[syndicate] I have a beef

[Alan Sondheim]

For those of us on pcs, can you say something about the motion sensor? How 
many degrees of freedom, what does it do exactly, etc.? Thanks - Alan

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Pall Thayer wrote:

> 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 Chris Klein. Since it's open, 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
> pall at fa.is
> http://www.this.is/pallit
>
>
>
>

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