Whomwah.com

Back in February, I added reminders to the BBC Now Next Chrome extension I wrote. This was not an ideal implementation, and required a bit work from the user to find out what they’d been notified of, as well going off and watching/listening.

I’ve now fixed that, and implemented in-browser notifications. This is what I would have used, had they been available or had I known, at the time.

The whole experience is much nicer and much more what you would expect. I’ve removed the old highlighting, and badge numbers, as I don’t think they are require anymore. Just to remind you, the deal with the plugin is thus:

• You set it up with your favourite BBC Radio or TV stations,
• At any time you can click an icon that reveals what is on and coming up next on your selected stations.
• You can click on the little clock next to any of the upcoming shows, which will create a timer based on when the show will start.
• When the timer is up, a pop-up notification will appear, showing you what is about to start, with a link to watch or listen live.

You can download the extension from the Chrome extensions site:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gejphpmnffccdjcjgbelkklbpnigiika

and you can get the source over on Github:
http://github.com/whomwah/BBC-Now-Next-Chrome

Any comments would be appreciated. Do you like it? do you hate it? you know the deal. Oh, and also let me know if it breaks anything. I’ve tried it myself for a while, but you never can be sure.

A quick post to say that TellyBox has been updated to fix a bug that was stopping and telly being shown (thanks Joe for the heads up). This was caused by iPlayer changing their implementation code (something out of my control). Whilst fixing this bug, I also change the schedule fetching code to use the BBC Programmes JSON feed which makes the app smaller and faster.

[UPDATE] If you check the comments below, the Mobile version of the BBC food site has now implemented check boxes next to the ingredients list. This really is great news! thankyou!

Back in October last year, I wrote a post about creating shopping lists from BBC recipes. Well it’s seems that the BBC Recipe site has been refreshed. It’s awesome. There’s absolutely loads of recipes and the navigation is great, with some really useful urls. The markup of the pages is also vastly improved. They’ve even now got shopping lists! (no, my pleasure) which incidentally, has a broken image, I think you missed 1.4.4 from the url. Oh and more importantly, there is a Mobile version, which looks great.

But, I still think my little experiment has some mileage though. The BBC mobile version of a recipe still doesn’t fundamentally address what happens when I want to cook something. When I go to the supermarket, I want to look at my ingredients list and see:

1. The ingredients I want to buy. Nothing else. Not that I need to soften the butter, or finely chop the onions. Just the ingredients.
2. I’d like to know what I’ve bought and what I haven’t. In the same way you tick things off your list when you write it on a piece of paper.

So these 2 things haven’t been addressed yet, and I’m pretty sure they could be quite simply. So until such a time, you can still go to this url on your phone:

• http://sl.whomwah.com/

Which I have updated to support the new pages.

Oh, and they don’t appear to have a data views of the recipes. Someone correct me if I’m wrong? Again, this seems like it could have been done. Imagine if you had data versions of the recipes pages all interlinked. You could build your own recipe viewing applications, or write apps that would let you curate your own recipe book for friends and family or, oh never mind, just a thought.

Ever since NikeID started 10 years ago, I’d always fancied giving this a whirl. I finally treated myself:

The base shoe is a NikeFree 5.0 v4 running shoe.

A few of my friends seem quite surprised I switched from iPhone to an Android powered Nexus One a few weeks ago. I got one via Vodafone here in the Uk. Here’s some stuff I learnt during the switch, just in case you were thinking of doing the same. The headline, in case you can’t bear to read anymore is I’m not regretting it.

When my old contract ran out about 2 months ago on my iPhone 3G, I held back on renewing specifically to wait for iPhone 4. I’d seen the Apple keynote and was as excited as everyone else. But I had also seen the Google IO keynote for the 2.2 version of Android, code name Froyo. They showed a pretty impressive demo, and in some respects looked like they were ahead of Apple. Here’s a couple of features that really wet my appetite:

Notifications

I realise I rely quite heavily on notifications, especially in this more Real-Time era. The current notifications system on the iPhone is pretty poor. I’d love to see stats on who currently chooses to receive push notifications and even more, who pushes them. The new local notifications in IOS4 is interesting, a bit Growl like. The problem is the ‘a bit’. I personally want notifications to alert me of something, and then sit in the corner where I can see them. On the iPhone you get an alert, and then you have to make a decision on what to do then and there because the dialog box blocks the screen until you do. Android have a much nicer model. There’s global notifications, and then custom ones per app to override. Notifications get fired, and then sit in the status bar, waiting for you to do something about them. It is a more complex UI than the Apple version, but I don’t mind that. It will also be interesting to see what Android do with their over the air notification/messaging.

Tethering

I was fortunate enough to get NetShare before is was taken from the App Store. It proved really useful on my train journeys on the way to work. Problem was it made my phone get pretty hot, and was a pain in the arse to set up every time so I stopped using it. That and the fact it could be deleted by Apple at any time. Froyo on the other hand has WIFI HotSpot. This is awesome. Click to make a hotspot, add credentials, and then bingo, you see it in your WIFI networks list, then connect to it like any other network. That and seven other friends can connect too.

The rest

Before I mention the things that may well be specific to just me, the other big thing that made me switch was cost. Currently, between me and the wife, we have 2 Apple laptops, 4 iPods, 1 Airport and 1 Apple Tv. As well as that hardware, I have a mobileMe subscription, and an iPhone developers account. I think it’s fair to say I’ve given Steve enough money for the time being. The idea of shelling out the ever increasing cost of a new iPhone plus the lengthy contract, was the straw that … etc etc.

My N1 cost me £80 and Fonebank gave me £180 for my old 3G, so I saved a chunk of cash from the get-go. I won’t be renewing my mobileMe account even though the robot [at] me email address is quite cool, and I don’t think I’m going to renew the developer account either. I have two apps in the app store, and whilst they have paid for my developer account, they have definitely not paid me for the amount of time I put into them. And whilst people seem to like the apps, I just can’t justify sapping any more of my own precious private time when there is no financial reward, there’s too much other cool stuff to learn about. So with that account gone, I won’t be tempted to tinker on the train. I will though still be able to keep my iPhone dev hand in through my job.

Finally, the reason I switched that is specific to me. I’ve had an iPhone since the first release ( I upgraded to a 3G, but not to a 3GS ), and whilst iOS has got better and more feature full, it still looks and feels the same. Sure it’s quicker, the phone has a shiny new screen and behaves like a WII remote, but to me it still essentially behaves like the first iPhone I bought a couple of years ago. Now some people will love this fact, but as someone who loves technology, and likes new stuff to fill my brain with, iPhone 4 is not giving me anything more than I had before. Android on the other hand is completely new to me, and lets me tinker.

So like I said, I’ve had it a few weeks now. The first thing I did when I got the phone, was to take off the Vodafone approved version of Android it was running. Froyo came and went but my phone never got the upgrade notification. I’m not even sure if they have updated it yet! Vodafone say they need to look over the code, and make some tweaks. Yeah, but no thanks. So I followed this great tutorial about upgrading a Vodafone N1 to Froyo. It all worked as stated, and even auto-updated to the very latest version once I had installed everything. Note though that it will unlock the bootloader which I guess screws your warranty. I think I may try out Cyanogenmod too, now they have a Froyo version.

Froyo really does run like a rocket, and certainly adds a great deal of polish to the Android OS. Here’s what I like and what could be better. I’m not really comparing against the iPhone here, as I know some things you get on that too since iPhone 4.

I like:

• The speed. 2.2 is noticeable faster than 2.1
• The screen. Remember I had a 3G
• Notifications. Vastly superior to Apples.
• Wireless hotspot.
• Speech recognition. Godsmackingly awesome. Makes up for the shit keyboard. Opens up a whole new world.
• Integration with my email/calendar etc. I use Google to handle this websites email, so it jolly well should be good.
• The Exchange support for work email and calendar
• Browsing the web. The big screen and rocket ship browser mean I have been doing this more than ever before on a mobile device.
• Flash plugin support! I’ll choose thankyou.
• Background tasks. You need to be selective though.
• The camera, with video
• The maps and satnav apps are very cool.
• Phew! You can still get Drop7

Could do better:

• The Keyboard. Whilst not horrible, it’s still not as good as the iPhones.
• The market store. Really hard to find the good stuff between all the crap.
• Music Player. Whether I like it or not iTunes has me. I have been using DoubleTwist, but it’s not a patch on the real thing.

Oh and the one they all talk about, the Battery. I actually don’t think this is as bad as people are making out. The battery with all the same things turned on as my old iPhone lasts just the same. If you turn off 3g and keep the screen dim, the battery appears to be very good. Again, just like my old iPhone.

In summary then, I really like my Nexus One and am genuinely happy that I switched. While it does not always have the Apple polish and UX, it has other stuff to make up for it, and it is still a lot of fun to use. Go on, give it a try.

The solution as usual is super simple. The problem I was having was that when you didn’t put a trailing slash on a url, it would not handle it and throw a 404. I saw lots of fixes with complex re-write rules, but it turns out that a simple fix for me was to add this to my .conf file:

# http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxHttpCoreModule#server_name_in_redirect
server_name_in_redirect off;

So your *.conf would look like this

server {
  listen  80;
  server_name  localhost;
  ...
  server_name_in_redirect off;
  ...
}

RadioAunty updated to work with the new iPlayer radio console. Oh and I’m pulling in JSON data instead of XML for the schedules, which has proved much quicker. Not quite sure I like the new now playing text on the console.

Not because it’s not useful, but because it’s just not very pretty. With all the text handling power Flash gives you, I’m sure they can do more. Hopefully they’ll fix this.

A quick post of my learnings when researching the best setup for my Garmin eTrex Vista HCx as most of what I initially found was old, PC only, or just plain wrong.

I chose this GPS device because it was reasonably cheap, expandable, and allowed me to upload maps to the device, and visa-versa. I also wanted to use the power of OpenStreetMap, rather than pay Garmin lots of money, and my research showed me this was possible.

So, rather than talk about all the things that I couldn’t find or do, I’ll just run through the good stuff. Here’s a run down of all the useful software I found.

• OSM/Computerteddy Garmin IMG tile calculator

  Create a bounding box on a map of the world, and it will return an OSM IMG to use on your device. There’s even a great bookmarklet to use on the OpenStreetMap site. This is an awesome site.

• geofabrik.de

  A great resource of maps of the world. I don’t speak German, but you can get the idea of what you’re able to download.

• http://fredericbonifas.free.fr/

  Detailed map of France. I used this on a recent cycle tour, and it was invaluable.

• TrailRunner

  TrailRunner is a route planning Mac software for all kinds of long distance sports like running, biking, hiking, inline-skating, skiing and more. It’s free, but a donation of 25 Euros will stop prompts. It’s a fantastic bit of software.

• LoadMyTracks

  This free utility works hand-in-hand with TrailRunner. It will send and receive data to and from the eTrex. It can also be used to translate data between the popular GPX and KML (Google Earth) formats.

Finally there is the OpenStreetMap Garmin page which has the useful information about getting all this data onto the device, and much more.

I’m excited and terrified in equal measures. Is this normal?

This caught me out today, so I thought I’d share to save someone else scratching their head. The problem I was having was thus. In interface builder I had a window with an NSTextField and an NSButton. I want to be able to tab between them. I did what I thought was correct:

1. Set the intialFirstResponser for the NSWindow to be my NSTextField
2. Set the NSTextField nextKeyView to be the NSButton
3. Set the NSButton nextKeyView to be my NSTextField

But this was not working in the app! It Turns out that in the Apple > System Preferences > Keyboard there is a setting that allows you to press Tab to move keyboard focus between:

• Text boxes and lists only
• All controls

I think the top one is set by default. Once changed to All controls everything worked as expected.