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The new UK VAT rate that came in today is probably going to affect consumers in many ways. Unfortunately, as you can see from the snapshot images below of the expansys website, I fear that this solution, as predicted in our office, will become widespread. I’d also expect in 13 months for them to take the opportunity to increase their prices.

Expansys Pricing for LG Viewty pre VAT change

Expansys Pricing for LG Viewty post VAT change

Thankfully some online retailers, like LinITX.com where I work, haven’t pulled this sort of trick on customers.

December 1, 2008 9:13

I’ve been messing about trying to learn how to write iPhone apps. There’s a lot to take in but at the moment I’ve managed a concept application. A little shop (of horrors ;). At the moment it simply reads data from an sqlite database and then displays information on the product. The buy now button currently just jumps to the product url at Linitx.com.

Update: Added a screenshot when rotated. The iPhone SDK handles the rotation automatically, all you need to do is specify which parts of which objects move or resize. All that can be done from Interface Builder. Easy as pie. Also note the changed title bar colour, in keeping with LinITX, and the title text. The shop title (LinITX) and shop base product URL are read from a plist file. I suppose they could be read from the sqlite db but I am experimenting so learning how to read a plist file is useful too.

Update 2: Spent ages last night trying to work out why some of the text descriptions for products came out of the database as null. Discovered that when importing the data file it wasn’t using UTF8 encoding, which is apparently all sqlite deals with. Loading up the source data file into TextEdit under OSX and saving it as UTF8 then reimporting solved the problem. I also modified how things are displayed. The image and text are inserted into a UIWebView so are now scaleable by the user. The images are also base64 encoded and in the database. This increases the database size but means the application can still be used offline. Before none of the pictures would display if there was no network connectivity.

Update 3: Added the ability to search the list. The search bar appears when the search button is pressed and hides again when the search is complete.

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Tagged with: development • iphone • software
November 11, 2008 20:35

Last night I tried a little experiment on my jailbroken iPhone. Since I’d already started poking about playing with my own Winterboard themes and have been tracking my iPhone’s location for a while now, I thought I’d see what happened if I mixed the two. So, how about wallpaper that followed you? It turns out that combining the two is relatively straight forward. Google now provide a mechanism for getting what they call static maps which will allow you to get an image centered on a set of coordinates. You can also add your own markers if you want.

There are some limitations on the number and size of the maps that you can retrieve so I employed a very simple caching mechanism to ensure I didn’t annoy Google. This certainly helps speed things up when testing and also enabled me to identify a small issue I was having.
Read more…

Tagged with: api • google • image • iphone • opensource • software • tracking
September 22, 2008 11:50

I recently purchased a copy of Jaikoz to help process some of my bulging music collection. Back in the day when most of this got ripped grabbing details from the internet was pretty much unknown. As time progressed things got easier but these old rips never really got their info updated. They may have had an artist and album folder, but they didn’t have much in the way of tags. Jaikoz, which runs under Windows, OS X and Linux, was to be my tool of choice in repairing them all. The process is pretty simple. Select the folder containing music to be tagged and then click the toolbar button of a car. Then all you need to do is find somehting else to do for a few hours. When you come back most, if not all, of your untagged music is tagged.
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Tagged with: Apple • Music • software
September 21, 2008 13:11

I’ve finally had enough of Twitter. I have no idea why people put up with its failures, its continuing inability to do IM updates or its inability to cope with their traffic volumes. It’s just broken. I’m moving to identi.ca which seems to be a lot more robust and at least lets me use IM. The also have a twitter compatible API sorted out. A perfect replacement. Hope to see you there soon.

Tagged with: api • opensource • software
July 24, 2008 12:58