Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

Android Market – a follow-up

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

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

100715-android-2

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.

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UK Traffic Checker now in the Android Market

Monday, June 14th, 2010

UK Traffic Checker for AndroidMy 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.

‘UK Traffic Checker’ in the Market

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Releasing apps in the Android Market app store

Monday, June 14th, 2010

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

click to see full-size version - thanks to PhotobucketThis 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

click to see full-size version - thanks to PhotobucketThis 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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Why I use vdr for TV

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Both here and on twitter, I’ve mentioned a few of the things I’ve done with my vdr-based media computer. In this post, I want to quickly take a step back and explain what made me go for this setup in the first place.

By way of quick background, we’ve now got an Asrock Ion 330 living under the TV as a set-top box, connected to the TV via an HDMI cable, and receiving a digital freeview signal over USB from the twin tuners in a Sony Play-TV. It’s quiet, has reasonably low power requirements, is small and pretty, can be controlled by a remote control using a small infra-red receiver plugged into a USB port, and has plenty of storage between it’s own hard-drive and the 500 GB on the Western Digital My Book attached over USB.

This isn’t a “why I use vdr instead of MythTV (or any other open-source HTPC software” post. Mainly because I don’t know enough about the alternatives to talk about them intelligently.

Instead, I wanted to explain why I went for setting up a Linux computer with a TV card instead of just buying another set-top box appliance when ours died last year. It’s not as simple (set-top boxes pretty much set themselves up nowadays) and certainly wasn’t cheaper (largely because I was starting from scratch – if I already had a server to use, that’d be different). So what was the incentive?

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What will Smart Metering look like in the UK?

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

This week, the UK government published their response to the consultation that ran over the summer. Basically, they asked how smart metering should be implemented in the UK, offered some proposals, and invited anyone to tell them what they think.

In case I hadn’t already convinced people that I was a geek, I read through the Government response paper. It basically reiterates the proposals that were outlined before the summer, summarises the responses that they received, and states the decisions that they have reached as a result.

Is it really very geeky that I found this interesting?

I wanted to highlight a few bits in particular…

… mandate a roll out of electricity and gas smart meters to all homes in Great Britain with the aim of completing the roll out by the end 2020 …

In case you missed all the press about this in the past week, the plan is still that we’re all getting smart meters, and it’ll happen in the next ten years.

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What happened to the integration?

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

A bunch of social networking updates arrived tonight for the Xbox 360. There has been talk of twitter integration in the Xbox 360 since E3 last summer. And after all the wait… I was a little disappointed.

Because it isn’t integration.

It’s a simple stand-alone twitter client app, that you can run on the Xbox. It joins the main menu becoming something else you can run, instead of play a game or media.

That’s not integration.

If they’d added the ability to receive replies/mentions and direct messages through the Xbox messaging platform while you’re in a game (as it does already with MSN Messenger messages)… that would be integrated.

If they’d built it in to Xbox’s Achievements system, so that when you complete an achievement it offered the chance to let your followers know what you’ve achieved… say by popping up a text box prefilled with a message and a link to more info about the game you’re playing… that would be integrated.

If they’d added the ability to capture a screenshot of what you’re doing, upload it to twitpic (or some similar service) and tweet to show your followers something cool… that would be integrated.

If they’d added the chance to see compare your twitter friends list with your Xbox friends list, and add any that aren’t on both… that would be integrated.

If they’d included a twitterfone-type service to let you tweet without typing, just by talking into the Xbox headset… that would be integrated.

I’m not saying that any of these are good ideas (they’re just the first few things off the top of my head), but the point is that this sort of thing would make twitter feel like it has been integrated into the “Xbox Experience“.

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Your data. Mobile. (a hackday hack)

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

screenshot stored on PhotobucketWhat do the following have in common?

Weather Channel Max – an iPhone weather app. StockWatch – an iPhone stock prices app. CNN Mobile – an iPhone news app. FlightTrack – an iPhone flight updates app. Tweetie – an iPhone twitter app.

They are all apps which provide users with updates to their phone when some information changes. The information in question is different. But they’re all ways for users to get information that they are interested in, while they are on the move.

Having a dedicated hard-coded app for each type of data is great for information that a large number of people are interested in.

For example, there are enough people who are interested in the weather that it’s worth having an app dedicated to it.

But what if you want updates for information that isn’t so widely needed? What about niche interests?

We’re all different. There is going to be something that you’re interested in that not everyone else is. Or at least a particular set of interests that noone else exactly shares.

People’s needs and interests are almost infinitely varied, so we can’t come up with enough applications to meet everyone’s unique needs. Particularly for more esoteric topics, which are too long tail to each justify a specific mobile app.

For these situations, we need something generic that individual users can customise.

This was an idea I played with on the last IBM HackDay. I managed to get a proof-of-concept working on the day, but not had the chance to share it before now.

What I tried to create was:

  • a generic mobile application – something that can display an arbitrary number of bits of information
  • a browser extension approach – some way that a user can pick any bit of any webpage, adding it to their list of information that will be pushed to their mobile

I’ve recorded a video of it running. (Difficult to see without full-screen – sorry!)

To summarise, the steps involved are:

  1. User visits a webpage at their computer
  2. User highlights a portion of the page, and uses a Firefox extension to register this with my notifications server
  3. The notifications server informs the mobile app of the new topic of interest
  4. The notifications server continues to monitor the webpage
  5. When the highlighted portion of the webpage changes, the updated contents are pushed to the phone
  6. The mobile app notifies the user of the change

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Palm Pre

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

I’ve had the Palm Pre for nearly a week now, so I thought that it was worth a quick post!

If you want to save yourself reading the rest of the post, I can summarise it for you here: the Pre is an awesome, pocket-sized piece of loveliness.

I love it. :-)

I should probably qualify this, though – I am a longtime Palm fan… having previously bought a Palm Pilot, Palm IIIx, Sony Clie UX50 (which ran Palm OS), Palm Treo 650, Palm Treo 750 and Palm Treo Pro.

And if they hadn’t killed the Foleo before launch, I was gonna get that, too.

I was always going to want the Pre. But it really has met my expectations. It’s the device I wanted them to produce so I could justify my Palm devotion to the naysayers who were only recently predicting Palm’s demise.

There are already a ton of Pre reviews out there, so I probably shouldn’t duplicate too much of what has already been said. But there are so many things to highlight…

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