Posts Tagged ‘google’

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Google Developer Day London

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

falling through the floorIt’s been a very geeky week – only a couple of days after BathCamp, I was in London yesterday for Google Developer Day.

I was saying only a couple of days ago that I really need to get my head around some of the options out there for web developers, so this was well timed.

I learnt about web development tools and online APIs, talked a lot about where mobile development is going, and got to wander around Wembley Stadium. All in all, it was a good day. 🙂

ooh - a present!The underlying theme for the talks throughout the day was showing how Google are trying to make the web ‘better’.

The messages were grouped into four key areas:

  • “client” – making the browser more powerful – through Chrome, and Gears
  • “cloud” – making the cloud more powerful – through the various APIs they make available
  • “connectivity” – making web apps more powerful – through web development tools like GWT, and Android for mobile
  • “social” web – making the web more social – through OpenSocial

I made a ton of notes throughout the day. Rather than write the world’s longest blog post, I’ve picked out a few interesting bits.

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OpenCellId – collecting data for mobile location-based services

Monday, August 18th, 2008

It is great to see a revived buzz around mobile location based apps and services. There are lots of new services to try. I try loads of them, the most recent was Moot just a few days ago (I love their video which I’ve embedded here – very cute), but there are way more than I can keep up with.

One problem they all share before they get to offer you their variations on useful location-based services is how to figure out where you are in the first place.

GPS is an obvious response, but not everyone has it on their mobile, and even if you do, it has some big problems – it can take a while to get a fix, won’t work indoors, etc.

Good solutions supplement this with other sources of information. Skyhook is getting a lot of attention at the moment for their service – mainly due to it being used in the iPhone. It means that the iPhone (and other devices using Skyhook) can work out where it is using GPS, but if a GPS fix cannot be made (or in the interim time while waiting for one) it can give an approximate location almost instantly using cell-tower triangulation and/or known WiFi access points.

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Our Mashed 08 hack: CurrentCost Live

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Yesterday was the end of Mashed 08 – the annual London hackday from BBC Backstage.

I saw last week that there was going to be a “social responsibility” category in the hack challenge, and decided that a CurrentCost hack was in order!

Together with Rich, we spent a day trying to hack together a competitive challenge based around CurrentCost, encouraging people to reduce their home electricity usage by making it into a game they can play with their friends.

Here are a few notes based on the presentation I gave at the end.

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But, I like transcoding!

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

screenshot - Image Hosted by ImageShack.usMobile transcoding – services which turn a webpage into something better suited for a mobile web browser – is an often contentious topic. It’s a topic which has come up several times recently, and at best people will begrudgingly describe it as a necessary temporary evil.

Don’t get me wrong – it hasn’t been without problems. It has been used in inappropriate ways, and I know web-developers whose sites have been broken by poor (and inflicted!) uses of mobile transcoding.

But as a practical, day-to-day tool – I kinda like it.

I started using Google’s transcoder (GWT) because when you use the mobile version of Google’s RSS reader, any links you click on are transcoded by GWT for you. And I find it very useful.

It creates efficient pages which render well in Pocket Internet Explorer. Plus it stops my phone trying to download some ridiculously large webpages over GPRS (argh… curse web-developers who have 1MB webpages on the front of your sites!).

It also adds a link to any RSS feeds it finds in a page at the top – clicking on which will take you to the feed in Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice at the moment), from where you can subscribe to the feed. (Slightly roundabout, but the only way I know to subscribe to new feeds from Google Reader Mobile).

I like.

But it’s a bit of a faff getting a page transcoded by GWT if you aren’t already given a link to a transcoded page. So (in the tiny window between tonight’s screaming fits… gah – when will the baby start sleeping through the night?!) I added a new tool to my set of Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) extensions: one that will re-open the current page using Google mobile transcoder.

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Mobile translation – an unfinished hack!

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Fourth of the random ideas for Over The Air hacks – a mobile service that lets you translate foreign text that you come across from your mobile phone.

The plan was to:

  • reuse some old code from last year to control my cameraphone and take a picture
  • upload the image to LeadTools, using their OCR web service to get the text back from the picture
  • translate the text into English using the Google translate API web service
  • display the English text on the phone screen

Unfortunately, too much time spent drinking beer, listening to talks, and generally slacking, meant that I didn’t finish this one.

But I thought it still might be interesting to share my experiences with the LeadTools service.

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