DigitalNeurosurgeon.com

I have recently been interviewed by the Americal Medical Association (AMA) on my iPhone application development. The full text interview is now available online, and has been mentioned on Twitter.

As the most urgent items on my tasklist for Surgical Neurology International have been completed, I had the opportunity to take up another hobby: iPhone development.

First, I have been working on an update for NeuroMind, my most successful iPhone app. Here is an actual screenshot of the stats for my apps. This contains the number of unique users, updates are not even counted here!

After more than 21.000 users downloading and installing the software, it’s time again for an update. I just submitted version 1.2 to the App Store, where it is now awaiting approval. It has been tested on iOS4 without any issues.

The new version contains some new scores and info on Surgical Neurology International. For details and screenshots, please visit the NeuroMind description on this site.

(click for full size version)

Second, I started reading “iPhone SDK Development” by Dudney & Adamson. For NeuroMind version 1.x I use XML to store the data. Currently I am expanding my knowledge on iPhone development, as I want to use SQLite or (probably) Core Data for a large update to version 2. A search function is currently not available in the app, and I would like to include that in the future.

Content will be more focused on scores and checklists, as those two are the categories that are used the most and valued the highest, according to the reactions I get on the software.

In the same time I am collaborating with a Canadian medical student, Jonathan Lau, who has a degree in computer science besides his medical education. He has experience in Java programming and offered to develop a NeuroMind version for the Android OS. Our current time schedule is to have both new versions available in Q4 – 2010.

I have an announcement that I have been waiting for to share with you, and that I am very happy with. The new open access journal Surgical Neurology International has made me their “Neurosurgery 2.0″ Editor!

Continue reading »

I needed online video for a new web initiative which will be revealed in a couple of weeks. I thought of using YouTube, as it is the most familiar interface to people and it has good coverage on mobile devices. But oops… apparently YouTube reinstalled their 10 minutes limit. This has mainly been done because most longer videos were illegal distributions of TV shows and movies, thereby violating copyrights. Unfortunately, there are no (paid) accounts available that offer longer video length.

Because of the need for length up to even 1 hour, I continued looked for other online video sites. First I met Viddler: in essence it looks good, especially with the podcast exporting features. But “slow” seems to be written in capitals for this service. From the confirmation mail to video uploading (failed due to server timeout!) the service was slow. Irritating slow, frustrating slow, not workable slow. Exit Viddler.

Then I met Vimeo and fell in love. It’s fast, it offers everything I need, and no problems with the time limit. Sure, there is a data limit, but that makes more sense in my opinion. Upgrading to a Vimeo Plus account , which is not expensive. Only the podcast export offered by Viddler seems not to be there, but experiments with HTML5 are (just as YouTube and Viddler are doing). By the way, for those who prefer a more entertaining read on the new HTML version, “Dive Into HTML5” is worth a look!

Some videos are already online for testing. Where? I’ll tell you in a couple of weeks! :-)

Last week two people E-mailed me to ask if I intend to release NeuroMind for Android.

Actually, the answer is “no” and “yes”. I did not intend to bring NeuroMind to Android for practical reasons: I am no Android developer. I do have some experience in programming Java, but too little to develop an Android app in a reasonable time frame. In which “reasonable” is defined as “not delaying my priorities”.

On the other hand, I would be interested in collaborating on an Android version of NeuroMind. If somebody who has some experience in Android development could contact me, we can work out a plan.

Raffi and Alice, thanks for your question!

Update May 25: I have been contacted by somebody who is interested in developing an app for Android. We are currently working out a plan. If more information is available, I will post it on the blog.

Update after two months presence in the App Store: > 15.000 downloads for my iPhone apps! Thanks to all people who downloaded and are using the software. I hope you like it.

I already wrote a post that some of my iPhone apps have been mentioned on other weblogs. Now there is a new blog to add to that list. It’s called Medicalchemy and it’s the blog from Nurse Practitioner Degree. They wrote a post titled “33 iPhone Apps Every Healthcare Professional Needs” and I am happy to see that NeuroMind made it into that list.

What’s going on at the moment? I have applied for a university grant on m-learning, and proudly mentioned all these blogs that highlighted my iPhone apps (with particular attention to the interview on iMedicalApps.com). Further I was pleasantly surprised to see that Safe OR from QxMD is for free now. They make interesting apps, but the former price of €7,99 was too much for that app. Safe Surgery is for free, and got a nice reference in one of the Safe OR reviews (click for original size):

Dutch comment on Safe OR, referring to Safe Surgery

Regarding iPhone development, I have paused that now. Temporarily, I guess. Just waiting for iPhone OS 4 to arrive, before continuing.

For now, I am making progress with my efforts in open web standards. As there is some NDA involved in my current project, I cannot do into details on the content now. But I’ve improved my knowledge of CSS and JavaScript / Jquery already, and expect to learn more in the future. I am especially grateful for the nice examples by Soh Tanaka and the Nifty Corners article.

Planning to update NeuroMind’s content soon, and continuing development in these open standard on a new app.

For now, I decided to stop using Adobe Flex. Why? I will explain you now….

After completing 3 iPhone applications and having them available in the App Store, I wanted to continue on web development. Simply because its target audience is much broader, the content is not limited to iPhone (and iPod Touch) users. After some pleasant experiences with Adobe Flex and the FDRIA course I chose to work again with Flex Builder 3 on a new Rich Internet Application.

But I could not help getting an increasing unpleasant feeling on this technology. My applications are focused on clinical decision support, and I do not need highly visual interactive applications now. It’s all about content, and making that content available quick & neat. I like(d) Flex for the ActionScript language, the rapid application development, and the beauty of the user interface.

I did not like the filesize of the SWF files. Just a simple text-based application took up 250kb when it wasn’t even ready! Actually, I need to give credit to whom deserved it: I read a tweet by @taudep (Todd Prekaski) on the filesize of one of his Flex apps, when he compared it to Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight did a much better job, in that case. That was my incentive to check on the filesize of my app: way too large. The demo of Flash Builder 4 did not make a difference, it just messed up my app (which is okay if innovations outweigh the need for backward compatibility).

I did not like being dependent on the Flash player, although it may be installed at 99% of desktop devices (not mobile at this moment). It seems to be slower, it’s not open-source, and vendor lock-in is a risk. Being dependent on the Flash Builder as well. I know the Flex SDK is open source, but without the Flash Builder it’s not fun working with. Of course, Adobe has the full right to do what they want – I have mine to choose.

I did not like the frequent bugs in Flex Builder. And yes, it was a bug in the IDE, and not in my code. A bug other people have been complaining about as well. Regularly I got an error message when building an application that I could not track down to the code. Just doing a Clean Build would solve it. Every time again (of course, sometimes the mistake was mine, but that turned out rather quickly).

And although not as important as the rest: I did not like all the iPad bashing by Flash evangelists. All right, you may be disappointed when the iPad turns out not to offer Flash support. You may add a #fucktheipad hashtag to your Twitter posts. And you may create some screenshot mockups of the iPad displaying Flash-enabled websites (that do NOT match reality, as has been demonstrated for Disney’s website on the iPhone). You may all do that… for one week. Arbitrary period, I agree. But the whole point is: continue your job and tackle the comments. Sure, I understand Apple is making money from the App Store. And allowing Flash-enabled games would reduce Apple’s income. But Apple is a business, not a charity foundation. Just do your job, and don’t tell other people are wrong… prove it, do a better job, and convince customers with a fantastic Flash player. Not with whining that Big Steve did not invite you to join the party.

That having said, I like to add I am still interested in Adobe’s technologies, and may be returning to it in the future. I think their cross-platform desktop development using Adobe AIR is good, Flash player 10.1 will be interesting for mobile devices (if battery rundown will not look as a Flash animation ;-) ) and the Open Screen Project is a good initiative in my opinion. But for text-based websites, I have chosen a different approach.

From my web development history, I should say I am going back to HTML & scripting. But actually it feels like “going forward” instead of going back. I have read the Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML e-book to update my knowledge on HTML and CSS. Currently I am using the Head First series for updating my knowledge of JavaScript and PHP/MySQL. Further I am looking forward to using a cross-platform JavaScript library. I bought a book on Prototype and Scriptaculous from the Pragmatic Programmers, but after some further reading I think I’ll end up using JQuery. All that using the Aptana Studio IDE.

I am looking forward to this new and open-standards technology. And to do some cross-browser testing, which is the other side of my current choice…

It is very nice to receive all positive reactions on my iPhone efforts. It’s even more flattering when people want to interview you, or post about your software on their blog. Here is what happened in the last few weeks.

iMedicalApps.com
Interview with me on iPhone development and a little Health IT in general. The interview was done by Felasfa Wodajo, MD (@OrthoOnc on Twitter).

iPhoneMedicalApps
Posted about Safe Surgery app in their category “New and Noteworthy iPhone Medical apps”.

KevinMD.com
KevinMD.com is well known place for medical blogs… and in this item Iltifat Husain, Yousif Alkadhi, MD, and Satish Misra blogged about 10 free iPhone medical apps that every doctor can use. NeuroMind is mentioned at place 7… rather proud on that!

Talking about proud… NeuroMind has been downloaded more than 12,500 times in the first month after release! :-D

And SLIC is doing fine as well: the target audience is much more specific, leading to 1200 downloads in the first month. But: the manuscript for publication in a scientific journal is finished, and I hope to submit next week (after final approval of co-authors).

By now, the updates for NeuroMind and Safe Surgery have been approved and are available in the App Store. Which made me remember to update the screenshots of NeuroMind! I uploaded new images (of the screens that changed) for the App Store, and on my website.

Recently I re-discovered how to use the magic wand tool in Adobe PhotoShop, so it was easy to remove the extra whitespace surrounding the iPhone screenshots in landscape mode, and put them a little over the four “portrait-oriented” screenshots. Which I think makes it look prettier.

The screenshots are meant for use in the NeuroMind section of this site, but for fun: here they are!

(click for large version)

I submitted updates for both the NeuroMind and Safe Surgery app to the App Store. They’re now waiting for approval: it should take some days before upgrades appear on your phone.

NeuroMind now goes to version 1.1 with these updates:

Content

• Anatomy > Peripheral category added with three images
• Renamed “WHO Safe Surgery” to “Safe Surgery”
• Scores > Other > ASA class added
• Updates menu-item added
• Smiley-icon added for each item that is new in the latest version

Technical

• Improved auto-rotation function for smoother user experience.
• Updated version number

(click for large version)

Safe Surgery 1.01 just had an updated notation of the copyright information.

Enjoy the software! With >7000 downloads of NeuroMind and >1100 downloads of SLIC so far, I guess that should be no problem! :-)