So the other day, after maybe a couple too many beers, I left my bag on the bus. Said bag contained my phone and laptop among other non-important things. Luckily it was all insured, but it’ll probably be a good few weeks before I have replacements from the insurance company. I am slightly bummed about it, but really nothing (other than the physical devices) has really been lost. Everything I do either happens in the cloud e.g. email, or is pushed to the cloud e.g. coding. The next day when I was in work I got a few peoples numbers from Gmail who I needed to contact, then sent them an SMS over Skype to let them know I would get back to them later. I then got my temporary phone setup and updated my number on Facebook, so anyone who syncs with that would instantly have my new number. I could have just as easily done this from an internet café in some foreign country. My backup plan for my laptop is the same, non-existant (Time Machine bugs me every couple of weeks that I haven’t backed up for a couple of hundred days). The thing is though, I don’t need to backup. I do everything is in the cloud. (Admittedly though a few things were lost, for example game progress and a couple of rubbish photos - the good ones were posted to Twitter before hand - but everything that mattered to me was available instantly.)

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been implementing a few new features on Tweeted Links. I actually released them last week, but forgot to write up a follow-up post :) First of all there is a new design. The old one was hacked together in about 5 minutes, so this is kind of a relief. It was made by my old friend James Deer for a project we worked on together a few years ago, but never got around to finishing. It looks a lot friendlier than the old design, so hopefully people won’t be scared off it anymore. Next up, it now separates different types of links, so articles are separated from pictures and music. This is probably the biggest new feature for me in this release, as before you were inundated with links and didn’t really know too well what they were. Previews are shown for pictures as well which I quite like. I’m looking to extend this for other media types as well, for example checkins and videos. If you have any other requests let me know! There have also been a couple of changes behind the scenes, link expanding for example is a lot more robust than it was before (old links have been reprocessed), so more articles should be picked up. I’m currently working on rewriting the Tweet fetcher to use the streaming API, so that new links will appear near enough at the same time as they are posted to Twitter. I am also going to add pagination (of some sort, I’m thinking infinite scrolling) to the list of links, as some people have quite a lot of links. My list of images, for example, takes quite a while to load and for the browser to render. I’m still wondering where to take this in the future, so I am open to any suggestions or requests you may have! One thing I was thinking of doing was making the link expander and detail fetcher thingy (I need someone to explain that in a marketing way) publicly accessible, if something like this had existed in the first place I wouldn’t really have to have built Tweeted Links!

I was interested in how the flow of Facebook apps work and the interactions a user can make. This presentation is the results :)

One of the issues that has started to annoy me as Android has started to game momentum commercially is that a lot of Android apps are just a copy of the iPhone application. This issue occurs on iOS as well, as a lot of iPad (compatible) apps are just scaled up iPhone apps, however this is a really bad practice. Android has a lot of different ways for users to interact with an application compared to iOS (physical buttons and sometimes even a physical keyboard), and developers should really take advantage of these. This isn’t really helped by the fact that there isn’t really any good first party documentation on standard design patterns used in Android. Over the last week I have been working on creating a nice interface for an Android application I am working on. I have had absolutely no design experience before (that is worth mentioning, anyway), however I have wanted to learn so I thought this would be a good opportunity. I have spent a lot of time researching Android design patterns and come across a few nice tools and resources, so hopefully this will help avoid the issue Android apps being blatant copies of iPhone apps in the future. Android Patterns http://www.androidpatterns.com/ I don’t know how I haven’t come across this before, but speaking to other Android fanbois I am not the only one. Android Patterns is a wiki providing a nice graphical overview of interaction patterns on Android. This is very much aimed at designers, so if you are are designing your first Android application (especially if moving from iOS) this is a must-read! Android UI Design Patterns http://www.androiduipatterns.com/ This site provides a nice review of the patterns used in popular applications. It provides a nice critical review, so it is easy to see what worked and what didn’t. The site seems to be quite new, however it is being updated quick regularly at the moment. Hopefully this will continue, there are quite a few apps I would like to see reviewed. Pencil + Android templates Pencil app: http://pencil.evolus.vn/ Android templates: http://code.google.com/p/android-ui-utils/ Pencil is a nice user interface design tool, that runs inside Firefox (euggh…). It is quite easy to use, especially if you aren’t a Photoshop expert like me. I expect there are Photoshop templates for Android same, but I liked this as it was easy to learn. Last night I managed to design a couple of screens in less than half an hour, it is definitely a lot nicer to see the actual mockup rather than messing about with an XML template to try and get something looking nice. Also DroidDraw just isn’t worth the effort (sorry!), compared to this. That’s about it for now, I’ll try and keep this updated as I find new resources. If you have any that you think would be useful feel free to post them in the comments.

The other day at work we were discussing something that I expect the majority of developers feel. When working on your personal projects, you never seem to finish anything. Fortunately one of the guys came up with an answer that he used to get his app out of the door: Do what you do at work, use agile! It seems he isn’t the only one, a quick search turned up a few related posts:

• Doing Agile in a Team of One
• Agile programming works for the solo developer
• What Aspects of Agile Software Development are Working for Soloists?
• Agile Methods Specifically taylored to working solo?

One of the things to bear in mind with agile is that you should be pragmatic about it, don’t follow everything by the book but do what works for you. There isn’t really any point in having a standup by yourself, however it is probably a good idea to be clear what your targets for the day are. I’m going to try this with my next project, a rewrite of Tweeted Links (that I have been procrastinating about for a few months). Thinking about it, I guess agile methodologies could be used for all sorts of projects, not just developing software. Maybe I’ll use it for my next DIY task?