Greengar Studios

Happy Thanksgiving! It’s a time for peace, cheer, and gratefulness. I always look forward to the end of the year, not only because of Christmas, but especially because of Thanksgiving. It’s an admirable holiday– a day to give thanks, express gratitude, and count our blessings– and that’s a feeling that anyone, even non-Americans, can certainly appreciate.

A Year in Viet Nam. I’ve now been in Viet Nam for a little over a year. And although most of our development team is based here, Greengar Studios is an American company. So, when we were considering how to celebrate our first Thanksgiving in our new offices, we decided to make it big. Not in terms of the number of people, but in terms of the amount of food. And we succeeded.

Not only did we prepare ample quantities of food, but we also expressed our creativity in multiple ways. We had a large, artistic “Give Thanks” poster with everyone’s hand-tracings and written expressions of thanks. And a few of the guests joined me in assembling this deliciously juicy fruit turkey:

Elliot and his fruit turkey

Does it look like a turkey? Because it certainly is one!

Thanks to Tyler, Silvercast, and others for helping to put him together. Later that evening, I ate half that watermelon body myself.

Our star Customer Service rep, Angie Worldtrekker, loves pies, especially Apple pies:

Angie Worldtrekker's pie

Mmm.. I had a slice after this photo was taken.

Needless to say, we had a terrific Thanksgiving feast. And way, way too much food.

Shopping season. Right after Thanksgiving, the shopping begins. I think they call it “Black Friday”. Or was it “Cyber Monday”? Heck, even Apple is having a sale today! So it should be no surprise that we’re jumping in with a sale of our own. We’ve taken our freshly-updated flagship app– Whiteboard Pro for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad– and cut the price from $2.99 down to 99¢.

Whiteboard Pro: on sale!

Yes: 99¢ for a limited time. It’s the lowest price ever.

Whiteboard Pro has NEVER cost less than this.

Get Whiteboard Pro from the App Store while you still can!

Not only that, but we just updated Whiteboard Pro 2 days ago. The new version is 2.3, and this is certainly the best version of Whiteboard we’ve ever shipped.

Besides squashing tons of bugs and seriously improving the app’s performance, we’ve also added the ability to claim your drawings on Whiteboard Gallery– so you can finally take credit for all your work!

This new update is a free to all existing users of Whiteboard Pro. So if you’re already a customer, hop over to the App Store, and enjoy.

And as always, let us know what you think! Give us a good review on the App Store, or let us know if you’ve found any problems. If you contact us, Angie Worldtrekker will get right back to you

Posted by Elliot Lee, founder and CEO

I’m pleased to announce that the version 1.3 update for Whiteboard Pro: Collaborative Drawing for Mac is now available.

Here’s what we improved in this release:

- New and improved icons.
- Multi-touch gestures are now supported.
- Full-screen drawing is now supported on OS X Lion.
- Support for the 2-finger pinching gesture for zooming.

Thanks for using Whiteboard.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

Greengar is excited to announce its partnership with Aviary and the latest version of Whiteboard which will integrate Aviary’s image editing features.

With Aviary, you can edit your drawings and photo images when you save. There are also special effects such as enhance, daydream and indiglow. Your Whiteboard pictures will have a customized look. Get ready to upgrade to the new Whiteboard with Aviary, now awaiting Apple’s approval for availability on the App Store.

Here’s a review from one of our users, who we gave early access to the new version:

Last week, I was shopping for stone facing for my fireplace remodel and I needed feedback from my wife on a coordinating color for the flagstone hearth. The iPhone photo I’d taken showed my contractor holding up a piece of multi-colored stone veneer, but it was hard to describe the colors over the phone.

Then I remembered my new pre-release version of Whiteboard (WB) had integrated Aviary. So I opened the existing photo from inside WB and used Aviary image editing. I cropped it for a close up, rotated for a wide screen and applied enhance for better color definition. Then I used WB to draw a circle and pointer to show the color I wanted for the hearth. This final shot I e-mailed, and my wife was able to see what I was talking about. Aviary image editing worked so well with Whiteboard. I’m really looking forward to seeing it in the App Store.

 

Aviary will be introduced in the next update of Whiteboard HD: Collaborative Drawing for iOS.

Hello Brain Tuner 2!

The cell phone calculator is one of the most popular applications for daily use. Our game, Brain Tuner, could save you time by helping you to do more simple calculations directly in your head. Brain Tuner has long been available for iOS and Android, and it’s a great way to get smarter in less than a minute a day. You simply identify whether each math equation is right or wrong. It’s a great math game for players of all ages.

Today we’re pleased to announce Brain Tuner 2, the sequel to this addictive game. It’s more fun, more useful, and still simple. Brain Tuner 2 offers hours of fun, and endless mental math challenges. By playing every day, you’ll quickly experience dramatic improvements in your thinking speed.

Brain Tuner 2 offers a new “Relax” mode, especially for those who are less competitive. It’s just fun and quick play, with no scores or restrictions.

Once you’re ready to compete, move to the other four modes: Classic, Infinite, Time, and Multiplayer.

- Classic: You will try to score more brain cells in order to unlock the next level. Currently, there are ten (10) levels to challenge you. This feature is similar to the original Brain Tuner.

- Mutiplayer: This option allows you to connect to Game Center and try to achieve the highest score with other players on Internet. The highlight of our app is here. You will find it uniquely fun and interesting.

- Infinite: No fixed game duration. Simply you just answer as correctly as you can. The game will stop immediately when you have a wrong answer.

- Time: By achieving three times of 30 seconds, you’ll get 100 Brain Cells to help unlock other features.

With these all-new game modes, along with new graphics and sounds, Brain Tuner 2 is a big upgrade from the original Brain Tuner. We put a lot of effort into this game, and we hope you have fun playing it every day.

This app is compatible with all iOS devices running iOS 3.0 or higher, including the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Please contact us with your feedback. Thanks for playing Brain Tuner!

Posted by Angela Huynh, Customer Support Team

Many people still try to over-analyze the success of iOS devices, as we’re now in the 5th year since the iPhone was introduced to the market. There isn’t a single function that iOS devices have that the competition can’t offer. However, Apple’s iOS devices still rock-and-roll on the mobile device market. They set the standard for everyone else who would call themselves “iPhone/iPad-killers”.

To me, what sets iOS devices apart is the iOS SDK (Software Development Kit) that gives everyone a chance to make their iOS devices do whatever they wish. When Elliot (our CEO) develops any app, his first question is always: “Would I use it?” — and I’m probably the second person that he turns around and asks, “Would you use it?” The questions are very simple and straightforward! However, I think they’re very important as a way to determine our development plan each day. “Develop the apps that you would use!”

Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing was developed while we were still in school. The idea was simply to make a tool for friends to collaborate on drawing something together. Two years later, Whiteboard now has over 4 million downloads, and spans multiple platforms, including Mac OS X, iOS, and even Android. Our Whiteboard Gallery now has over 100,000 drawings uploaded, and counting. To us, that’s exciting because every week we receive requests for features, along with feedback from our users. We gave them a tool to express creativity, and they love it!

Last month, we received an inspiring email from a team member of Scott Flansburg, who is considered the “Human Calculator,” as in this video of him from the Discovery Channel:

YouTube: Scott Flansburg

Scot Flansburg can do math faster than any other human being. It doesn’t matter whether you want to substract, multiply, divide, or add 3-4-5-6 or 7-digit numbers, Scott gets the result in his head right when you hit the Enter/Equals key in your calculator. He has been doing a world tour to inspire and teach people practicing mental math. They have been traveling around Scandinavia and teaching over 20,000 students, doing math and using our Whiteboard app on iPad as a presentation tool for his keynote. They use 2 iPads connected wirelessly, one of them connected via a VGA cable to the projector, and the other in Scott’s hands: moving around to interact with the students, and providing a fun and interactive experience.

Check out some of the pictures of his keynote below. To us, that’s the biggest inspiration after a long day of debugging code and resolving versioning conflicts.

Keep looking for our next big update to our Whiteboard apps on iOS, where we’ll soon introduce better pan and zoom features

We appreciate all of your feedback, and look forward to hearing more of your creative ways of using our applications!

Please click here to write to us!

Happy Birthday, America!

Posted by Thủy Muối @thuymuoi, VP of Human Resources
Ho Chi Minh City, beautiful Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

Last weekend turned out to be very exciting for me as a mentor in Hackathon. Working with young and passionate students is a lot of fun and very interesting.

Yet despite learning quickly and being enthusiastic, many teams make mistakes during the contest. Here I’ve written down some tips for contestants in future Hackathons.

Research more while brainstorming and choosing an idea.

In Hackathon, creativity is always emphasized. You need to think about an interesting idea that can convince the judges. When you have an idea, although it is interesting to you, it may not be novel. Your judge definitely knows a lot of apps and ideas which are already in the App Store.

That’s why, to convince them and others, you need to do some research into your idea. Find out if there are similar apps, and if there are, find out what makes your app unique.

During the beginning of competition, many teams hadn’t thought about this question until we judged their idea.

For example, a team wanted to build a calendar app (both server and client side) in Android, without taking much of a look at Android’s built-in Calendar app. If they’d said that they want to integrate Maps into their app, I hope that they would play with the built-in app a bit more. They might find that the feature they have in mind already exists.

So, it can be quite hard for their apps to be ranked high in creativity.

Taking a look at other apps can also bring you more interesting ideas for your app.

Think big, but focus on your unique feature first.

Once you have your core idea, you can brainstorm all of the things your app could do, and form a list of all the features your app may have.

You can also use this feature list to show the potential of your app in front of the judges.

However, when starting to code your app, you should ideally narrow this feature list down to only one feature.

Ask yourself: “What is my app’s purpose?” Would removing this feature from your app make it totally different?

Is this the simplest feature that is appropriate for your app’s purpose? Choosing this feature will help you know what to code first.

Many teams spend time on their many planned features, or start to work on supporting views first (splash screen, menu, list view, info…)

Forget all of these supporting features until later. Implement your main view with its core feature first.

Doing this will really help when you run out of time before implementing all planned features, because you’ll at least have your main feature ready to demo.

Start to code your main feature immediately, then iterate, iterate…

You can always start small. If your main feature is helping users to easily track their money spent by recording the amount of money, product’s photo, location… You might think to spend time to solve technical problems like the photo capture module, then get location (with PhoneGap framework) first.

However, you can build a financial tracking app by just displaying an input box, for users enter there money, then save it to database. That’s all you need to start immediately.

So, if your main feature is too big, simplify or narrow it down. If your view is not simple, choose to implement an important & simple part. If you have a lot of technical problems, spend time to solve the necessary one. The key is that, you can start to code in the first minute, have something to show, and build your confidence over time.

Despite all of the limitations, all contestants finished the competition with great results.

All of them are young and really passionate with their apps. Passion is definitely the source of their energy for spending days coding; not bread, or instant noodles with a small amount of beef. With 2 days of continuous coding, they are “sleepless monsters” also

Another surprise is that most of the contestants, like the second place team, knew about their platform only a few days before the contest. They learned really, really fast.

I hope all of the participations experienced a lot of new things in this Hackathon.

Congratulations and thanks to all contestants, volunteers, and organizers for this great event!

P.S. Check out more of their photos on Facebook.

Posted by Cong Vo, Greengar iOS App team

We’re pleased to announce that version 2.0 of Whiteboard Pro: Collaborative Drawing is now available!

It was officially approved for the App Store on May 03, 2011. For existing users of Whiteboard Pro, it’s a free update.

Here’s what’s new:

- Pan and Zoom. Use 2 fingers.
- Undo and Redo button.
- PDF support. View a PDF, then Open it in Whiteboard.
- Performance improvements and bug fixes.
- Updated libraries.
- Updated About screen.
- Built with new LLVM compiler 2.0 which fixes a potential crash.

- There’s a minor issue where changing the brush width/opacity/color while drawing with your other finger causes zoom to activate. This will be fixed in the next update.

Thanks for using Whiteboard!

We have plans for many future updates. Send us your suggestions at http://www.greengar.com/contact/

Today, we’d like to take a dive into some technical specifics. This isn’t for everyone, but we think some people– mostly Android developers!– will find it useful.

In Linux, applications collect the battery status through sysfs, where the battery status is located in /sys/class/power_supply/.

Different platforms, however, may give us a different directory layout under /sys/class/power_supply/, but Android hardcodes the directory layout to /sys/class/power_supply/.

From the directory /sys/class/power_supply/battery/, there is some files that contains the newest information about the real battery:

1. uevent:

   Contains some information including: name, type, status, health, present, technology, capacity, for example:

   POWER_SUPPLY_NAME=battery

   POWER_SUPPLY_TYPE=Battery

   POWER_SUPPLY_STATUS=Charging

   POWER_SUPPLY_HEALTH=Good

   POWER_SUPPLY_PRESENT=1

   POWER_SUPPLY_TECHNOLOGY=Li-ion

   POWER_SUPPLY_CAPACITY=93

2. batt_vol:

   Contains the information about the current voltage of the battery: for example, 417

3. batt_temp:

   Contains the information about the current temperature of the battery: for example, 310

So, we can access to that directory, read those related files and get the appropriate information about the battery.

Posted by Hector Zhao, App Engineering team

Whiteboard HD, also known as Whiteboard Internet Collaboration, has the ability to collaborate with another user over the Internet. That means you could be in Bangkok, Thailand while your friend is in New York, USA, and you can both draw together.

Whiteboard Pro currently does not have the Internet Collaboration feature.

The next update of Whiteboard Pro will have pan and zoom.

Whiteboard Lite (free) has ads. It has a different color picker. On iPhone and iPod touch, it does not keep the color tab toolbar visible while you’re drawing. It does not support Internet Collaboration. It currently does not have pan and zoom.

Question: Can I print my Whiteboard drawing on A4 paper?

Yes, you can print your drawing on A4 paper (210 × 297 mm), but there will be margins or cropping because the aspect ratio is not the same as the iPhone’s display.

Have fun with our apps!

Posted by Angela Huynh, Customer Support Team

Now your Mac and iPhone can draw together.

Run Software Update… on your Mac to download and install the 10.6.6 Update.

The Mac OS X 10.6.6 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Snow Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. It also includes the Mac App Store, the best way to discover and buy new apps for your Mac. The Mac App Store, a new application you’ll find in the Dock, includes the following features:
Discover Mac apps: Browse featured apps, top charts, and categories, or search for something specific. Read detailed app descriptions and user reviews, and flip through screen shots.
Buy and install: Easily purchase apps with your iTunes account. Apps install in one step and are quickly available from the Dock.
App updates: The Mac App Store keeps track of all your purchased apps and notifies you when free updates are available.
To learn more about the Mac App Store, visit: http://www.apple.com/mac/app-store.
For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4459.
For information on the security content of this update, please visit: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222.

Then pick up a copy of Whiteboard for Mac — free for a limited time!