11 Jun 2009
It was with some trepidation that I listened in to this Monday’s Apple developer event, the WWDC keynote
address. I have 16GB iPhone 3G, a current top-of-the-range model. With all speculation before the event it was
clear that Apple were going to release a new model. But what were they going to include? Were they going to
include the kitchen sink as some had been suggesting?
Fortunately, as the change in name would suggest, the new iPhone 3GS is an evolution rather than a revolution.
Apple claim it has twice the magic which should equate to much faster application loading and probably better
games too. In reality it’ll mean twice the cpu speed or twice the memory, or more likely both. It appears that
the biggest change is that the iPhone 3GS contains a new graphics chip which gives it seven times the graphics
throughput, Seven times!
The extra disk space that comes with a 32GB 3GS is nice, but is unlikely to be a reason to pay the extra for a
3GS. The same with voice dialling. The new phone does contain a compress, which will certainly make using the
mapping application easier, and will allow for some really nice apps. When Google change Google Earth to us
the compress it’ll be really nice to use.
I’m not going to pay the extra to upgrade before my contract is up, but I’ll certainly be a bit jealous of
those with a new 3GS.
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01 Jun 2009
On Friday I download a fun little puzzle game for my iPhone,
FlightControl.
The premise of the game is that you’re running air traffic approach control for a small airport and you need
to arrange for the two types of passenger jets, light aircraft and helicopters to land in the appropriate
places without crashing into each other. A simple concept with even simpler controls. You tap on the plane you
want to direct and then drag the plane to the runway. It will then follow the path you dragged out. It’s
incredibly easy to use and really lets you focus on the goal of stopping those planes from crashing.
The graphics and sounds are excellent. The game has a great cartoon feel and although the menu and ui are
minimal it has a very consistent look that clearly didn’t happen by accident. The map and airport look good
and there are plans to add more airports to the game which I hope will be done to a similarly high standard.
The game starts off very easy to let you get the feel for the controls but the difficulty level ramps up
pretty quickly and you’ll soon have to deal with five or more planes at once. When you’ve got two planes
flying at different speeds trying to land on the same runway your brain will start to melt, but in a good way.
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28 May 2009
For several years I’ve written and maintained a
GreaseMonkey script which adds chart change information
to your music charts. The biggest problem with a greasemonkey script is that you don’t control the page you’re
modifying. Last week, for the umpteenth time, Last.fm changed their page again and broke the script.
Fortunately, I’ve fixed the script and have taken the opportunity to improve the webservice that it uses. This
means that the charts should be more cachable to improve performance for you and reducing bandwidth usage for
me. I’ve also added support for weekly charts so they’ll now have chart change information, as they used to
before Last.fm’s most recent redesign removed it.
Finally, because my host Linode.com recently increased the disk space on all their
plans by a third, I’m able to increase the length of time all charts are stored for 30 to 120. Unfortunately
as I had to delete all the chart change information you won’t see a change initially but gradually you’ll see
your charts are available for longer and longer.
You can download the updated script here.
Enjoy!
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07 May 2009
While working on my new open source project, CouchQL, I’m being very
strict with my development process and following both issue driven development, and test driven development.
Issue driven development requires that every commit refers to an issue that has been logged in the bug
tracking software. This means that every change must be described, accepted and then logged. This works better
if your repository is connected to your bug tracking software such that any commit message with a issue number
is automatically logged. In subversion this can be achieved with a post commit hook, such as this
script for trac.
The connection between your commit messages and bug tracking software means that when changes are merged
between branches new messages will be added to the issue, informing everyone what version of the software the
issue has been fixed in. As well as just adding comments to issues it is also possible to mark bugs as fixed
with commit messages such as “Fixes issue #43.” which should speed up your work flow. While Google Code does
add hyperlinks between commit messages and issues, it doesn’t add automatically add comments, which is a pain.
Enforcing a development practice like this requires you to think about the changes you are making to your
software, and focuses your mind one a particular goal. Bug tracking software will have the ability to assign
priorities to changes as well to group them into milestones. This helps you to build up a feature list for
each version of the software, and to know when you’ve achieved your goals and it’s time to release!
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02 May 2009
I’ve just uploaded the first release of CouchQL. It can be installed from PyPI by typing “easy_install couchql”
or you can download a tarball from Google Code.
It’s a very early release, but please play with it, break it and email me your results!
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