I installed the Android Froyo 2.2 update yesterday on my nexus one and thought I would share some initial thoughts on what I like and more importantly what I don’t. I will only touch on the main UI for now. I know many of the stock apps received updates, but they don’t relate to the core OS which is what I want to review today.
The rollout for Infinity Pool that I discussed earlier went off without a hitch. I had some great support from the community on this one and it let me delegate the most dreaded portion of the job (for me anyways) data entry.
I decided to create a handy admin interface that lets Infinity Pool be updated without the need for a programming / SQL background. This takes a lot of the pressure off of me as there are a group of people that are able to do updates now. This is very similar to the approach I took when I was the head of Horde to the Core. Delegate and train those around you to take on tasks when they ask for more responsibility so you don’t end up burning out.
A big thank you to CserZ and Atis52 for doing a lot of the leg work and doing a lot of testing and suggesting some fantastic features to help save them time.
Directions with Google Maps has just been updated to version 0.6. There are minor changes in this version the major one being the update for firefox 3.6.
What does Directions with Google Maps do? It is an extremely simple plugin that takes any text you highlight and passes it to google maps to do a search. The search results open in a new tab.
If you find your self highlighting a business address, copying it, opening a new tab, going to maps.google.com and then pasting the address in as a search then this plugin is for you.
It streamlines this process to one click, a major time saver.
Here is a body scanner in action on tv in germany. They plant various objects on a person and have them scanned. Funnily enough they find a pocket knife and a cellphone, but miss the bomb components. These things are useless wastes of money that do nothing more than invade privacy.
Big Wax captures everything that I love about hip hop. The great flows, the smart rhymes, the fantastic vibe. He brings a little bit of pharcyde style to the new school.
Just a quick update on one of my side projects Infinity Pool. I’ve pulled it out of beta and it is now hosting 300 accounts with over 2500 army lists for the table top game Infinity created. When I started the project I figured it would be a good way to keep my Rails skills up to date I didn’t think it would still have many daily users this far after launch.
As happens with many table top games the rules are about to undergo a huge overhaul. This means much of the codebase will need to change. This will be an interesting challenge as I will need to maintain all of the current users data while adding in all of the new features that are coming due to the new armies and rules.
This should be pretty fun and some good experience. All I can say is I’m grateful I built out a full suite of tests for my code as having them will be essential to ensuring that things don’t break while the site is under heavy reconstruction.
I’ve created a new blog over at www.mediumhard.com. It covers all the gaming related material that I want to talk about but never really set up a platform to do it from. Should be a lot of fun, some good humour and lots of youtube videos. Check it out!
So there was a story on citynews today about a poor guy that was beaten into a coma. Fortunately there was a surveillance video showing someone that might have crucial evidence to help catch the guy that curb stomped this guy.
What does City news do? Force you watch 30 seconds of a Dove commercial first. This is just disgusting as a 30 second ad will drive away many people that came to watch the video in order to try and help.
Stay Classy CityNews.
If you play the table top game infinity and want to help me with some feedback on the army builder I am creating please shoot me an email (alan -dot- hietala -at- gmail.com). The version that is running now is as bare bones as it gets right now but it support army validation, a single view that contains all the important information about your army.
I hope to add in a print view either tomorrow or the day after. I only have a small bit of test data loaded into the system right now so you will only be able to add 2 ariadna units to your lists. I will get the rest of the data loaded in the next day or so.
Feel free to send feedback to my email or leave a note on the blog post. Thanks for the help!
check it out at http://infinitypool.failedsave.com.
create an account to get started. These will be wiped periodically since it is still under heavy development.
Known bugs. Removing an item from the list does not work. will fix tonight
you can add 11 units to a combat group. it should be 10.
We’ve been hard at work at PlanetEye. I’m really excited about the new embedable travelpack maps. The speed that I was able to get this up and running in Google Maps really speaks to the flexibility of their API.
We’ve got out technology working in Google maps now too so we can be entirely map platform independent. Over the next iteration of the map we want to integrate the notes feature from our standard travelpacks to give some descriptive context to each item.
There is a lot of potential for embedable maps especially those that handle grouping of items as elegantly as PlanetEye does.
If you want to get your own map simply create a travelpack and hit the embed button and copy the code into your website or blog.