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Last Thursday, I expanded my Gowalla Tools website (a companion site for the popular geo-location game Gowalla) to include a new feature known as the Item Finder. It works by displaying a list of spots in any area you choose, and them removing those that don’t have items you are missing from your vault. I always knew that this would be a controversial feature and that I’d need to write a piece explaining why I had built it – now that a few people have complained that it is “changing the core nature of the game”, it is probably an apt time to publish my opinion on why this is not the case.
Thanks to my appearance on The Gadget Show earlier this week, I’ve been inundated with people emailing me with ideas for iPhone applications. The majority of them have no understanding of the development aspects (which is fair enough) but have ideas for apps they want me to build, usually with payment via the profit made. I’ve had quite a few interesting ones come through, but some have been suggested with very little thought or realism applied. I decided to create this article to show prospective idea senders how an idea should be presented along with a few answers to common questions I’ve received.
You can watch the Gadget Show episode online and download Social Beacon from the App Store.
A couple of months ago, I was asked if I’d like to appear on Channel Five’s “The Gadget Show” to take part in a challenge about iPhone applications with Jason Bradbury and Suzi Perry. I had only been developing iPhone apps for a short while but decided to enter into the spirit of the challenge by jumping head first into some of the trickier aspects of the iPhone SDK. The show and results of the challenge aired last night so I thought it was time for me to do a write up of the application and the process of building it.
For those of you who play the excellent iPhone GPS game Gowalla, I’ve built a handy web app that will allow you to see all of your missing items and where you can find them. In addition to telling you what type of spot a particular item is likely to appear at, it will also list specific spots if applicable (such as states – some items only appear in Texas for instance) and allow you to use the built-in location awareness of Safari in iPhone 3.0 to show you where the nearest spots of that type are. It is available today at http://gowallatools.com/ and is the first in a series of small utilities I’ll be creating to help players.
I was up at 5:30am this morning in order to start queueing for the iPhone 3GS outside my local O2 store – I’m happy to say that I was the first person in the queue and although I had problems in getting a second contract (eventually deciding to buy a PAYG version from the Apple Store) I am now the proud owner of the iPhone 3GS. In this short post, I hope to review a few of the key features as well as giving you some real world stats from tests I’ve run to show the differences between the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS. Please use the comments section if you have any questions!
Ever since the iPhone 3GS was announced in the Apple WWDC Keynote last week, the internet has been ablaze with criticism about both AT&T and O2 with regards to their upgrade policies to the new phone for existing iPhone 3G customers. I have battled long and hard on Twitter and on the O2 Forums to try and put across that they have in fact done nothing wrong, it is the public that are misguided, yet this has fallen on relatively deaf ears. I decided it would be easier to put one whole post together about the “O2 Fail” (or #o2fail for you Tweeters) and the rational response to it so I could just point people in this direction rather than re-explaining myself over and over!
I was recently asked by Packt Publishing to review a copy of their latest book, Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 which promises to “increase your MySQL productivity and control by discovering the real power of phpMyAdmin 3.1″. I was a little skeptical at first of a book on phpMyAdmin, the most widely used MySQL admin tool, especially when it arrived at 325 pages! However, there is a huge amount of information that really is very useful to every PHP developer out there whether you are a beginner or an advanced user.
Over the past few months, there have been a number of web apps that have popped up with the task of feeding your ego (or indeed deflating it) by telling you exactly who is following you on Twitter and giving you pretty graphs to show you how your followers are increasing – some of them even go so far as to estimate how many followers you are likely to have in a weeks time! However, the key thing for me that is missing from Twitter is the ability to see who has stopped following you and also those people that stopped but are now following you again as you don’t get email alerts from Twitter for these two things. This is a useful piece of information to have as it will let you know when people drop off and whether they are important (e.g. friends who don’t care what you are talking about thus suggesting you should stop talking crap) or not (e.g. spam bots).
Following on from the first of this series of tutorials on how to extract Xbox Live achievement data using PHP and AppleScript, I thought I would use this second part to look at the AppleScript that powers one side of the system I’ve put together. In the next part, I’ll be explaining the PHP class I’ve built, and in the fourth part (the last of the series) I’ll be showing you how the two talk together and how you can use the collected data with other APIs such as Facebook Connect.
