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Week Notes Week 81
I tend to ignore blogging trends, in fact I wouldn’t really go as far as to call myself a blogger, but this “Week Notes” trend could help me to work better and more efficiently so I thought I’d give it a go. The week numbers run from the time at which the company was incorporated and MKE Computing Ltd, the limited company I set up to handle my freelancing work, was setup on the 30th July 2008, hence week 81.
This could actually be the worst time for me to start something regular considering I’m actually going on holiday at the end of this week, but what the heck, it’s some content for my blog if nothing else!
So this week has been pretty busy, largely as I’m trying to wind things down for my holiday. Monday and Thursday afternoon I was in the offices of Moneyextra.com where I regularly do a few days work. My work there is generally PHP though has ranged from Perl through VB.net through to an iPhone app in the past. At the moment I’m working on a PHP-based back-office system that they’re doing for Carphone Warehouse. It’s actually based on OSCommerce which I think was last developed in 1973 (honestly, it feels that way) so is really outdated and can be a pain to extend.
My main focus this week and next was actually supposed to be to get lots of work done on my “start up” website mapme.at. I’m giving a talk at the end of March at the Where 2.0 conference and I’m really hoping to have some interesting things to talk about. The main things I was supposed to be doing is developing two iPhone apps to work with the site. One is focused around putting data in, the other more focussed on pulling it out in a unique and fun way. I’ve been having issues decided how to handle authentication though. If I put an app on the app store it’s quite likely that most people who download it have never heard of the site and won’t have an account. I’d like to do something really simple to handle creating an app, potentially even doing it silently in the background. I already use OAuth for the API and it would be possible to handle a signup step as part of that but the OAuth process is quite jarring to many users (the app has to quit, Safari launches and then you have to be sure to reload the app when the signup/login and authorisation has finished). One option would be to use Facebook Connect and automatically create a user linked to their Facebook credentials, this could also be confusing to many users and would require me to integrate facebook connect into mapme.at in general. I think I’ve decided to just stick to the OAuth method for now and to look at improving it once I’ve got an app that I can demo.
As part of looking at authentication though I decided to improve my existing OpenID support. My initial implementation was done in such a way that you could attach the same OpenID credentials to multiple accounts. I guess I thought that might be a useful feature but I think most people found it annoying as it meant that to log in, you had to enter your OpenID and your username, as mapme.at wasn’t using the OpenID as a unique identifier. I’ve now fixed this which should hopefully make things simpler. I’m also intending to reduce the number of fields you need to enter to create an account, but again I think I’ll wait until I’ve got some iPhone apps I can demo.
Something else that I’ve been considering for mapme.at and decided to implement this week is “place based check-ins”. Currently on mapme.at you either map yourself at an arbitrary latitude and longitude, or you create a “favourite” location and map yourself there. There was a few “global” favourites which I had added myself but generally you had to create a favourite manually or use some sort of logging app or API to log your location arbitrarilly. The new functionality means that mapme.at will give users access to a big database of existing shared places. This database, and improved UI on the site, will make it much easier to say “I’m in the supermarket” rather than “I’m at 53.415812,-2.921977”. I decided that having that functionality in place would vastly improve one of the iPhone apps so I decided to start working on it. It’s coming along really well, there’s still work to do but I think I’ll have it out in just a few more days.
On Friday I met up with some old friends, and met some new ones, for lunch. I had a good time and it was good to catch up and find out what others are up to in Liverpool but it did cut into my dev time on the new functionality.
Next week I’m hoping to spend at least another two days working on mapme.at. I’ve got some functionality to finish off for another client on Monday but apart from that it should be mapme.at until I got on holiday to Australia at the end of the week!
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Basic Sat Nav and LocationManagerSimulator
I’ve just launched an awesome new iPhone app - Basic Sat Nav. A PND/Satnav app for your iPhone that will direct you anywhere in the world. Using Cloudmade’s great geocoding service I can provide essentially global coverage that no other iPhone satnav offers. Okay it doesn’t have advanced features like “Augmented Reality”. In fact it doesn’t have any of the more basic features like “turn by turn directions” but I think there’s nothing better than a series of textual updates telling you whether you’re getting “Hotter” or “Colder” for getting you where you need to be.
Ok, so maybe it’s a bit of a joke but I’ve been amused that everyone who’s seen it has paused for a moment and then said “cool! that would be useful for X”. The most obvious thing that people have asked for is Geocaching support so I may try to add searching for geocaches in the future, I’ll see how things go though as I really want to avoid feature bloat.
Testing a satnav really isn’t the simplest thing to do though. When testing iPhone apps in the iPhone SDK provided iPhone Simulator you get a single location update that puts you in Cupertino. This is obviously completely useless when writing a satnav. To get around this I wrote a new LocationManagerSimulator class that I could add to my project which will take in a Property List file (converted from a GPX file recorded earlier) and will replay the locations in that file every time I start the app. This was a really good way of testing things – so long as I had a well defined route in my GPX file I could then search for a location along that route and the sat nav would update as my recorded position got closer and closer to the destination. If I picked a location halfway along that route I could see the satnav updating as I got further from the destination too.
The simulator will take the HDOP and VDOP values from within the GPX file and will, using a simple metric (× 6) convert these to horizontalAccuracy and verticalAccuracy values. If they’re not present it uses fixed values of 50.0m for these fields. If there’s an “ele” field in the GPX then this will be used for the altitude, otherwise altitude is set to 0m. Currently the code is pretty basic but it does all that I needed it to and should be quite easy for others to use. Simply drop the two files (LocationManagerSimulator.h and LocationManager.m) into your project and change your reference to CLLocationManager to LocationManagerSimulator. If you have a file named
simulated-locations.plistin your project then it’ll read from that by default. Otherwise you’ll want to use the full initWithFilename:andMultiplier: call, this also allows you to pass a multiplier so that the route runs faster or slower. Simulate a driving route on your bike or vice versa!I want people to just go ahead and use this so I’m putting it out there as public domain/CC0 or whatever you need to be able to use it without worrying :-) You can download LocationManagerSimulator from github where you’ll also find a bit more documentation. If you feel guilty about using my code for free then please do buy Basic Sat Nav from iTunes. If you have ideas for improvements then let me know or, better still, fork the project and add them yourself!
Oh, nearly forgot to say, if anyone wants to try Basic Sat Nav out for free then I’ll give promo codes away to the first 20 people that ask in the comments. Unfortunately promo codes can only be used in the US iTunes store though so only ask if you’ll be able to use it!
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OSM State of the Map and AGI Geocommunity
So one of the great events that I’ve, er.. delayed writing about was the annual OpenStreetMap conference “State of the Map”. This year it was a 3 day conference (previous years had been 2 days) with the extra day accommodating the various commercial people that have started making use of OSM data. It was a great idea to bring in some fresh faces to the conference and actually gave me my first speaking opportunity of the weekend, talking for five minutes about mapme.at. The following two days took a more traditional course with various members of the community talking about the ways in which they are using and working with the OSM data.
A selection of countries gave a “State of
" type talk, these are always really great to hear, especially for the smaller countries where perhaps Internet access or access to GPS technology is not so great. Often in these locations there isn't even any existing map data so there's a great opportunity for the OSM community. The talks from Pakistan and Brazil were particularly memorable and were only made possible due to the great OpenStreetMap Foundation "scholarships" program which was a great way to make sure we had attendees from all areas of the world. It was also good to see these attendees being handed GPS devices as part of the [GPStogo](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/GPStogo) program which hopefully they'll take home and use to collect many more GPS traces. 
The OSMF Scholarship attendeesThe conference took place this year in Amsterdam and it was my first time visiting the city, though I didn’t see much of it in the first few days while at the conference we fortunately stayed on (we being my wife and I) to spend another few days in the city for some rest and relaxation. We had a great time there and I had plenty of opportunities to use my (still relatively new at the time) DSLR camera as you should be able to see from the photos scattered around this post.
I managed to make it three years running speaking at a SOTM conference not only with my 5 minute segment about mapme.at but also with a full half hour on Saturday afternoon talking about OpenStreetView. This is my idea for a project to try to create an openly licensed database of street-level imagery, and ideally some really impressive software to go with it. The talk went well though I had an “interesting” Q&A; session afterward, obviously people are still concerned about the privacy aspect even when related to what I hope will become a very open project. Unfortunately at the time I hadn’t completed the software side enough to launch the project, and as you may have noticed I haven’t yet launched it, more on that soon.
Next week I’ll be attending another conference, and again will be speaking about OpenStreetView. Ed Parsons has written about the conference that he “was disappointed with the introspection and backwards thinking demonstrated … and had all but given up attending” which doesn’t sound like a big vote of confidence. The conference is AGI Geocommunity and fortunately a big effort has been made by Stephen Feldman, Chris Osbourne, John Fagan, Rollo Home and many others to improve the situation leading to a really great and interesting looking programme.
As mentioned I’ll be speaking about OpenStreetView again, but this time I’m intending to have something launched and usable beforehand. It won’t be particularly pretty, it won’t have a huge number of features, and it probably won’t have a huge database of images, but I’m hoping this will all change once I open it out and get more people involved. My aim with the project is to build a database of images and metadata which can be built upon by others who are already working on the software side for viewing these things. It should also provide a home for imagery being created by various people who are already building hardware solutions for collecting it. Unfortunately (for the project, good for me) I’ve been very busy over the summer with paying clients but I’m hoping I can get things finished off this week to allow upload and moderation, then the fun can begin!
I also can’t talk about conferences without mentioning another speaking date I have coming up in November. While the AGI is a national group aimed at representing the interests of the whole UK’s geographic information (GI) industry, they also have smaller groups aimed at bringing together the GI community in different areas. The AGI Northern Group achieves these aims in the North of England with a monthly meeting and this year their first full-day seminar - the AGI Northern Group Where2Now Conference. It’s being held on the 10th November in Harrogate and I’ll be speaking along with a great list of people. Ticket information isn’t yet available but put the date in your diary, check out the linkedIn events page and head over to Tim’s blog for more information on the speakers.
If you’re going to the conference next week and we haven’t met before then please do say “Hi!” I’m really looking forward to it, not just for the great content on offer but also for the opportunity to meet up with some old friends that I haven’t seen in some time, and also to meet some new faces. I’ll close this blog post out though by quoting Tim Waters and his write-up of the SOTM conference, it’ll be interesting to see if the AGI Geocommunity conference can generate just as much emotion:
Yes, I got a bit emotional at the third OpenStreetMap conference, held in the CCC, Amsterdam last weekend – mainly because this globe we are on is the only one we know – we really are mapping our universe, doing it our way. Creating the world we want to live in. [Tim Waters](http://thinkwhere.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/were-making-the-world-weve-always-wanted-to-live-in-sotm09/)
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YUI Flash Uploader crash in Firefox
Ok, so I’m still not blogging about future and past conferences but I had to post about this one as I’ve just wasted an hour trying to fix it.
I’ve used the YUI Uploader a few times now as a handy way to upload multiple files. In my current project I’m using it mainly as an Ajax uploader, I need to upload multiple files and create a variety of DB records in a few Ajax requests so I thought this would be a good way. Initially I had a few errors because I was getting a 401 - the flash doesn’t pass the cookies through. I sorted this out by passing them in the URL (and modifying the PHP to read $_REQUEST as well as $_COOKIE). I then tried in Safari and found the flash element had zero height so wasn’t accessible. Played around with the CSS and got it working. It was successfully uploading the file but for some reason not calling my JavaScript function callbacks. Oh well, bit odd, let’s try Firefox again. Tried it and Firefox crashed! I then spent an hour trying to figure out why Firefox was crashing.
One thing to mention before I tell you why. The YUI Flash uploader has to get around a limit in Flash 10. The actual process of launching the “Select Files” dialog must come from within the flash. To achieve this you either give the flash the URL of an image or you position the flash on top of some HTML, I was going with the latter, hence my problems when the flash had zero height.
Because my save process involves the flash file uploading and a few ajax requests I had decided to hide the flash during this process, to make sure that during the ajax requests a user couldn’t try adding new files in. I did this by adding “display: none” via a CSS class. This is what was causing the crash in Firefox. It seems that giving the flash “display: none” was detaching it from the page (or something), Firefox didn’t handle this well and so crashed out completely. Safari handled it a bit better, it didn’t crash but my function callbacks were no longer attached.
So, moral of this story, don’t “display: none” your YUI uploader flash. I’ve tried setting “visibility: hidden” and that works equally well, without causing a crash. After spending an hour fixing this I decided I had to post something to try to save someone else that pain, I didn’t see anything similar in my googles of “flash YUI crash firefox”.
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Helvetireader
I need to blog more, like seriously, for now though… I use Google Reader to read everyone elses blogs. I use it a lot so I was very interested to read on twitter and lifehacker about an extension thingy to allow you to view a nicely restyled version of Google Reader that uses the Helvetica font to give a much nicer experience, Helvetireader. The only ways to use it though is using a userscript that requires Greasemonkey or Greasekit, or a user CSS if your browser supports it. I generally use Safari and don’t have Greasekit installed so didn’t have an option to quickly try it out, so I knocked up a bookmarklet. Add the following link to your bookmarks (I generally put these in my toolbar/”Bookmarks Bar”), then when you’re in Google Reader click on the link and it’ll switch you to Helvetireader. If you don’t like it just refresh the page, if you do then you can look into one of the other options, or just keep using the bookmarklet.
I promise I’ll blog more soon, I’ve got two past conferences and two future ones to tell you all about!
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Hacking Location into Hardware
UPDATE 2011/11/16: It’s now possible to buy a mapme.at WhereDial “Weasley Clock” just like this one!
Last weekend I went to the Howduino hack day which by good fortune was happening on my doorstep, in Liverpool. The day was organised by two friends of mine - Adrian McEwen and Thom Shannon - who have been doing hardware hacking for quite some time now and wanted to open things up for more people to get involved.
The day was partly named after Arduino (with a bit of Scouse humour mixed in - “how do we know?!”). From their website:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.
Basically you get a circuit board that has a USB slot, a power slot and a set of digital and analogue inputs and outputs. You can load software onto the circuit board via the USB slot, the software can then run on the board when it is disconnected from the computer and can operate other hardware through the inputs and outputs. Adrian used one of these devices to make the famous Bubblino twitter monitoring bubble machine and the Mazzini power monitoring project. Thom has used it to make, amongst other things, a light tracking mini.
Though Howduino got its name from the Arduino boards, the day was actually more of a general hardware hacking event. Sophie Green spent most of the day making artworks using “brush bots” which were incredibly simple devices made from motors and batteries mounted on toothbrushes. Some people built a “drawbot” from scratch on the day and a few people tried making racing radio controlled cars with movements controlled by twitter hashtags.
My project was suggested by Grant Bell, he thought that I should use mapme.at to create a “Weasley Clock”. This clock is described in the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, it is used by the Weasley family to see where each member of the family is. Instead of telling the time, each hand shows a photo of one of the family members, the clock face has a number of locations written around the edge, such as “Home”, “Travelling”, “School”, “Holidays” and even “Mortal Peril”!
Now one way in which I could’ve handled this would be to create a web page that showed my location on a picture of one of these clocks. That would be fairly easy to do but much less interesting than the hardware hacking version. I started off by getting hold of an old clock. My Dad has been tinkering with and fixing clocks for years, and often gets given old clocks and told “This stopped working years ago, thought you might like it” so fortunately he has a few lying around and gave me this one:
I spent a morning taking it to pieces carefully and working out how it worked, until I pulled the back off it and the chime spring caused an explosion of gears:
I then took all the bits to Howduino together with a stepper motor that I’d taken out of a floppy drive. After a short while working with Aaron from Oomlout we managed to get the stepper motor going but then I had the problem of connecting the motor to the clock. After many hours of trying to glue and solder the small stepper motor on I finally decided to ask around to see if anyone else had stepper motors. Fortunately someone did, a much bigger motor that could fit through the black of the clock mechanism and unbelievably had a gear on that meshed perfectly with the gears in the clock. With the application of some super glue and a few pieces of metal “salvaged” from an old printer I got the motor attached and turning the hand reliably:
Once that was done I had to write some software. The software for moving the clock is fairly simple. As the motor is a “stepping” motor it can be controlled very reliably. One step of the motor moves it by a well defined amount, with the gearing from the clock 150 steps of the motor turns the minute hand around in a complete rotation, meaning 12 × 150 = 1800 steps will turn the hour hand around completely. I knocked up some Arduino code that reads the current location of the hands from the EEPROM memory on the Arduino. To reset it I manually move the hands to “midnight” and zero the EEPROM memory. I can then tell the Arduino to position each of the hands by an hour. As the hands are still geared together I can only put the hour hand between one hour and another, while the minute hand can be precisely positioned. When the clock has moved to the position you’ve requested, it saves the new location of the hands to the EEPROM memory again so that it’s safe to be powered off.
To get my location I’ve knocked up a MapMe_At class which can request the location for a user. It makes a HTTP request to mapme.at, using the Arduino Ethernet Shield, pulls down the location and uses a very lightweight JSON parser to pull out the label for the favourite location that I’m currently at. From my core code I then request the location of two users from mapme.at every minute, convert that location to a position on the clock and then move the hands. When it works it looks really good, I’m only running the clock forwards at the moment because some of the gearing for the chime is still there and makes funny noises if I run the clock backwards, this means that it can take nearly a minute for the hands to move but considering it’s unlikely for location changes to happen that often this should be fine. I do seem to have a problem whereby the clock stops working after running for a while so I’ll have to do some debugging, but as you can see from the photos and the video it is looking pretty good at least!
(Unfortunately hardware hacking can have its casualties, as you can see the glass on the face of the clock was one)
I’ll be taking the clock along with me on the next Tech Bus Tour from London to Liverpool. I’ll be updating the face to show our progress between the locations as this should be more interesting than showing that I’m “Travelling” constantly. I’ll also open source the Arduino source code when I get around to tidying it up.
UPDATE 2011/11/16: It’s now possible to buy a mapme.at WhereDial “Weasley Clock” just like this one!
UPDATE 2009/01/04: The code is now available on github, I haven’t had time to fully clean it up and add comments throughout but hopefully it’ll be useful anyway. Download the code here.
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New mapping APIs available from CloudMade
If you’ve been following my Twitters you’ll be well aware that I’ve just spent the past week in San Francisco. I came here to attend, and speak at, the launch event for CloudMade’s new APIs for location based services. CloudMade is a company that was launched around 18 months ago by Steve Coast, the founder of the OpenStreetMap project, and Nick Black, a core member of the OSM project. The aim of their company is to bring the power of crowd sourced data, specifically OSM data, to more developers and to commercial companies around the world. The first step of this was of course to develop some products to make this possible and to make them available to the world, hence this event.
The event was split into four main sections. Steve started by giving an overview of the OSM project, its history and some glimpses of what’s likely to happen in the future. Nick then came on stage to explain their ideas behind forming CloudMade and what they’re doing to get OSM data into the hands of more people. After this I and four other developers who have been working with CloudMade’s APIs got on stage to give 5 minute presentations about our experiences developing with the new APIs.
Andrew Turner, CTO of GeoCommons, explained how they have integrated CloudMade’s tiles into their Maker application and talked about how the new Style Editor enables great looking mashups. Jaak Laineste of Nutiteq told us how they’ve been integrating CloudMade’s tile, geocoding and routing services into their Mobile map libraries. I talked about my experiences working with the new APIs, though I won’t go into too much detail here as I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise for Thursday. Andre, of Advanced Flash Components, then showed us a live demo of CloudMade’s APIs being used in a flash application and showed the speedy responses that the API gave.
Cragg Nilson then talked more about the specific products that CloudMade are making available and how people can get access to them. Finally a Q&A; session allowed some light interrogation of the CloudMade team before we moved into another room for demo sessions. Jaak, Andre and I all had a plasma screen each that we used to demo what we’d discussed in our talks. The CloudMade team also demoed various other applications that were using their services, centred around a large range of mobile devices that are able to access the APIs using various applications.
I’ve been really impressed by what CloudMade are offering considering they are still a young company. While a large reason for the quality of their offerings is down to the great team they’ve built up, they do also have an advantage in that the data they’re using, and the license it’s built upon, allow them to offer so much more to the developers using their products. The OSM dataset is incredibly rich and can cover a wide range of features that often don’t get much coverage from standard data providers. Also because the data is free CloudMade can make all of it available in their APIs without having to worry about extra charges such as you might get if you wanted to return vectors from existing data providers.
Now the good news, if you’re reading this thinking “I wish I could’ve gone to San Francisco and seen these great talks”, you need not fret. The whole event is being repeated in London on Thursday 12th. It’s currently oversubscribed but if you are interested in going I believe they’ve managed to arrange extra room so there shouldn’t be a problem with more people going. This page should give more details about the CloudMade launch event in London.
Oh yes, and as a hint to what I’ll be talking about on Thursday, take a look at the new logo for one of my existing mapping sites:
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Postcodes are Important!
I spotted this article about postcodes on the BBC a few days ago. It points out how UK postcodes in their current form have been around for almost 50 years. Postcodes are of course hugely important. Though there have been stories over the years of Royal Mail managing to deliver poorly addressed, or even cryptically addressed items, the fastest and most reliable of getting a letter delivered is to make sure you address it with a postcode. Postcodes are also being used increasingly by personal navigation devices and online mapping services as a really simple and short way of identifying locations.
Considering how important and useful postcodes are, you would think that the post office would want to make it as easy as possible to get hold of information relating to postcodes. On the contrary, while it’s not particularly hard, it is prohibitively expensive. This, of course, is where the Free the Postcode project comes in. As such I’d like everyone reading this blog to make sure in this coming 50th year of postcodes that they submit as many postcodes to Free the Postcode as they can. Hopefully someone will make an Android, J2ME or Symbian app to make this easy, but in the meantime if you have an iPhone then there’s a new version of iFreeThePostcode available to you now.
I’ll talk about the new version in a moment but first I thought I’d mention how successful the app has been so far. My main source for statistics has been iTunes Connect, this is part of iTunes you generally don’t see. This is what I used to upload the app originally and setup my contracts. Apple also provide some basic sales data which can be downloaded in tab separated files. When I added the app I was able to choose what stores to make it available in but I decided not to limit it, so that visitors to the UK would still be able to help if they wanted to. Using the files I’ve found these are the top 5 countries that have downloaded the app:
GB 1683 US 535 CA 77 FR 69 IT 66 Others 684 Total 3114 With so many people downloading the app you might think we’d had huge numbers of submissions to freethepostcode.org. Maybe 2 per person, home and work? Or at least 1 per UK person to download? Well, while that hasn’t been the case, I’ve found that over the past month and a half since the app was released, nearly 50% of postcodes submitted to freethepostcode.org have come from my app. A few days ago I received the following stats from Dom, the administrator of freethepostcode.org:
In November 307 out of 1723 submissions were from iFreeThePostcode. In December 587 out of 1199 submissions were from iFreeThePostcode.
So in December that was 49% of the submissions, and using a little maths I’m guessing at about 59% for the 9 days in November that the app was available. I’m really happy with that, but hopefully with the bugs ironed out, we’ll be able to get that even higher in the coming months. And so onto the new release…
Two days ago the new version of iFreeThePostcode went live on the app store. I’ve noticed a few negative reviews on the App Store saying things like “I tried to click the button to submit and it didn’t work, 1 star!” It seems that my existing way of telling you that the accuracy of your location wasn’t high enough was a little too subtle. Originally I set the button status to disabled, all this seems to do though is change the text colour from blue to black, not the most obvious change. I also colour the accuracy label red or green depending on whether it’s accurate enough.
The new version replaces the overly subtle “disabled” button with a label when the accuracy is not enough, this label also shows when you haven’t submitted a postcode or email address. I’m hoping this label will be clear enough and that people will now try waiting for a more accurate location. It’s a good thing to remember that not everyone installing your app will be a technophile, but then even amongst my techy friends there were people who couldn’t tell why they weren’t able to submit. I’ve also made sure that the app remembers the postcode that you’ve put in. The original version didn’t do this because I wanted to make sure that people didn’t accidentally submit the same postcode in different locations, but I’ve realised that this is unlikely to happen, whereas it’s quite possible that someone might be copying the postcode from an email or a contact, and might want to flick between iFreeThePostcode and another app without the postcode being removed.
If you’ve got an iPhone and have installed the app, please leave some positive feedback on the iTunes page to counteract the negative feedback. If you do have criticisms then contact me directly or leave comments on the blog post and I’ll try to put fixes in the next version. If you own an iPhone and haven’t installed the app, why not?! Head over to the iFreeThePostcode page for more information and for the iTunes link.
Oh yes, final thing to mention, this version is of course open source again, see the above link to download if you’re interested in finding out how it works. Patches welcome!
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BarCamp Liverpool
Wow, BarCamp was such a long time ago. Though I had an amazing weekend and felt really inspired by the end of it, real work brought me back down to earth pretty quickly :-(
So far I’ve only been to one BarCamp, in Manchester, that was really good but only lasted for one day. I’ve also been to a WhereCamp which is basically the same thing specialising in location based services, this one did involve an overnight stay and was also fun (this one actually took place in the Googleplex!). Having had so much fun away from home I was really looking forward to having a BarCamp in my home town.
Something that I’ve been planning for a while to do at the next Liverpool Mapping Party, when I get around to organising it, was to prepare a big printout of the OSM coverage of Liverpool, get some stickers printed up with POI icons on them, and invite everybody to place stickers where there was missing POIs on the map. As I hadn’t got around to organising a mapping party I decided to do this at BarCamp and try to get everyone interested in editing the map. Cue me spending 3 hours the week before trying to finish all the surveying of South Liverpool and then spending hours on the Friday before BarCamp trying to input this data and prepare a PDF file of the map, suitable to be printed at A0 size. I managed to email my PDF over to the printers at 2:30 on Friday afternoon, fortunately they managed to get it printed within the hour so that I could pick it up on my way to the iPhone event. Unfortunately though the print-out came out looking great, and the vector-based PDF file had given a great result, for some reason all the road names were missing! This is the second A0 printout I’ve done that has had problems so I’m definitely going to have to spend more time on it if I try again.
This is a photo of the map at the beginning of the weekend. Unfortunately it didn’t look much different at the end, only a few people bothered putting stickers on it. This was a little surprising to me but I guess that actually most of the people at BarCamp were from outside of Liverpool, and most of the ones from within Liverpool were from the parts that had been mapped. There was also an issue that the map was at such a small scale, and the stickers so big, that each one covered an area of about 1km2. I think the idea could still work but definitely needs to to be done with a larger scale map, more like the type of area you’d try to cover at a mapping party.
The talks at BarCamp were quite varied. Unfortunately as it has been so long now I can’t remember too many of the ones I went to, and I haven’t been able to find a full set of photos of the sessions board. Adrian did a good writeup here that you should read. I do remember a few of the sessions I went to though including one from Gill Hunt of Liverpool Ventures who talked about VCs and how to look for funding. Last thing on Saturday there was also the “Bitchin’ Pitches” session. I used this one to talk about my iPhone app iFreeThePostcode, it was good to get up alongside all the other pitches and talk about my app, but as I wasn’t really looking for money or anything like that there wasn’t actually all that much point and I didn’t end up winning a prize.
In the evening we all went to the bar downstairs at which Microsoft was sponsoring drinks. Beer tokens were handed out by the organisers which we all dutifully exchanged for beer at the bar. The “Bitchin’ Pitches” session also continued into the party with the best pitches being repeated in front of everyone. Melinda Stockington pitched her idea of a site that allowed you to log how often you read books and Adrian pitched his Arduino based Mazzini project for which he won first prize!
Due to the effectiveness of the MS sponsored drinks we were a bit late arriving on the Sunday but when I got there I decided to go for the “Let’s talk about sex” session as I couldn’t find anything else that interested me. I wasn’t really sure what to expect from a load of Geeks talking about sex, it wasn’t quite as scary as you might expect though and most of it was a discussion of relationships and the Internet, including things such as the volatility of the “relationship status” on Facebook. Much amusement when someone suggested the use of HTTP error codes in sexual situations, the following being the ones I found most amusing:
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411 Length Required
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413 Request Entity Too Large
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405 Method Not Allowed
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416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable
I don’t know if we covered normal status codes on the day but I just noticed the following could be used too:
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100 Continue
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201 Created (pregnancy ensues!)
After this I went to a talk about “CodeWiki” which unfortunately I wasn’t really paying attention to at the time. This was followed by John O’Shea’s discussion about his Meat License Proposal. Again I wasn’t really paying attention at first, sitting at the back playing on my laptop. After a while though his talk made me pay attention, basically he’s proposing that to eat meat a person might have to obtain a “Meat License”. To get a license the person would have to have killed an animal with their own hands. It sounds fairly grotesque, but I found it a really interesting proposal and raises some good questions about how much we know of what goes into making the food we eat. Afterwards I talked to John about some work that he’s done as co-director of an artist’s collective that could make some good use of maps, hopefully I’ll be in touch with him again soon (just as soon as I get around to replying to his email!)
Later on in the day I gave a talk about the use of location tracking services on the iPhone. Really it was just to give me an opportunity to talk about mapme.at and get some opinions of what people expected from this type of service. It was also good to chat to Paul Stringer about his experiences from creating Coffee Buzz.
The final talk that I went to was Adrian’s Don’t Just Change the World… Improve It!. This was a good inspirational talk, it reminded us that the North-West was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and probably has a few environmental debts to repay, so if we can get involved with this side of things it would be a great way to repay those debts. Maybe I just liked his talk because his last slide was one of my photos!
This artwork was actually just outside the door to the venue for BarCamp and it really summed up Adrian’s talk well, this quote is definitely something to live by:
FIRST RULE OF THE COSMOS GET OFF YOUR ARSE & MAKE IT HAPPEN
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The Amazing iPhone
Wow, I’ve just had the most geeked out weekend ever, so big in fact that I’m going to have to split it into two blog posts. It started on Friday with The Amazing iPhone event. I had been planning to go to this event for a few weeks but it was only on Monday of last week that I got a call telling me that the organisers would like me to give a short 5 minute talk at the event. Obviously I jumped at the chance to talk about my experiences of iPhone development, and of course to hawk iFreeThePostcode and my own freelance services!
The Amazing iPhone was essentially an opportunity to launch a report that the guys at Kisky Netmedia have spent the past few months putting together. The report is a freely available (CC licensed) download that looks at the iPhone and covers the effects it’s having on the overall mobile landscape, what opportunities it’s creating and what development skills are required to create apps for it. Phil Redmond, the creator of such TV hits as Grange Hill, Brookside and Hollyoaks actually gave an introduction to the event and explained the reasons that he loved his iPhone and how he saw it representing a real change in the culture of internet use in the future. Katie Lips of Kisky Netmedia followed this by giving an overview of the report. The report starts by introducing us to the iPhone and then tries to explain the fanaticism and dedication shown by people who own one, also covering “The Cult of Mac”. It then talks a little about the history of the mobile phone business, covering what came before the iPhone, the players involved in the industry, how they worked and mistakes they perhaps made. We’re then taken through a timeline of the iPhone’s entrance into popular culture and some statistics on sales, growth and market share. The report goes on to cover many other subjects including the attempts by existing manufacturers to compete with the iPhone, who is using the iPhone (consumers and enterprises alike), before going on to talk about apps, the app store and the development skills required to create your own apps.
Three developers then gave an interesting mix of their opinions on iPhone development. Dave Verwer of Shiny Development talked about his recently released Charades app and talked about his experiences as an existing Objective C and Cocoa developer starting out on the iPhone platform. Matt West of Westbright Ltd then told us about his upcoming Zombie Slayer game and told us about his previous work on Palm devices and the difficulties he had handling the distribution process, which is made much easier by Apple with the App Store. Lastly I gave my talk, unfortunately I’d been really busy preparing for BarCamp and so had only knocked together my slides a few hours previous. I began by giving an overview of my background in web development and my involvement in the Open Street Map project. I then talked about iFreeThePostcode, the reasons for its existence and why the iPhone is such a good device for it. I followed this by mentioning my routing app, how the limited specifications of a mobile device made this sort of app more difficult to write but how the capabilities that the iPhone has should allow me to create a great app. If you’re interested you can see my slides on slideshare.
After our talks Paul Stringer, also of Kisky Netmedia, gave a half hour overview of how they set about creating an iPhone app - CoffeeBuzz - and the insights that this process gave them which they then put into the report. After this we had a Q&A; session which saw all the speakers answering questions offered by the audience. My main input of course was on location related questions but a good range of questions were asked, including of course the inevitable “I don’t want to use O2, can I hack the iPhone?”. After the event we all hung around to enjoy some free refreshments and chat to the attendees. It was good to see such a varied crowd including other local developers through to people from a variety of different businesses. I’d definitely recommend reading the report so head over to The Amazing iPhone site now to download it.
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