Tonight I noticed that in a React 0.12 codebase of mine, entities were rendering as "Â " in Mobile Safari. After a quick search I came across this StackOverflow answer which identifies the "Â " output as a UTF-8 formatted non-breaking space character being interpreted as ISO-8859-1.
To resolve this problem, putting…
<meta charset="utf-8">
…after my <head> element did the trick. While explicitly marking your webpages as UTF-8 encoded has been a best practice for a while now, I learned the hard way today that it’s a requirement when working with React.
Interestingly, this problem was apparent in Mobile Safari on OSX but not Chrome on Linux. This made it present much later in QA. Another good reason not to leave the choice up to the browser!
Myo is a wireless armband that uses electromyography to detect and recognize hand gestures. When paired with a computer or smartphone, gestures can be used to trigger various application-specific functions.
When their marketing video made the rounds in 2013, I remember one specific demo made my jaw drop: touch-free video control. The video shows a man watching a cooking instructional video while cutting some raw meat. Being able to pause and rewind the video simply by raising his hand was a solution to an interaction problem I’ve had countless times, such as listening to podcasts while doing chores, or watching videos while eating a sandwich.
I ordered a Myo back in March 2013 and deferred shipment until their consumer design was ready. It was a nice surprise to return home from holiday travels to find a Myo waiting for me. :)
Unfortunately there is no official Linux support yet (though there’s a proof of concept from a hackathon). On Windows and OSX, there’s a pretty elegant Lua scripting environment in the SDK which is used to write “connector” integrations. Lua scripts are selected based on the currently active app to trigger mouse/keyboard actions from gestures. This is a neat approach. It enables developers and tinkerers to do a bunch of the legwork writing and designing integrations, while wrapping the complex parts (gesture recognition / mouse control / keyboard automation) in a cross-platform manner.
I was happy to see some web browser integration already built, but upon further inspection there were a few different behaviors which would be more to my liking. I was delighted to discover that I could simply open up the web browser connector and hack the high-level Lua code into the controls I wanted. I added a gesture to take control of the mouse, as well as some special cases for controlling video playback.
While the gesture recognition doesn’t always work perfectly (probably a matter of training both myself and the armband better), when everything works properly, the results are pretty sublime:
I’ll be posting my scripts and future tinkerings in a myo-scripts repo on GitHub.