cowfish

So, unless I do something fairly interesting tomorrow, I think I have hit my creative peak for the week – I wrote a computer program. This worries me, it being my job and all, but this one has pictures in and everything. I’ve been at Over the Air for the last couple of days, a mobile development conference and hackathon at my old stomping ground of Imperial College. It was rather excellent, with a Dalek in the IC great hall, supa-fast wifi courtesy of JANET, and Rachel Clarke, Ewan Spence and friends exploding stuff at the end of today.

There were many categories for the conference’s programming competition and lots of data was thrown around for us all to grab and use. However, the promise of a special prize for someone who managed to combine Doctor Who, Top Gear and data from the new Lonely Planet API piqued my interest. I may not have managed to include all three, but I got some of the way there:

So, a it’s mobile ‘optimised’ web-app that lets you pit the powers of the Doctor Who posse against the might of the Top Gear presenters and tame manbeast The Stig. Who could ask for more? Well, the people at the conference for one, as there were a bunch of rather excellent apps which were actually properly mobile, rather than slightly shonky websites, so I didn’t win any prizes. However, a nice man at BBC Worldwide grabbed me before I left to give me a bag of Top Gear related goodies as a thankyou for playing with their graphic assets. I am now the proud owner of a copy of “Where’s The Stig?” as well as a Stig mouse and other toys (including the hi-res Top gear and Doctor Who graphical assets that I grabbed on Friday). I suspect my quite horrendous stage fright (when confronted by a room containing hundreds of people, most of whom would realise that my app is a bit shonky, I consider it to be quite natural to shake uncontrollably…) did not aid my prize winning chances.

Anyways, if any of you lovely people would like to play then it’s over on my site. It looks a bit better formatted in a thinner window (until I do some fixing [and learning of how to do the fixing] of the CSS). You know, like on a phone. I will convince myself that it’s a proper ‘mobile’ application one day…

On the more technical side, it’s a JavaScript and php app that is basically a branded and limited version of Google Fight. There are also a number of other versions that I hacked together around the same code base in an attempt to convert it into a Bondi widget (there’s also a version of the pre-Bondi’d app online). In order to do that I hacked the whole thing up to be in JavaScript, apart from the Google fighting bit which is an XML returning webservice. Unfortunately my plans of getting the phone to vibrate while it worked out who was the winner, using the Bondi device APIs, were scuppered by my inability to get them to work. Well, that’s not quite true – the scuppering factor was my inability to get my code running on the Windows Mobile browser that is the heart of the Bondi reference platform, despite it working everywhere else. I did manage to get it up on both a real phone and a simulated phone (courtesy of emulator farm Perfecto Mobile), even if it didn’t work once it was there. I may have unfortunately hinted that it was all Bondi’s fault while I was on stage presenting my app, despite an attempt to pin it on myself that was too little too late, but it looks like it could be a rather nifty thing – an API to allow access to underlying phone functionality from JavaScript. There were rather a lot of problems with the Bondi APIs during the conference, with the website not being particularly helpful and the dev tools that there were only being incomplete in a few places and only available for Linux or Windows, which wasn’t much help to the Mac heavy crowd. However, I have another Bondi widget to write, thanks to one of the dev team being a fellow member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society with a whisky widget part written. I’ve got some useful data, he’s made a start on a widget – BY OUR POWERS COMBINED! there may soon be a whisky widget with some nice maps in. And then I write my iPhone one.

Dense block of text over. I am now reclining on my comfy Over the Air branded beanbags (as it seems that there is a tradition of hackdays both having beanbags and also asking the attendees to take them home afterwards) and contemplating what shiny things I should write next. Which is nice.

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