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.