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Showing posts from September, 2011

GPS Game for cyclists - 2

Well when I went for a cycle yesterday to test out my new GPS game things did not go according to plan. I was just collecting the GPS data from the activity, so when the activity was not in the foreground (for example when I switched off my screen and put the phone in my jersey) the gps collection stops. A pretty fundamental mistake. I have substantially modified the code to consist of a simplified Activity for which you can start and stop GPS collection (and effectively the workout) and a service which does the actual collection. This works well now (at least before I go out on the bike). When I start the data collection service an icon appears in the status bar telling me that the service is running. I can then leave the activity and do other things and collection will continue. When I am ready to stop the data collection I pull down the status bar and click on the notification. This brings me to the simple activity from where I can stop proceedings. Lots more to do on this, but ma

GPS Game for cyclists

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I do quite a bit of cycling and inevitably this leads to thinking about logging and recording these activities in an interesting way that would motivate me to be more consistent in my exercise. When I was an engineer we used Pareto Charts to work out which problems on the equipment were the most pressing and needed our attention. This involved looking at the impact of each problem on the output of the system and ordering this list from biggest impact to smallest. I want to create a program which will create a Pareto style chart of my cycling where my exercise is sorted by speed of each second. An interesting goal for a high intensity session might be to draw a vertical line down this chart at some point and aim to get above that amount of 'high intensity' work. High intensity being defined as above some threshold of speed. It turns out that the GPS receiver in my phone also gives speed numbers. I modified an earlier piece of code for logging my location to also include the s

The blog word counter progresses

So I made some good progress today. Got the first revision of the blog word counter (doesn't exactly roll off the tongue does it? But considering that mine will probably be the only tongue that it rolls off, that really doesn't matter :)) up onto google code At this stage it is a command line java program that relies on a few google jars. It asks you for your credentials when you log on and then goes through all of your blog posts from the previous 24 hours and adds up the words. You end up with a total word count for your blatherings for the previous day. Handy. The google code source control system is very easy to use an provides all of the features that a budding open source could desire. But then again I will probably be the only person to work on this one, so that does not really matter either. I was just trying to get a feel for how all of this stuff worked.

The Blogger APIs

I took a look at the APIs for accessing Blogger (and a large range of Google's other data services). I am a Google fanboy. No surprise there. Android is just the logical next step on that journey. They seem to provide so much more than the companies that I used to rely on. People like Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. Its a while since I used MS technologies professionally, so maybe their offering has come along, but Sun - now Oracle - is still stodgy fare compared to the nice things that Google lets us do.  So what can you do with the blogger APIs - well pretty much anything you can do with a blogger account. Create posts, edit existing posts, delete posts and add comments. A range of client languages are provided for in this - php, JavaScript and for my liking Java.  In essence the Blogger API is just a layer sitting on top of a common data access API provided by Google for most of their services (Analytics being another interesting example). So the client bit just puts together

Wolfram Alpha Android app review

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I have been a fan of Wolfram for a while. The impresario is Stephen Wolfram a physicist who turned business bloke to sell and develop his maths software. Maths software is not all that hard to come across on the web. A lot of it is free - from Sage for general maths to R for statistical work the field is well populated. Mathematica though seems to be in a different league. I am not working in maths, but did a degree in it while in college. I think I have an idea of what I am talking about and this has pushed me to want a copy of Mathematica. I have not taken the plunge yet as the full version for home use is €175. This is a bit beyond my budget at the moment, but soon I reckon I will take the plunge. Their computation engine is called Wolfram Alpha. Although a bit clunky (return values of the I did not understand that input sort, spring to mind) the idea behind it is solid. There are a lot of sources of data on the web, but standard queries just pass the data back to you. If you ar

Idea for cycling Android app

I was out for a spin on my bike today and I had an idea for an Android app (or any other smartphone you like). Often when cyclists are training they want to complete a certain distance. A typical training method is to complete a small number - say 2 or 3 - normal rides per week. These might be an hour long. In addition the key part of the training system is a long spin - often at the weekend. The duration of the long spin gets longer (or more intense) as the training plan proceeds. Something like this: Monday - 30km Tuesday - rest Wednesday - 30km Thursday - rest Friday - 30km Sunday - 50km Cyclists end up having to calculate routes of varying lengths near their homes, or a few small loops which they add multiples of onto the end of a training ride in order to get the correct distance. If they decide to push their mileage up in a big jump, they can end up over training or getting an injury, so this is important stuff. My idea is an app that tracks the users mileage as th

The Economist Android app reivew

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I've been reading The Economist for the last few years and could only watch with a green eye from the Android corner when they released an iPhone/iPad app earlier this year. That was resolved in April when the produced an Android version. There is no arguing with the quality of the journalism in this paper whether you agree with their stance or not. However good content does not necessarily a good app make. Ease of use can make or break an established title's move to mobile. Opening page The Economist app is excellent in this respect. You get the latest version as soon as it is available on Thursday. And its cover is what greets you when you launch the app. You can click on the cover (or that of any of the back issues still on your phone) to get to the table of contents. This is an exact replica of the paper version, albeit it laid out vertically in a nice clean phone format. Clicking on a story brings you to that section of the paper. The layout of the stories is

entertainment.ie Android app review

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I have always liked entertainment.ie . The sheer volume of stuff that's on and I didn't have a clue about always impresses :) The android app is a bit mixed in design and usability, but it does give you what you asked for - listings of stuff to do. The opening page is a scrollable list of counties with a number of events beside them. They are ordered by number of events which is a bit silly. Alphabetically would have been better, or cleverer still - by distance from the user. Not that hard on a handset and a feature that was also ignored on yesterday's app . One of the issues with mobile devices is their small screen sizes. People like Apple and Google have done a lot to alleviate these problems by hiding menus offscreen when not in use, removing unnecessary borders from screens and generally reducing clutter. This aligns them well with the current trend for clean interfaces like twitter . entertainment.ie however have cut a big chunk out of the interface. Somebody some

Spar Android app review

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Spar  have created an Android app to promote their new TV series on RTE Television. The app has 3 sections: List of episodes from where you can get to a text version of the recipes featured that week A store locater  Links to their Facebook and Twitter locations The list of episodes is nicely designed, but once you click on a week you see an Apple style home button at the top of the screen. This is just not an Android feature and emphasises that this is a conversion and might be a poor relation of the iPhone version. Occasionally clicking on the Android back button quits the whole application instead of bringing you back one level.  The store locator is a bit pointless. All they have done is take the latitude and longitude of all of their stores and overlay them on a map. I can't really think of when I would ever use this. Showing the nearest stores to the user in order of distance would have been far better an limiting the list to a small number. The full list of