Last week, some of the staff and trustees of Solent Youth Action had an Away Day for strategy and planning a-plenty.
In one of the morning activities, we were ideastorming in small groups. My group had to identify what impact SYA has on the community.
I kinda liked the list we came up with. As the work of ten minutes or so of ideastorming, it’s not definitive or official in any way. But I thought it warranted sharing.
This might be obvious to someone less ignorant in the mystic ways of CSS, but I thought it was worth sharing anyway. 
I was struggling to work out a suitable font-size for a mobile web page. Whether I tried using size names like “x-large”, or values with em, pt, px or %, the same basic problem remained:
Font-sizes were either too small on smartphones with high-resolution screens, or too large on other smartphones.
If I increased the font-size to look better on a high-res screen, it was too big for other phones. If I decreased the font-size for those other phones, it looked tiny on a high-res screen.
Seven years ago this week, I started at IBM. Two years ago this week, I started my current job. Thought those were worth noting.
I joined IBM thinking it’d be for a couple of years to get training and experience before going to do something more fun at a start-up.
But seven years (four changes of jobs, three promotions, six changes of office and nine changes of manager) later, I’m still here and still loving what I do.
I gave a presentation earlier this week which led to a discussion on information that people share online. The general experience from the group was along the lines of “we’ve heard of people who share a lot of information on facebook”, but that was about it.
I talked about some of the other ways that people share information online, and they were very surprised.
I’m guessing that anyone who reads my blog will likely find this less surprising, but I thought that the list we produced during the discussion was worth sharing nevertheless:
Ironically, I don’t use facebook all that much…
A month ago, I submitted an app to the Android Market app store for the first time, and shared the experience – from compiling the app to it being live in the Market on people’s phones.
I thought I’d follow this up with a quick post on what happens after your app goes live in the Market.
Again, as before, this is aimed at the idle curiosity of people who use mobile app stores, rather than trying to replace the detailed documentation provided for mobile developers.
Crash reports
My favourite part are the Error Reports. As a developer, you can see when your app crashes on people’s phones. You can see how often it happens, how many people it has affected, and how many times it has happened.
I’ve not had any errors (I’m almost disappointed! 
) so the screenshots on the Android developer’s blog are perhaps a better example. You can see that not only do you get told that an error has happened, but (as these are Java apps) you get the stack trace at the point of the error, telling you exactly where the app crashed.
This should make it a million times easier to debug buggy apps – it’s the sort of functionality that I’ve tried to manually build into apps before, but with Android you get it out-of-the-box. This is awesome.
I am a big fan of Remember The Milk (RTM), the online to-do list manager. It’s one of the few sites (like flickr) that I’m happy to pay for.
For some reason, the logo for RTM is a cow’s face. Which means that I get a cow staring at me when I’m deciding what I need to do next.
I had a random thought this evening – that the cow should really look more sympathetic when my task list is so full. Because he’s really quite heartless, even when I’m manically busy.
And once I had the idea, I kinda had to give it a quick try. (And I wonder why I’m busy…)
So I’ve knocked up a quick Greasemonkey script – which should work with Firefox with the Greasemonkey add-on, or with Google Chrome.
My last post was a bit of a clue, but I still thought it was worth a mini-announcement that “UK Traffic Checker” is now available in the Android Market.
I wrote about the basic idea for the app when I first hacked it together, but to summarise it’s a mobile app that checks for roadworks or other traffic incidents on UK roads for a specific journey. Tell it two places, it will work out the route between them, and check that route for known problems.
And if you give it your schedule, it can automatically check traffic for you – with support for both one-off and repeating journeys. So if you have a regular commute, you can give it the details and it will check your route to work for you in the morning while you get ready, without you needing to remember to ask.
I’ve just added my first app to the Android Market app store, so I thought I’d write a quick post to share what is involved.
Note: This post isn’t aimed at mobile devs. The process is documented clearly enough that there really isn’t any need. Rather, this was more written at people who are probably never going to write and submit an app to a mobile app store, but who might have an idle curiosity about what is involved getting an app from a developer’s workstation to the app store.
Step 1 – Write the code
This is really the fun bit
The Android plugin for Eclipse gives you nice integration for publishing.
You can right-click on the project, choose “Export Signed Application Package” and the wizard spits out a signed file ready for publishing.
Step 2 – Register with Android
This is the painful bit 
You visit the Market site at http://market.android.com/publish/signup and pay your $25 to register with Android as a developer. For me, it worked out to a bit over £17.
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