“Garage model” Leprosy MIS

While the world’s managers and venture capitalists have lost faith in the “garage model” of business, I am still a firm believer that the best innovations come from individual efforts and not concentrated directional movement in large organizations. Today, was yet another day in the field showing how homebrew software has innovations that many large software suites lack.

Just to give a background on what I’m talking about - a product that I’ve been working on lately is a patient-tracking system for the National Leprosy Eradication Programme. Since DHIS2 is the widely deployed HMIS application in India and aggregated reports for the Government of India are generated through DHIS2, we needed some kind of patient-tracking, yet required aggregate numbers of these patients through DHIS2. For this purpose, the most ideal way we found out was using OpenMRS for the patient-tracking and then generating reports through DHIS2. Thus, we are able to create rich and generic medical records of a leprosy patient, which can later be used not just for leprosy patient care, but future medical treatment of the person for any other disease or health service provisioning.

But today when I arrived to demonstrate this system in Maharashtra State Health Society, I was pleasantly surprised to see a homebrew application. We finished our presentation on the system, demonstrated the application, decided upon pilot process, future meetings and the whole process before we can go live with the system state-wide. Just after we finished our stuff, one of the leprosy health officers told us that he had privately worked on something that was suited for the NLEP program. Most people just ignored his comment, but I was eager to see what he had developed.

And when I saw his application, I was very much stunned. A really nice and intuitive user-interface using Adobe Flex, neat use of data using good-looking reporting and visualization tools, basic reports using excel sheets and a neat-little data model, similar to the ideas in OpenMRS. Maybe the data-model is not suited to a medical records system like OpenMRS, but it very well met the requirements. From what I learnt, it was developed in about a month’s time by one developer, who happens to be the son of this medical officer.

“Commendable effort and nice design decisions”, is what I complemented the medical officer. But what got etched in my mind is that, some best software are written in “that car garage” on a single computer.

Adobe Flash Player 10 Shows 3D

Adobe's play with Acrobat 3D didn't go too well. Acrobat 3D was for creating 3D models and save them as PDF. It was a nifty and useful idea, but didn't sell much as everyone used their favorite 3D tool and printed (PDF using Distiller) the different views. But now Adobe has added 3D to its latest Flash Player 10. Adobe is showcasing the feature through a beta.

Flash Player 10 is available for Windows, Linux and OSX and features new 3D filters. The latest beta known by codename "Astro" has 3D filters and custom effects and allows native GPU acceleration for 3D animations. Thus this brings the power of the GPU to be web through Flash animations and videos. And Flash being the de-facto for animation on the web, its an excellent thing for the web developers and users alike.

From Adobe's Press Release:

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that the pre-release version of Adobe® Flash® Player 10 software is now available in beta on Adobe Labs with new expressive features for interactive designers and developers to build richer and more immersive Web experiences.... Custom filters and effects are created with the Adobe Pixel Bender™ toolkit, also available for no charge on Adobe Labs. Adobe Pixel Bender is the same technology behind many filters and special effects in Adobe After Effects® CS3 software. Flash Player 10 beta can now create their own filters, blend modes and fills with Adobe Pixel Bender by writing small pixel-shading functions that can be parameterized to create animated effects or change the effect on rich media content at runtime.

The downloads can be done from here... and you can view some exciting new demo videos from here.

Project Capuchin - Sony Ericsson Mates JavaME & Flash Lite

Sony Ericsson announced today that they are experimenting with a new technology which plans to integrate Flash inside JavaME applications. This will enable developers to show Adobe's FlashLite interfaces inside JavaME applications. The project is called Project Capuchin and will be shown to the world at the JavaOne Conference 2008.

Adobe's Flashlite has been one of the easier UI development platform for mobile phones, but there aren't many popular business applications in Flashlite. On the other hand JavaME is popular for mobile application development, but the user-interface built using JavaME (especially CLDC) is boring and tough to build. With Project Capuchin, the guys from Sony Ericsson want to provide developers with the combined power of Adobe's Flash and Java's programming capabilities.

The main advantage of Project Capuchin is that developers will not have a new technology to learn. Designers are already acquainted with Flash and Developers already have existing JavaME applications. This will make the new technology easier to learn and will mean faster porting of existing applications with a better UI. The details about the performance and the runtime are still unknown, but most probably it'll be a single Java runtime that'll be able to run the applications. For this technology to be successful, Sony Ericsson should license the platform to other handset manufacturers, so that applications can be run on different handsets. May be Steve Jobs wanted something like this when he said Flash wasn't good enough for the iPhone...

The release date for the project and availability on handsets is still unknown and the technology is very much in the experimentation stage. The idea of such a mashup is exciting and it'll be interesting to see the response towards the technology at the JavaOne Conference. Hoping it'll become a quick and stable release from Sony Ericsson because the mobile platform does need something of this sort.

Flash Not Good Enough For Steve Jobs, But Windows Mobile Wants It

When Steve Jobs said that Flash wasn't good enough for the iPhone, it was kind of odd. Odd because a lot of devices from other handset manufacturer including Nokia, Sony Ericsson are easily able to display Flash using FlashLite. But here we are, Steve Jobs saying the iPhone needs a better, "special" version of Flash, just like YouTube site for iPhone.

Soon after that, I was speculating that Apple was going to use Silverlight on the iPhone and Microsoft was pitching a good deal to Apple. But today Microsoft's Windows Mobile team has a surprise for us!! Microsoft has licensed the latest version of Flashlite v3 from Adobe to be installed on handsets with Windows Mobile. The most current version of Flash Lite, which is developed on Adobe Flash CS3, can' display pages built using Flash 9, but it works with sites created using older versions of Flash.

The announcement comes as a surprise because Microsoft has been building its own version of a Flash competitor called Silverlight. Silverlight is under heavy development for the mobile devices, but Microsoft still managed to win Nokia to install Silverlight on its devices. I'm not sure how Nokia would be feeling with this development and I guess they must be thinking some delay in the shipping of a Silverlight for Mobiles.

Either ways, how can be Flashlite good enough for Windows Mobile when it isn't good enough for iPhone?? I guess Steve Jobs always needs special treatment!!

Want To Know What Celeb You Look Like??

Found this really interesting website, thanks to the complimentary LINQ from the Inq. You can go the MyHeritage Face Recognition website and upload a closeup photo of yours. It'll run some complex face recognition program and match your face to the faces of celebrities that are present in their database. After the search is complete, it creates a collage of celebrity faces that are your look-alikes!!

Its a flash based interface that they have built and it looks pretty slick. But you can't say the same about the accuracy of the face recognition. We all know that face recognition is a complex thing to do, but how about me looking like Winona Ryder or Halle Berry for accuracy!! :)) Even the 66% match with Jesse Bradford was flattering that anything else!

 

 

To test the accuracy I tried an image of I also tried an image of Salma Hayek and Elisha Cuthbert. The Salma Hayek face detection said, that Salma Hayek looks like Amisha Patel, the Indian actress - a fact I've been saying for sometime now!! And the Elisha Cuthbert detection is an awesome one... The picture I upload didn't quite look like Elish Cuthbert to me (but actually the photo is of hers) and the app found her!!

Other than the celeb face recognition there is also a genealogy on their website which is also pretty interesting.

Tell me who you look like and how accurately it seems to find you?? and which celeb do you look like??

Intel Interactive Ads Are Fun

A lot of us have adBlock installed on our computers because we think ads are good and waste out bandwidth. But there's always a rose among the thorns, and Intel's Interactive Ads are something of that sorts. I have been looking at Intel's ads (not those stupid T.V ads) that are seen on different hardware sites. I have to say the ad makers have really done an amazing job with these ads!! If you haven't seen these interactive ads, then you really don't know what I'm talking of. May be a screenshot will help, but then playing with the real thing is something fun!!

The fun part of the ads are that they are interactive and in the screenshot you can see how that "agent" has caught my mouse (broke it, stamped it :(( when I tried to get close to the guarded Intel laptop. Other similar Intel ad campaigns that were present earlier had dogs in them, which would angrily bite the mouse if you brought it any closer to the Intel machines!! :-) I have seen a few interactive ads on the internet, but none of those were from big companies and nor were they as perfect graphically as these intel ads.

If you want to play with these ads, look at tech sites like theInquirer.net , tomshardware.com , Newegg.com. Really an awesome job from the designers of these ads!! May be in the future we'll see many more interactive ads from other companies as well!!

Note: Remove the adBlocks if you wanna see those ads

Indian Film Giant YashRaj Films To Use SilverLight

I recently noted in my other post, that Microsoft's SilverLight could become a real competitor to Flash, but only if it is widely installed on client machines. That shouldn't be much of a problem for Windows, since Microsoft could provide an automatic update or service pack part for installing the SilverLight CLR. But another thing that will determine its success is video quality, and it'll be only known to the general public when the first Expression Encoder is released.

Silverlight uses Windows Media Video which incorporates the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers’ VC-1 video standard. It can also incorporate DRM in the video, so that video cannot be distributed freely. These are probably the reasons why YashRaj Films, one of the biggest film banners of India will be moving to SilverLight on their website.

“We chose Silverlight as we wanted to deliver rich interactive applications for our viewers. It is an end-to-end solution that will enable us to reach multiple platforms,” said Anand Gurnani, Senior Manager, Internet and New Media, Yash Raj Films.

Wins like this from big film companies could help SilverLight become a real competitor to Flash Video (flv) used by YouTube as well as many other online video sites!!

Microsoft's SilverLight ported to Linux by Novell

While I was exploring Visual Studio 2008, for a IDE comparison, I came across a highly publicized technology called SilverLight. Microsoft's competitor product to Adobe Flash, but Microsoft is trying to advertise more about its video streaming features. Thus, its more like a competitor to flv (Flash videos) which are very popular these days, thanks to YouTube.

SilverLight seems to be a promising technology, but does it have enough to beat Flash? Actually, Visual Studio 2008 is more of a programming tool, whereas Flash CS3 has programming, but design ease is its USP and based on the beta2 for Visual Studio 2008, it can't compete with Flash CS3. But for video streaming you don't need design, you require better video quality, with smaller file size. When Microsoft Expression Encoder is released at end of the year, or early next year, we'll find out if it gives flv videos a run for their money or not.

Coming back to another advantage of Flash is that it's installed on 90% of computers. So if you make something in flash, you can expect most people to be able to view it. Since, SilverLight is a Microsoft technology and we all know the dogfight between Ballmer's bunch and Linux geeks, so how will Microsoft make a linux runtime for SilverLight??? Simple, they call their best friend from the Linux world, Novell to help them out. And Novell being Novell (they want interoperability in everything), helped them out. From what I hear, SilverLight will be called MoonLight in Linux, and Novell+Microsoft gonna release it with Expression Encoder. So my guess is that quite a lot of work on the linux front has been done by Novell, and lets see when it finishes!!