Test...the category errors are getting on my nerves

The first sentence above was sent from the iPhone simulator. My first blogging application for the iPhone OS just reached a milestone (I managed to post to my Geekzone blog). I encountered a little hiccup earlier in that the Geekzone implementation of the MetaWeblog API returns an error if you don't provide a category - annoying, but given that MetaWEblog isn't a particularly well-specified API there are lots of quirks out there that client software has to allow for, so that was actually a good test.

I've still got a lot of work to do, but by now I pretty much know how I'm going to handle everything.

Actually, having to approach everything afresh (for a new platform) has been a very useful experience - some of the necessary re-thinking will feed into what I do for a future Windows Phone 7 (or whatever it ends up being called) version.

The slides and demo source files for the presentation I gave at the Wellington .NET User Group on Wednesday (19/08) are available on Kirk's blog: http://pageofwords.com/blog/2009/08/19/WindowsMobile65WidgetsWithKevinDaly19Aug09.aspx

I've recently arranged new web hosting, so I'll post them there as well once the site's up and running (I'm developing the site from scractch using the ASP.NET MVC Framework rather than just putting the old one back up, so I've got a bit of work to do).

As I was adding links to the slides beforehand I was embarrassed to notice that the MSDN widget documentation has the same title as I'd used for the presentation, but "Developing Widgets for Windows Mobile 6.5" is a title that pretty much invites itself, so I decided not to change it.

There were two demos: the first was intended partly as a backup in case there was a problem with the second (since the second required internet access), and also was simple enough to be allow me to code it on the spot and demonstrate a minimal widget configuration.

The second was actually a widget version of the Geekzone Friends (yeah, dorky name) Pocket PC application I wrote several years ago to display Geekzone friend statuses. I actually added a little bit of additional functionality in the form of linkification, which I'll retrofit to the .NETCF version if anyone's interested (you probably aren't so I probably won't, but you can't say I didn't offer ).

As fate would have it the second demo did originally fail to work...that is until someone pointed out that I'd neglected to plug in the network cable. I think we all know what Homer Simpson would say at this point.

(I was originally planning to document the development of the Geekzone widget in a detailed blog post, but I was delayed trying to sort out icon resolutions for Windows Mobile Standard, which I haven't yet resolved to my satisfaction - at least to the extent of getting the icon to appear on WM 6.5 Standard, and yes I did include .ico files - and in the end a presentation seemed a more useful way of getting the information across. With the added benefit of free beer and pizza).

PS. ...and yes I'm still open to job offers. Although if people just want to give me all of their money because I'm a Living Work of Art or to salve their tormented consciences for a lifetime of evil deeds that works too. Just saying.


Have a good day folks.

Hello people.
Or person. Frankly Scarlet I don't give a damn.


Update: I was wrong about the the 2.1 update (See comments below). My unreserved apologies to Apple (I know this will help them begin the healing process after my half-cocked criticism...)

First on my list of annoyances for this week: Apple's upgrade policies for the iPod Touch.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a brilliant device, and I have every intention of buying one once I've worked through my priority spending list of travel, guitars, and the abuse of alcohol.
What I think shows considerable cheek (and exactly no concept of fairness) is that Apple is charging iPod Touch owners for the 2.1 update.
There is nothing new about this: Touch owners have been charged for updates since the beginning. Previously however (especially not being an actual Touch owner at this point) I've been inclined to shrug it off...without knowing who is subsidising what I didn't feel strongly that there was necessarily anything wrong with charging Touch owners for updates that iPhone posers owners received for free.
With 2.1 however the situation is different, however, because this release is just a set of fixes for bugs in the initial 2.0 release.
When I Twitted my opinion of charging for service packs Mauricio rightly pointed out that Apple don't have "service packs", but my careless use of terminology aside, I think my original point stands. You should not expect people to pay for the privilege of having what they buy off you do what it was supposed to do to start with.
If you make a mess, you clean it up, and if you release buggy software you should not charge extra for the fixes.

   My second whinge also concerns bugs. I'll start with my own incompetence and then move as swiftly as possible on to other people's.
The day before I left for Tech Ed I uploaded an update to my web site (introducing at long last category feeds...which a couple of days later at the bloggers' dinner Scott Hanselman advised us not to use...sigh. I'll leave them in for now and make up my mind about about that one later. But I *am* in the process of adding support for comments. But none of that has anything to do with what I'm talking about here).
As fate would have it I also accidentally uploaded an outdated copy of the Twitula CAB, so a couple of people who downloaded it during the week encountered bugs that had me scratching my head until I got home and realised the nature of my cock up.
So I re-uploaded the correct version...you can imagine my chagrin when I noticed that the "People I Follow" option was still not working, because the relevant call to the Twitter API was returning a status 404 "Not Found". I checked the issues list for the API and sure enough other people were having the same problem. Somehow the authentication for this one function has been broken. I documented my experience of the problem. More and more people added theirs. Time passed. Time passed a bit more, as is its wont. And absolutely nothing happened. Nothing decided it had got onto a good thing and continued to happen.
It seems very likely that this would be an extremely easy fix, but to date it appears that no Twitter developers have even bothered to check it out. While it's likely that workarounds can be implemented by doing a bit (or in my case, probably quite a bit) of extra work I'll leave that to those developers who have the inclination and/or financial incentive to reward bad behaviour by cleaning up after people who can't be bothered fixing their own mistakes.
Personally, I'm giving up on Twitter and looking for other avenues for my development efforts.

Grizzle grizzle whine. With extra bitching (at no additional cost).

I wasn't planning on doing more work on Twitula this soon (there are other more interesting things to work on in .NET land these days), but with Tech Ed '08 coming up soon I thought it would be handy to be able to filter tweets by the #tenz hashtag while I was there, and then since I was adding hashtags it wasn't much work to include word search as well.
As always, you can get it here.

If you have any problems just use the contact form and let me know.
(Clarification: You'll need to be more specific than "it doesn't work" . Just thought I'd mention that).

I've just posted an updated version of my Windows Mobile Classic/Professional Twitter client, Twitula (and the name's definitely getting on my nerves now).
This includes the following new features (thanks to Ed Hansberry for the feedback that prompted this):

* You now have the option to automatically retrieve the Friends timeline at login.
* You now have the option to scroll a page at a time, instead of a line or two
(These two options can be configured via the "Options" er, option)

* You can now see a list of replies to messages you send using "@" + screen name.
* Soft keys are enabled on the status update and message screens

Additionally, I've tweaked the code to deal with the fact that Twitter for some reason sends mostly empty responses rather than returning a 304 (Not Modified) status when the content has not changed since your last request.

Frustrations: As of right now, the public timeline is no longer working. This is because the XML response from the Twitter API consists of incomplete data (users of the previous version of Twitula will get an error, whereas users of this version will see a message telling them nothing usable was returned).
I hope the Twitter developers and/or administrators will resolve this issue shortly (no sign of it so far), otherwise I'll have to try something else (my current options involve using colourful language to my PC and then sulking for a week)

Yep folks, today's post is yet another one brought to you by the Ministry of Self-Promotion.

This has been out for a while now, but I've recently finished tweaking it (and let's be honest, fixing embarrasing bugs) to something approaching my satisfaction, so to the esteemed Geekzone readership I present Twitula, a Twitter client for Windows Mobile Classic and Professional (that is to say, touch screen devices - I have a smartphone version in beta if you're interested in trying it).

As always, you can use the contact form on the site for feedback, requests and death threats.
Whatever.

PS. Also As usual, source code is available on request. Because after all, everyone needs a good laugh now and then.

PPS. Here's a pretty screen shot even:

 

(That's actually slightly out of date, since I now display people's actual names rather than screen names. But then again anyway I deliberately reduced the screen shot in size to make the text unreadable. So it probably doesn't matter all that much. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it. So carry on with whatever you were doing).

It doesn't take a genius to observe that this century to date has been pretty comprehensively shitty (it's also been pretty horrible for me and mine personally as well but I assume that to be a coincidence).

This century seems to have been dominated by madmen, criminals and self-righteous fools (and those who are all of the above), and the idiots who follow them: Osama, George, Dick and Toady Tony to name but the 4 most obvious examples. (The 20th century had Hitler, Stalin and many more larger than life monsters, but it also had examples to inspire us...currently this century we have an inspiration deficit, while our monsters hide behind the words of better men).

Karl Marx once said (and quoting Marx is a great way to wind up people who like to capitalise the words "market" and "business", so it's worth it if only for that): "Hegel remarks somewhere^[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

What Marx failed to observe is that there are occasions where history is revealed as both tragedy and farce at the same time: George Bush being the classic example. It's astonishing and appalling that so many thousands have died, been maimed or otherwise had their lives destroyed as a result of the actions of such a witless and venal man, and that he may yet through his actions and inaction prove to play a starring role in the end of life itself on Earth (see any detailed description of the planet Venus for what I mean). And surely he gets a special prize for putting the archaic and barbaric practice of war between nations (finally almost obsolete at the turn of the century) back in the forefront of human affairs.

So to the people of Iowa and the other US states who are about to vote in the upcoming primaries, and those who will be voting in the eventual presidential election, I would like to say: Remember that your decisions have effects far beyond your borders and beyond your lifetime. For all our sakes and the sakes of the unborn generations to come, choose wisely.

Happy New Year.

I hope it will bring less war, more tolerance and more sanity. Hope, as they say, springs eternal.

Yesterday I bowed to the inevitable, popped into the nearest Telecom shop and bought myself an Okta Touch.
While it's annoying that we're deprived of WiFi apparently because Sprint in the US don't want their customers to have the option of bypassing the cellular network, it's still a very nice device.
And tiny - at least for a Pocket PC. It makes my iPaq rx1950 look big, and that takes something.

I have to admit the new naming convention for Windows Mobile 6 makes sense to me now - the old Smartphone/Pocket PC Phone Edition distinction just doesn't reflect the how users experience devices like this (as phones that happen to do nifty tricks).

Niftiness reigns.

I remember being mystified when Dell released their first post-Windows Mobile 5 Axim and I saw that the hardware was essentially the same as the previous version, and they had made no provision for dedicated buttons mapped to the new SoftKey feature (you know, the one where you can control the on-screen menus with appropriately mapped hardware buttons, provided there are no more than two top-level menu items).
Well, a lot of water has flowed under a lot of bridges since then, and I've seen this omission repeated by certain Pocket PC manufacturers with depressing regularity.

When HP's most recent, WM6-equipped devices were announced I was initially quite interested...then as I read the specs and looked at the photos I came to the realisation that in HP's case at least, the omission is not just a case of a company leaving out a useful feature for reasons known only to themselves...it's a actually perfectly intentional and deliberate act of stupidity.
...Because not all HP devices lack hardware buttons for SoftKeys: one group where you'll consistently find them is anything that could be called a phone. And in anything that can't, (unless I've missed one) they are consistently absent.
So there you have it: HP actually seem to believe that SoftKeys are just for phones.
It could be worse of course - to leave out the buttons on anything with a keypad would be complete idiocy (switching between keypad and stylus is very awkward and annoying). But didn't it occur to anybody that substantial stylus-avoidance is perfectly feasible in many types of applications even with no keypad, and that where feasible many of us find it very desirable? OK, not Catherine Zeta-Jones desirable, but not to be sneezed at. I know that HP typically provide the facility to have secondary mappings for hardware buttons that are activated if you hold on for dear life until the Sun turns to a cold, dark husk, but that's not quite as convenient as dedicated buttons, is it?

It's a shame, it is.

For anyone who's interested, Diarist 2 can now be downloaded from my web site (which incidentally, I'll now be able to make much more useful, having dealt with that major distraction).

Anyway, as stated previously this version requires the .NET Compact Framework 2 (already present on Windows Mobile 6 devices), and regrettably does not include support for Blogger (which I have had to give up on for now).

But for those of you who are still reading this, the feature list includes:

 - The ability to save blog posts locally on the device for subsequent editing or publishing
 - Support for Technorati tags (I might add other kinds in future)
 - Ping server support
 - Improved Tap and Hold menus
 - Support for soft keys in Windows Mobile 5 and 6 (in the menu design)
 - Integrated Windows Mobile Help (just select Help from the Start menu when you're on a Diarist screen, and there it is. Help. Hopefully helpful).
 - A few other bits and pieces.

This version can run side-by-side with an earlier one (that's why it's got the 2 on the name. Well, one reason), so if you try it and don't like it you've still got your original.

Now for a number of interesting projects that have absolutely nothing to do with blogging (yippee!)...

PS. For anyone who subscribed to the RSS feed (and I know some people have), now you know why


UPDATE 04/04/2007

Juan David Gomez alerted me this morning to the fact that the display was a mess on VGA machines.
I've now posted an updated CAB file.

UPDATE 07/04/2007

Stefan Stranger informed me that nothing happened when he added his blog from a list of several hosted on the same site (at least that's my understanding of the situation). When I checked I found that the selection event had become unhooked from the code that handles it (this wouldn't have affected most people, since you only see the list if you have more than one blog hosted in the same place).

My second embarrassing bug in a couple of days is a good argument for a Beta phase, but whenever I've tried that nobody says anything. So for now I'll go with just fixing problems as I find out about them.