Scraplab

Morse-it is a really well put together iPhone application for encoding, decoding and learning Morse code. There's a little video showing it in action - skip to a minute or so in to see two iPhones side-by-side, one transmitting and one receiving. And then buy a copy, hold it up to your speakers and watch it do the same with this video. Clever.

I'm pretty sure that with both the Haynes Apollo 11 Owner's Workshop Manual and the Command Module & Lunar Module code, one could have a fairly solid attempt at a moon landing.

Snatching a moment at the back of Sketching in Hardware, I wanted to talk about the Dopplr iPhone app, and a few of the technical details and design decisions. In this post I'm going to focus on the map interface, as that's the core of application. I'll touch on other thoughts in a separate post later on.

One of the first things people notice upon booting up the app is that we're not using Google Maps. Dopplr concentrates on city travel, and the majority of the most travelled to cities now have superb OpenStreetMap coverage. Using OSM gave us the flexibility to design our own custom map, reflecting how people use the Social Atlas: at human scale, often on foot, bicycle or public transport.

Matt Jones was inspired by Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City to develop a style specific to city size, human scale navigation. Matt wrote:

Lynch contended that we make legible mental maps of the city with 5 types of object: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.

I’m trying to make a style that emphasises these, and eschews the ’satnav’ style car-oriented mapping. It must be noted that this is a style that works most effectively at city-scale zoom levels, which it’s intended for. It looks pretty useless at country-scale.

This was made possible because of Cloudmade's superb Style Editor, a simple interface for themeing and tweaking OSM maps in the browser. In days gone by, we'd have had to spool up our own Mapnik installation, translate Matt's thoughts and designs into code, and dealt with keeping the tiles up to date. We're more than happy to let Cloudmade deal with that - they're the experts.

To display all these beautiful tiles, we're using route-me. Consider how young the project is, it's in very good shape. We're using a revision just before 0.5, and it's proved stable and quick. OK, it's not quite as smooth as the Google Maps library, and there a few niggles, but development is ongoing and Hal Mueller and the rest of the contributors are very responsive and friendly. I recommend checking it out.

I'll touch on our data fetching and caching strategy for placemarks in another post. I think it's going to need diagrams.

I winged about homogenous locative services in a previous, very grumpy post. I hope that we've shown a little bit of what's possible with easily accessible libraries, tools and open data.

Of course, it's not perfect, so do get in touch with the Dopplr team with your thoughts - this is the first foray into the mobile Social Atlas and your feedback is greatly appreciated.

The Dopplr iPhone application launched yesterday. I was lucky enough to be the lead developer on it, so I'm slightly biased when I say you should go and give it a whirl - it's free and doesn't require a Dopplr account.

More to come when I get a moment.

I'm at Sketching in Hardware for the next few days - a mini-conference on physical computing and the stuff floating nearby.

Matt Cottam just showed us this video about computational wood - wood grown with conductive ink. It's mad and bonkers and genius, and a lot of fun.

Prowl is an iPhone app that forwards Growl notifications from your Mac to your iPhone. That's a good idea in it's own right. But then there's a little note at the bottom of the FAQ that mentions that there's a little Perl script which allows you to push any notifications to it. So it becomes a generic push notification system for anything that you can connect to it. Like Twitter direct messages, or new comments on your blog, or well... anything. And you could rewrite that Perl script in your language of choice. It's just an HTTP GET with Basic Auth. And that makes it pretty awesome.

The new OpenLibrary integration on Flickr is a lovely example of small things, loosely joined. You can see how it works on this photo of London Orbital.

You could do some fun stuff with it. Perhaps augmenting my reading history on Bkkeepr, with photos I've taken of quotes and pages. Or knitting together photos of places with geodata, as a way of letting people explore the places mentioned in stories.

Paul is writing up his adventures/research into the highwalks that used to litter the City of London.

I'm glad he's outed himself as a person "nostalgic for a future that never happened" - it's a fine thing to be nostalgic for.

I've been quiet about work and that sort of stuff for a while. Sometime very soon, I'll be able to point towards a thing I've made with some smart folks — Cupertino based companies permitting.

At the moment I'm working on a thing that has been an open secret for a while and now isn't. Newspaper Club is a service to help people make newspapers, and Russell, Ben and I are blogging about it over here.

It took a few days longer than expected, but Clarke 0.2 fixes the Skyhook bug. Your installation should automatically update (or you can force it manually, or download direct).

When I launched, I didn't realise that my developer account was limited to 350 users... until it started failing for everyone. Thankfully Kate and Ryan at Skyhook have been very helpful, and I'm set up with a proper account now.

I also added an option that Tom at Fire Eagle requested — to be able to pause location updates whilst your computer is idle.

There's a little bit of housekeeping that needs doing before I can open the source code, but it'll be Real Soon Now.