Tech

Want to be a good Muslim? There’s an App for that

iPhone 9 Comments

A fellow blogger, and actually one of the reasons I came to recognise and love blogging, Bandar Raffah is a very talented artists (check out his artwork on flickr and picasa) and now an iPhone application designer who designed the interface for the award winning 2Do app, has came out with a new free iPhone and iPod Touch app that allows a Muslim to keep track of his/her daily prayers and good deeds using an iPhone or an iPod Touch, he asks in his post about the QamarDeen app “if I ask you what you ate yesterday you would probably not know” and he goes on to explain the main reason for why they designed the iPhone app.

The app serves to tell a person how well they’ve been praying this week (time wise that is), how regularly they’ve been reading the Quran, and how steadily they’ve been fasting. With how popular the “keep track of what you eat” or “how well have you been exercising” or track where you’ve been and tell the world with applications on the iPhone like Gowalla or Foursquare, it was only a matter of time before someone came up with an iPhone app like this, and I am glad it was Bandar who did it, because no one could’ve done it better or made it more beautiful than Bandar Raffah, and you do not have to take my word for it, just check out the design for other iPhone applications and you would know what I mean.

Bandar has a cousin named Yousef Raffah who is a talented photographer and was one of the people I consulted before buying my DSLR camera last year. I wish them the best, and know that there will be more good stuff coming from them in the future.

The app was a made by Batoul Apps, you can checkout their other iPhone apps by clicking on the image above

Apple… whatcha smokin?

Apple 4 Comments

Apple… I am in no position to argue about your operation as a business, I know you have been profitable to your shareholders.

I know you have a marketing machine that is unequivocal, how else could you sell us products that don’t differ much from year to year, yet keep us salivating and wanting each new product you come out with… Even when we don’t really need it… Yes that is marketing at it’s best, make people want something… For needs and wants are two entirely different things.

My beef with you today is about the iPhone, the new 3GS. I have the iPhone 3G, and I love it. I use it all the time, my hand gets numb from prolonged iPhone use, but I just shake it off. It does what I need it to do… I do not need the iPhone 3GS… Let me tell you why.

If I jailbreak my current jPhone, I can take videos, and upload them to YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, 12second, and many more sites that I do not know about…. Yet the 3GS, only uploads to YouTube, and is not that much better in quality. Sure it can edit those videos, but speaking from experience, editing on a big screen is hard, you want to tell me that it would be a pleasant experience to do it on a little screen? I don’t think so!

What about the digital compass? I can make a real compass using a needle and a cup of water, yes it works better with GPS, but I know how to read maps, so it’s not something I need.

What else? Nothing much to boast about, faster, better, all good but I can’t justify an upgrade.

Yet I still want one… So what am I thinking? And how are you (Apple) pulling this off?

Smile Your on Haya’s Camera

News, Saudi, Tech 5 Comments

The post you are about to read is fictional, none of the events actually happened, any resemblance to real or actual events or characters is purely fictional.

Now that I’ve got the legal side taken care of, let me begin my post.

The recent news of the Haya’a wanting to install cameras in shopping centres and such made my mind wander a bit. I know there are cameras in and around big cities and big brother has a hold on things. But when a government agency says something like they want to install cameras in shopping centres which already and most probably have security cameras installed, makes me wonder what the limits of their jurisdiction is?

Something like installing cameras should be the responsibility of the shopping centre to prevent theft and vandalism, not the ministry of interior, and certainly not of a branch of which theoretically has limited responsibilities.

I remember when the Saudi television channel tried to do a poor copy of the American television show COPS, and busted a brothel in Saudi (episode here) and started interviewing the people who were in there, asking the woman “how many times have you had sex?” wow, sex sells I guess. Legally they should not have been able to do that, even COPS asks convicted felons (and the cops) if they agree to air the episodes.

I have a friend who owns a café in Jeddah, and he tells me stories about how the haya’a and the municipality always come around asking for bribes in an indirect way of course. They come and tell him that he should have partitions here and that smoking indoors is not allowed (hmm, really?) until he goes with them out to the car and tell them, oh look, your tires are worn out, do you need new tires, I can get you a set of tires for free… and so on and so forth.

My High School friend once told me, that his uncle told his older brother that if he never wanted to actually work, and just go around in an air conditioned car all day and call it work, then he should just grow his beard, and join the haya’a… this was back in the late eighties, so I am sure its not that easy now… as you should do all the above, and have a big W help you out.

Back to the subject at hand, the haya’a wants to install cameras around town… which means a huge over inflated budget for procurement and installation of equipment, another huge budget for training, another huge budget for buildings to be rented (never built) and so on and so forth (I used that sentence already).

So in reality it’s just another way to embezzle money out of the government instead of actually using the funds for actual infrastructure, and/or development of the country.

I have a dream, that one day when all immorality is wiped out of this world, the Haya’a will use the cameras to produce their own version of punk’d and trick people in thinking that they have done something immoral, and when they are scared like they have seen casper’s unfriendly friend, they will laugh and tell him/her… look, the camera is over there… you’ve been punk’d… haha… maybe even get one of the celebrities that turned religious to do the show… who knows.

Now as I said, all events and characters are purely fictional since I never had any friends due to an extreme case of sarcasm which has puzzled doctors all over the world, and I was homeschooled all my life, I actually live in a bubble. The YouTube video was made by me using the latest digital technology such as Photoshop, 3dmax, and windows movie maker. And the news page from alarabiya.net is a clone page which I fabricated to look like an actual page from the site and have a basis for my fictional story.

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© Qusay 2012