(Or, things to do when you have a sick kid)
One of the new data catalogues that the City of Edmonton has put up is the 2010 Election Results. This Thanksgiving Long Weekend I was kind of “grounded” at home when my son came down with a nasty inner ear infection. I was hanging out with him, and thought I could use the time to see how hard it would be and how quickly I could put together an Android application that would poll these results and show leading candidate in each contest for a given ward.
Last night I pushed a new build of YEG Buildings out to the Android Market. The two changes with this one:
Rather than showing the latitude/longitude of were you are, the application will try to translate that into a more human-friendly address. Note that the address might not be 100% accurate. It depends on how much accuracy the GPS has. The application no longer uses Google Maps and a KML feed when show where all the historical buildings in Edmonton are.
After a few months of neglect, I put a new version of my Edmonton Historical Buildings application up on the Android Market. I’ve renamed it to just YEG Buildings, as I’d like to eventually include buildings that aren’t historical, but interesting in general for some reason. The previous version had a nasty bug that would crash when you tried to view the location of a building on the map. Was one of those curious things where it worked in the emulator but not on a real device.
Thanks to all who attended my “Induction into the Android Army” talk this afternoon at the monthly Edmonton Java User’s Group meeting. I’d say it was a good turn out, especially when one considers that this is only the second monthly meeting for EJUG. It was a pretty basic talk, and didn’t dive to deeply into the “fun” Android stuff. If anybody from EJUG wants a follow up presentation that’s a bit more in depth, give a shout out on the EJUG mailing list.
Just a heads up for those interested: On Tuesday, June 15th the Edmonton Java User’s Group is having it’s monthly meeting at noon at the Canadian Western Bank Building. The speaker is none other than yours truly. I’ll be giving a brief introduction to application development to Android, using my trusty G1 and IntelliJ.
It’s free to attend, so stop by if you’re so inclined.
You have to love spring time in Alberta. The tulips have such a contrast against the snow at 21:30 on a Saturday evening:
I just uploaded an update to HistoricalBuildings. The list of historical buildings used to be sorted alphabetically, by name. Now they are sorted by the distance from your current location (assuming the GPS can figure that out).
Well, for the brave, criminally insane, curious, or otherwise bored I have a alpha version of Historical Buildings – download the APK if you want to try it out. This is just, at this time, the application just shows a simple list of historical buildings in Edmonton (according to the City of Edmonton's Open Data Catalogue). Click on a building, and it will show you on Google Maps where the building is in the city.
Not that long ago, the City of Edmonton announced it's Open Data Catalogue. I noticed that one of the data catalogues was a list of historical buildings in the city. Yeah, I know that some people in other cities might consider this a pretty weak list. I mean, the oldest building in Edmonton isn’t even 150 years old. I’d wager that some parts of the world consider 150 year old buildings to be “new construction”.
Well, it’s coming up on fall, which is traditionally the time of year for the Edmonton Code Camp. It seems that there is still a spot or two left for speakers, so if you’re in Edmonton why not think of something programmy and give a talk. Doesn’t have to be .NET – anything that is related to software development will do.
Anyway, I’ve put my name down for a talk at ECC.
