iOS 7 - Feature: Use camera to redeem

So I stumbled upon a nice little feature in iOS 7 for my iPad & iPhone, and it is a much needed feature, redeeming a gift card through the camera on the device. I haven't seen much on this feature as of yet, so I figured I would post a few pics of the process.

When you hit the Redeem button in the App Store, you are asked to use the camera or enter a code manually to redeem a gift card. Once you hit the Use Camera button, it ises the front facing camera to identify the code on the back of the card.



Once it finds the code, it will show a box around it for a second, and then blink and show the text (not backwards) and then ask for your account password.




Once the password is confirmed, the box will turn blue and then the camera view will close and go back to the App Store's redeem dialog.



That's about it! Nice feature for iOS 7 I think, and gone are the days of entering a redeem code 2-20 times until it takes :)

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IDEA: A different take on how we record sound.

When we are at a concert or listening to a guitar, we aren't just hearing a guitar, but we are hearing the guitar, the string, the reverb, and they are all coming from different places, so the sound is more pleasurable to our ears. So what we hear is analog when it comes from the guitar. Once we record that sound, we lose the quality of the sound, and it doesn't matter what medium we use to record, the sampling rate is still dependent on the medium used. Currently, we convert analog audio to digital audio in a form that uses sampling, or grabbing a snapshot of the analog wave at a certain rate per second. The way it is stored is a lot like how we store a picture too, where you will only get one sound/pixel per sample.

 

In Graphic Arts, I have learned a lot about using vector information I my graphics for scalability, and the way a vector is made is by grabbing the relative point and curve values, along with attached lie or color info. This could be done with sound too, by initially recording at a high enough ate to be able to analyze the point, frequency and curve values of a single wave. With a high enough sample rate, it is theoretically possible to be able to separate each wavelength by source and curve, allowing for a much higher quality recording, along with a much smaller file size, because all that is being stored is point values, curves and metadata.

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