[PD] slightly OT, I'm on a mission

[Pall Thayer]

I posted a rant to a couple of lists yesterday and am now going to  
include it here. What it involves could make for a pretty cool  
external if someone wants to take it on, thus making the post more  
relevant to the list.

There have been a handful of interesting experiments involving use of  
the so-called Apple Motion Sensor or Sudden Motion Sensor that's  
built in to all recent PowerBooks and iBooks. Most of these projects  
have used a program called AMStracker to read from the sensor.  
However, the current version works only with the first powerbooks to  
come out with the sensor. It doesn't work with the iBooks and now the  
newest PowerBooks have yet a new way of handling the motion sensor.  
When I made my Carpenters Level Dashboard Widget, at first I used  
AMStracker. But it bothered me that I had to instruct people to  
download and install AMStracker. You see, it's proprietary and the  
creator, Ahmit Singh strictly forbids distribution of it. So, for the  
sake of making installation of my widget easier for the end user, I  
went looking for an open-source program that would do the same thing.  
I found it, it's called Motion, originally written by Christian  
Klein. Since it's open (BSD license), you can distribute it along  
with your nifty motion-sensor-enabled-whatever-it-is. On top of that,  
I've adapted the original version so that it works on iBooks and have  
now adapted it again to support the newest PowerBooks. Ahmit still  
says he's trying to find the time to fix AMStracker for the iBooks  
(on top of that, he says that it's an OS thing but it's not, it's a  
hardware thing. Don't tell him. Let's let him think it's an OS thing).

Here's my beef. I'm still seeing stuff coming out for use with  
AMStracker. Why on Earth would anyone want to use it when there's an  
open alternative? It boggles my mind. So, if anyone is interested in  
playing around with Apple's motion sensor. Don't use AMStracker, use  
Motion. It's open and what's even more important is, it works.  
AMStracker works on one model of three. You can hardly call that  
functional. Also, if you know of anyone who is likely to do anything  
with Apple's motion sensor, share this info with them.

Motion can be downloaded (source-code, Makefile and compiled binary)  
here:

http://pallit.lhi.is/palli/dashlevel/motion.zip



--
Pall Thayer
palli at pallit.lhi.is
http://www.this.is/pallit