Tempus fugit. I can tell you. Even more so, if you have a baby. I must confess I somewhat underestimated the impact the baby would have on my spare time. In some weird mindset I really thought I could continue working as usual on my open source projects… as we know now I couldn’t. I completely lost track and have to catch up with all changes that happened over the last 6 months.

The first bunch of weeks with the baby were really demanding. I mean, really. She screamed a lot and could only sleep in our arms. Boy, were we tired. We carried her around so much we have Schwarzenegger arms now. But it’s great to see her developing, err… growing up, of course. With 6 months now she is a very interested baby, eager to learn new things and always trying to become more mobile.

Luckily both my wife and me are self-employed. It so much easier when you can skip some hours at the usual start of the workday and also at the usual end. Of course, the work needs to be done, so we have to compensate when she’s in bed. But still, it’s very satisfying being able to see her twice a day for a couple of hours — not all families have this luxury. Plus the existence of our two invaluable grandmas… it’s great.

Company-wise, the Lauer & Teuber GbR had an amazing year with many interesting iOS (and some Android) projects. We have reached the maximum we can do with the two guys we are, so we decided to grow and hire our first regular employee who’s going to start in 2012. We also rented another office and are already moving.

I’m slowly getting back into some of my beloved open source projects… it’s great that work on e.g. FSO did not stall at all, but continued while I was “away”. Last week, I attended the 3rd installment of the Open Hard- and Software Workshop in munich, where the latest development of the very promising GTA04 mobile phone was presented. I had a talk about Vala which was well received. By the way, my Vala-book plans are not dead yet… just in parking position

Next week I’m attending the FSOSHRCON, a joined conference with the people working on the freesmartphone.org middleware and the SHR software. It’s going to be great seeing all the folks again, concentrating a full weekend to agree on some important issues laying the path forward for the next year. Can’t wait to be there.

What’s left is the feeling that an extremely busy year has passed by, spiced with incredibly intense emotions. I’m a happy man and I love my life. I’m given exciting opportunities, but also challenges – and I plan to accept everything

All the best to you guys!

After letting us wait for a bit longer than scheduled (13 days), the hospital initiated the contractions. For the first couple of hours, everything went just perfect, but then the little one got stuck on the way and we had to resort to a cesarean section. Lara Marie Lauer was born 8th of June at 04:41 (AM) with 3460 gramms and 49 cm.

Mummy was still on intensive care and so they gave her to me. I can’t express the feelings I had in this very moment. I’m still kind of overwhelmed every time I see her. Thanks for all of you who waited anxiously with me and those who prayed for us. The most important tasks for the near future is getting Mummy to recover and Lara Marie to become accustomed to us and the rest of the outside world.

Please bear with me if in the next time I’m not as responsive as usually

Every now and then you come to the comfortable situation that a client requests you to develop a technology for a product of theirs, which you can then use in your own productions as well. This happened to us in the last couple of months, when we had to create an audio streaming engine for iOS for an internet radio app.

Now the internet radio app market on iOS is completely saturated. We browsed through the AppStore and found hundreds of radio station apps, half of them for free, half of them between 1 and 3 EUR. We downloaded quite a bunch and analyzed what we liked and what we didn’t like. With regards to the latter, we have seen splash screens, click-through ads, complicated UIs, and — most annoying of all — broken stations. Only a few apps actually do well in what they advertise… streaming radio!

This is what lead us to the development of Volksradio: Just Radio! A no fuzz no buzz streaming radio app. This is what it looks like:

A clean uncluttered UI that focuses on what the app does best… streaming radio. While we have refrained from feature overload, we put a couple of goodies into it, such as:

• HiFi streaming engine, even via EDGE
• Headphone remote control support
• iOS4 background streaming and multimedia dock support
• Automatically picks up playing the station you last heard
• Order channels alphabetically or by rating — either just your own or total rating of all users.

We even did a small video to show the features, which you can see by clicking here. Note that right now we focused on german radio stations, so if you don’t like german radio, don’t buy! If you are missing your favourite channel, please mail us to support app-developers.de. Thanks for listening!

Despite being incredibly busy due to some nightmare project I have been working on for the last couple of months, I have managed to sneak in some time to update Sid Player Pro to catch up with iOS4’s idea of multitasking.

Sid Player Pro now can stream audio in the background, just as the iPod application can. Moreover, it also reacts to headphone remote control events and hooks itself with the lock and multimedia dock screen controls.

The update has been submitted to Apple for review and we expect it to be posted very soon. Once Sid Player Pro appears in the AppStore, Module Player and Pokey Player will also be updated.

Here’s a video that demonstrates the new features in Sid Player Pro for iOS4.

New versions of the Sid Player and the Module Player are now available via the AppStore. While Sid Player just received a minor update with some performance tweaks, Module Player received a major content and performance update. Here’s the changelog:

• Artwork: Module Player has a blueish tone now which leads to better identification if you also own Sid Player and Pokey Player.
• Performance: Database access has been completely rewritten for improved performance and less impact on the audio engine. It also helps with battery life.
• Database: Module Player now doubles the amount of available songs, we have added 70.000 songs in multiple new formats, such as 669, ABC, AMF, AMS, DBM, DMF, FAR, IT, J2B, MDL, MID, MT2, OKT, PSM, S3M, STM, ULT, UMX, WAV, and XM. The database has also been updated to incorporate new MOD songs uploaded since the last release.
• Authors & Songs: The number of songs per author is now being displayed next to the composer. Since there are so many song formats now, the type of song is shown next to the song title.
• Playlists: Double tapping on a song moves you into the author’s view where you can see all songs of said authors. You can shuffle any of the playlists now. The random playlist will come up with new titles on every query.
• Player: The currently played pattern and row is now shown. Release notes longer than the screen width are now presented in old-style scrolltext fashion. We also added a seek bar (#1 feature wish), so you can jump to your favourite parts of the songs. The Oscillator view has been rewritten in OpenGL for improved performance. If you still experience audio glitches, you can turn off the Oscillator in the settings.

I also finally took the time to work on an updated website for our team. Since I do not fancy direct HTML or CSS editing any more (I’m a big fan of frontends of all kinds), I did a small survey on website creation tools. I have settled down on Freeway Pro now, which is really amazing and allows me to realize my layout without having to care about the nitty details.

Update: Sid Player Pro has just been updated as well, receiving all the internal goodies from the Mod Player plus an update to HVSC.52+PSID

Sad to see that a lot of people are not getting it. The iPad is a revolutionary device — it is the manifestation of transit, the transit from the classical desktop paradigm over to the new wave of ubiquitous computing.

Applications like iWork for the iPad and the OmniGroup products are going to make a substantial difference. Software developers will now stop with overloading their apps with features (of which the typical user rarely uses more than 20%), but concentrate on streamlining the human computer interaction instead — hence improving productivity and… fun with computers!

We — the LaTe App-Developers — are embracing change and will create software for the iPad. Exciting times to live in!

Update: Matt Gemmel got it, see his blog post with great insight into the relevance of the iPad.

Update II: Joe Hewitt as well, see his blog post.

In-between coding FOSS middleware such as the freesmartphone.org software stack, my colleague and me are working on iPhone OS projects. After a bunch of retro players (Sid Player, Module Player, Pokey Player), we did a small fun game for christmas. Here’s the video of us playing it (sorry for the german voices… didn’t have time to do sub titles

Liar’s Dice is available on the App Store. Enjoy!

After bringing the Sid Player (and its siblings Pro and Lite) into the AppStore, we just delivered a new production, the Module Player (and its sibling Lite). The market-situation will be quite different this time, as there are already two other Module Players. We believe we have the highest quality play routine though and a proven user interface. 70000 mods at your fingertips! See the video for a short demo:

We have just submitted Sid Player 1.2.49 to Apple. Highlights of changes in this revision include:

• Author Tab: In offline mode, only show authors for which songs are available,
• Underrun Detection: Relax threshold a bit, add setting to turn it off completely (for you jailbreakers…),
• Settings Tab: Enable switching between multiple SID models,
• Files Database: Files are no longer stored on your filesystem, but in a database. This fixes the incredibly annoying iTunes synchronization times. NOTE that we had to wipe all your data during the upgrade to make this happen.

and finally the first step towards the #1 wanted feature…

• Added four playlists: “Favorites”, “My Top 50 Played”, “Random 100″, “HVSC Top 100″.
• Enable reordering all playlists and adding/removing songs from/to the “Favorites” list directly from the Player screen.

Although we wanted to ship more smaller updates, this one has become a major update and took us a while. I hope it gets past the review pretty fast, so you can enjoy our latest work!

NB: The newest iPhone 3G[S] excited us a lot, especially since we already max out CPU power on the current models. We’re looking forward to enabling stereo and to add some nice post processing effects in a special Sid Player version once this model is out. Stay tuned!

NB2: Yes, we know that the HVSC team has released v50, however they have substituted a lot of PSID versions with RSID versions, which — although they might sound better — do no longer play given the limited CPU power of the iPhone and iPod Touch. I’m sorry, but until faster models appear, we can not ship the updated SIDs…

Our Sid Player application has been on sale in the AppStore for three weeks now. We received quite a nice amount of feedback considering that this is a niche application — thanks to all of you who downloaded and reviewed or mailed us!
Behind the curtains, we have been analysing the feedback and have just started to work on the first update which we expect to be available within the next 4 weeks.

This next release is mostly a database update, since we will add the missing songs from the HVSC directories ‘GAMES’ and ‘DEMOS’. This adds about 2000 more classy titles that were left out due to not being present in the appropriate ‘MUSICIANS’ subdirectories.

Apart from that we will add an NTSC-override in the settings tab and — if all goes well — add some download-all-the-good-stuff buttons

Stay tuned for more exciting things coming to the Sid Player this year!