http://thebogles.com/blog Things I care about Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:45:41 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en When building the Android version of the iLike Concert app, I wanted to have day headers for the concert list. This was easy on the iPhone; sections are built into the oUITableView class. Surprisingly, the ListView class in Android doesn't provide any corresponding functionality, as of Android 2.1. ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2010/02/section-headers-for-android-listviews/ The local search app Beyond411 (aka Berry411) is now available as a free download for the iPhone in the app store, just search for the abbreviation "b411". This is just an initial version and doesn't have all of the features of the Blackberry version. Be forgiving of ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/12/beyond-411-for-the-iphone-is-now-available-in-the-app-store/ If Microsoft or Google found a way to predict and profit in the stock market by mining search logs, would it be a violation of their privacy policy? This is not an outlandish scenario. The research paper Stock Prediction using Web Sentiment describes "a novel way to do stock ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/12/stock-prediction-web-sentiment-and-search-engines-a-privacy-thought-experiment/ Skinny controller, fat model is a good design principle not just for Rails, but for client apps in MVC frameworks like Cocoa. I think it's not uncommon, though, for client apps to have fairly anemic models, to the detriment of reusability. For example, I recently worked with an open source module ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/11/skinny-controllers-fat-models-and-cocoa/ Below are some (terribly blurry) pictures of me browsing my iPhoto albums on a network Blu-Ray player. I just installed and ran the latest version of iPhotoFS, clicked the "Shared folder" checkbox on the Get Info box for the iPhotoFS device, and browsed to the shared folder on the Blu-Ray ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/11/browsing-iphoto-from-a-blu-ray-player-using-iphotofs/ iPhotoFS is a read-only filesystem for iPhoto collections, built on top of MacFUSE. I wrote iPhotoFS to let me easily copy my iPhoto Library to my PC while retaining its structure. There are subfolders for photos organized by roll, album, or month. It allows you to easily interfact with ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/11/iphotofs-alpha-on-google-code/ I've submitted Berry 411 for the iPhone to the App Store and am hoping for quick approval. It will be free. (See a screencast here.) I have many ideas for future improvements but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Being able to get driving directions, reviews, and ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/10/berry-411-for-the-iphone-submitted-to-the-app-store/ I'm just about done recreating Beyond411 on the iPhone. I created this brief screencast to get your feedback on the app before I submit it the iTunes stores. The key features are as follows: * Find nearby local business information by name or category - 20,000 word autocomplete dictionary ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/09/iphone-411-screencast/ iLike frequently receives large XML files from our partners that we need to analyze. For ad-hoc analysis of XML from command line, xml_grep is a really valuable tool. Instead of extracting lines that match regular expressions, xml_grep extracts xml nodes that match xpath expressions. However, it took me a bit of ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/08/xml_grep-cookbook/ Early this year, the Orkut team became aware that "a small subset of OpenSocial applications [were] being used to spread phishing attacks to Orkut users." To solve this, the Orkut team phased out support for Flash and Javascript in profile views and ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/08/tutorial-opensocial-data-pipelining-and-templates-in-the-orkut-profile/ With the closure of a number of I90 bridge lanes, I spent a lot of time waiting in and thinking about traffic. The WSDOT has a Seattle Travel Times page that lists commute times between various cities in the Seattle area given the current traffic conditions. Unfortunately there wasn't any ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/07/seattle-travel-times-web-service/ The Picnik API makes it easy to add online image editing to any site that hosts images. For the benefit of those coding in Rails, here's a summary of how I integrated Picnik with iLike to allow our users to touch up photos after upload. I used the "pull version" ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/07/using-the-picnik-api-from-rails/ I wrote an earlier post on how to replace you're cellphone's voice mail with Google Voice. That was for generic GSM phones; happily those instructions work without change on the iPhone. I use Google Voice for my voice mail because it forwards text transcript of messages to my email, and ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/06/google-voice-on-the-iphone/ I have been a long time Blackberry fan, and even wrote Beyond411, a popular local search application for the Blackberry. But with the release of the iPhone 3GS, I finally reach my personal tipping point and bought an iPhone. My story is a common one; AppleInseder reports that 12% of ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/06/why-i-ditched-my-blackberry-curve-for-an-iphone-3gs/ Google Voice offers a really compelling set of voicemail features, much better than what US cellphone carriers offer. You can view, search, and listen to your voicemails from any phone or web browser, with textual transcripts generated using automatic speech recognition. Assuming you're lucky enough to be on ... http://thebogles.com/blog/2009/04/how-to-replace-your-cellphones-voice-mail-with-google-voice/