Allrecipes. Anyway, they’ve got recipes for all kinds of stuff.

The other thing I like about it is that I have – I’m lactose intolerant. It makes me really, really sick when I get a little bit of milk. So what I’ve been able to do is actually go in and when I do the search, I just check the box that says ‘dairy-free’ and then I get all the dairy-free recipes which is awesome. So if you have a dietary restriction, you can pretty much rule out anything that you can’t eat.

The other pick that I have is LinkedIn. I have just been connecting with all kinds of people over LinkedIn and I’ve really been liking it. It’s funny because for the longest time it was like, “Well, I’ll add all my co-workers and I don’t really care,” but it’s really turned into a great place to connect with people. So if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I’ll put a link to my LinkedIn profile on the show notes but you can get them at – or you can get it at linkedin.com/in/charlesmaxwood.

Anyway, those are my picks.

Azam, what are your picks?

Yes, I’m going to do a self-plug. My pick is my Apple TV app – 7 Minute Body app and it is available, I has been approved by Apple so it’s ready for sale. So next week, hopefully when you get your Apple TV, you can download it.

There’s a great story about this. I don’t really do iOS at work like full-time. My role is dynamic and spread out so to create this app in time, I had to wake up at four in the morning to do a little bit of coding and then all that stuff. But finally, it is done, submitted, approved and if you get to buy Apple TV – the new Apple TV – then you can go ahead and download the app; it’s called 7 Minute Body.

Hope you like it.

I’m a big fan of 7 Minute Workout; I’m working forward to getting this.

Cool.

I’m actually transitioning my development over to the smart TV platforms like Apple TV so yeah, I’ve got to buy one of these. I might buy it and then ask for permission later [chuckles] but that looks awesome.

If people want to follow up with you or seen what you’re up to these days, where do they go Azam?

So yes, they can follow me @azamsharp which is my Twitter and they can also email me at azamsharp@gmail.com and azamsharp.com which is my blog where I announce things usually when I’m going to a conference, developing a product. But usually most of the time I am very active on Twitter which is @azamsharp.

Alright, well we will wrap up the show but thank you for coming and we’ll catch everyone next week.