We are in contact with Apple engineers and have been assured that this problem will be fixed in an upcoming iPad OS release.  In the meantime, we are investigating alternatives and workarounds to resolve this issue even sooner.

Your patience in this matter is much appreciated.

Thank you.

Here’s the deal. We want some awesome renditions of Fur Elise, no shorter than 1 minute in length, recorded in good or high quality video and uploaded to YouTube. Send the youtube link to @bitsonthego on Twitter, and make sure you include #ClefTunes_Fur_Elise. It’s that simple!

We will be selecting the three best videos, and each of the three submitters will be sent their choice of one of the following:

• $50 sent via PayPal
• $50 Amazon.com gift certificate
• $50 Apple iTunes store credit

Just a few details:

1. You probably should use ClefTunes 1.5 or later to take advantage of the key signatures
2. It’s fine to use ClefTunes Lite; However, if your video is selected as a winner, you will be asked to resubmit the video using ClefTunes (we’ll provide you a free copy) before we send you your prize
3. You may wish to use an audio cable between your iPad and the camera to best record the music

Questions? Leave a comment here.

* YouTube is a trademark of Google, Inc.

****Attention:  Users of ClefNotes version 2.0****

Version 2.0 has a bug in how it handles the change of instruments at the end of a level or per note.  This bug manifests itself in some games, where you can not locate a note that you hear.

This bug has been fixed in 2.1 and has been submitted to the Apple iTunes App Store.  We expect approval around January 25-30.

There is, however, a temporary work-around:  In the Settings view, please uncheck the two checkboxes that start with “New Instrument/…”.  By disabling those checkboxes, you should be able to play games and proceed through the levels.

We apologize for the inconvenience.  Please rest assured that we are here to support ClefNotes, and to continue to make it a better, more useful and more entertaining app.  To that end, please send us any suggestions or thoughts.

Version 2.1 will include the Flute and Soprano Saxophone instruments.

Ok, so say you haven’t used NumMemorize and can’t recall any digits of pi.  Well, here is one way to calculate pi – without any fancy high tech gadgets – just by tossing hot dogs.

Calculate Pi
]]> http://bitsonthego.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/how-to-calculate-pi-by-throwing-frozen-hot-dogs/feed/ 0 mz http://bitsonthego.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/1-million-digits/ http://bitsonthego.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/1-million-digits/#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:00:57 +0000 mz http://bitsonthego.wordpress.com/?p=43 ]]> I’m sure some of you wanted to memorize pi to a million digits, and were having a hard time finding a reference.  Here you go, pi to a million digits:

pi

Wow.  How does her brain file all those digits away?

Nerve got on my nerves.  Putting all else aside, I hacked it together and here it is:

It was pretty fun writing this.  Learned a bit about the iPhone too.  I took a litte creative liberties with the idea Dan gave me last night.  First off, I tried to count microseconds from 0 to 10 seconds.  That includes 0001 to 9999.  Or displayed as 0.001-9.999.  However, the iPhone can’t count that fast.  The best it can do, or so, is centiseconds.  0.00-10.00 seconds.  Therefore, I assigned one point per centiseconds – if you stop the timer at 5.73 seconds, you get 573 points.  Of course, if the timer goes off, which it does with a nasty “buzzzz”, then you get no points.

Dan mentioned that in his game you do multiple rounds each time adding the points in order to get higher and higher scores.  Sounds good, but given lots of time, your score could grow endlessly.  Especially if you play it safe and hit the stop key early, lessening the chances of getting timed out.  Not like a game where your high score grows as your skill grows or you get lucky.  That made me add an “average” label.  The thinking being that by gaining some skills (strategy) or getting lucky, you could drive up your average as your top score.  You would be limited to a high average of 1000, which would be virtually impossible unless if you’re especially lucky (or the random number generator fails).

The strategy, which I’m sure any middle school kid can tell you, is to just press stop when the timer hits 500.  If you play the game 100 times, the random stop time would be 100 or higher, 90% of the time, and between 900 and 1000 only 10% of the time.  50% of the time, the timer will stop at a number 500 or higher.  If you get greedy and keep trying to hit the stop at 900 or higher, you’ll only manage to do that once every ten times or ten times every one hundred.  You’d average 90 or so points.  If you play it safe and hit the stop at 100, you’d also average 90 points.  If you shoot for 500,  you’d have an average of 250 points.

Going to try this prototype with the kids and see if they get it and whether they like it.

I can see why Dan called it Nerve.  It is nerve racking to sit there, go for the stop button, only to have the buzzer time you out.  Plus, I keep thinking that once the timer goes off, if I react quickly enough, I’ll somehow manage to beat it.

Think a big stop button.  The program starts counting up, from 0 to 10 seconds.  Sometime in between, randomly, it will stop the timer.  You’re task is to hit the stop button as close to that random moment as possible.  You get as many points as seconds have gone by before hitting stop; you get zero points if the program stops the timer and you haven’t hit stop yet.

He named this program “Nerve”.  Sounds like an easy iPhone app.

I went ahead and increased the size of the keys as much as I could without impacting the other elements of the design (compare to the older size in the lower picture):

I had to adjust my view to deal with this.  Now my app has some extra space along the top of the number.  In the next release, I will have to do something a bit more elegant.