Here’s a video of my Chumby podcatcher (podcasting client) in action:
And a couple of photos:
Just finished getting a UI working on the Chumby. Last week I had the basic http server running in the Chumby and I could browse to it from my laptop and control it that way. Today I managed to get a simple flash widget written that interacts with that server, so a laptop isn’t needed.
The http server is written in Python (see here for info on running Python on the chumby). It has the job of downloading the feeds and interacting with the audio server on the chumby (called btplay). It’s all pretty standard, except that the version of Python I was using didn’t have BaseHTTPServer. This meant I had to roll my own (thankfully pretty easy) using the SocketServer module.
The UI is written in flash (using swfmill and MTASC) and talks to the server to find out about available episodes and to stop/start the audio.
Once I’ve used it for a bit and made sure it’s ready for use I’ll release it and the code behind it. Hopefully other people will find it useful. I know for me this has been one feature that I wish the Chumby already supported. That’s the great thing about the Chumby though – if you want a feature bad enough you can just get in there and write it yourself!
I should also be talking about this app at the next £5app (which should be late September).
I’ve mentioned this on the £5app blog already, but I’d just like to point out here that there is now wiki page to discuss the future of the £5app meet. We want to get feedback and suggestions on where we should take the £5app idea and this is one way to do it. We’ll also get a google group or similar setup. Hopefully this will also be a good way to get people interested in getting involved and doing talks.
For more details about the wiki itself you can read about it on the main page.
I’ve posted details of the next £5app meet to upcoming. It will be (as tradition dictates) the 2nd Tuesday of the Month (April 8th) at Brunswick square. Ian has a few more details. I’ll be posting more details on the £5app site later.
This will most likely be the last “story-led” £5app meet. We’ve had some pretty good tales told to us over the last year or so, but we feel it’s time to change things. So we’re aiming to try and get people to come along and actually work on stuff at the meets. Not sure of the exact plan yet (we’ll be discussing it at the next meet), but it’ll be a sort of mini-barcamp/workshop/hackday sort of an affair. Basically we want to help people get their projects off the ground. Exact details will follow as we figure them out.
After feeling somewhat intimidated by the blank canvas I made a start on my portrait for MASS on Sunday. Going fairly well so far:
The sketch you can see if my very rough idea of what I’m aiming for, but is very much a guideline and the final version will turn out very different. I’ve also resorted to painting with the canvas on the floor. For some reason I find it easier to work this way – I guess it’s what I’m used to from working with smaller pieces normally. Think I’ll revert to the easel later on as I add more detail and finish things off.
I’ve got a Flickr set of my progress with the painting for those who want see see how things have progressed/are progressing.
I shall be providing a brief summary of “Developing your £5 app”. Neil and I led a discussion/presentation on how to develop software in your spare time.
I’d prepared only about 30 minutes worth of material, but the discussion proved very constructive and we quite happily managed to talk for well over an hour.
I provided some talking points for roughly three areas of development:
Getting going – the very first things to consider
Sticking at it – how to keep on going once you’ve got started
Scaling up – planning for the future and/or success
Possibly the longest part ended up being discussing the pros and cons of language choice. This is the kind of thing that can often end in flamewars on the internet, but things remained quite cordial. General consensus being that a more “dynamic” language may well give you can edge when developing, but you may well have other issues to deal with instead. The case in point being PHP vs. Lisp. Lisp is a much more powerful language than PHP, but PHP is very easy to deploy on a web-server. Whereas with Lisp you are largely speaking on your own. The middle ground of, for example, Python or Ruby, seemed to represent a sweet spot in terms of ease of development, without being too unusual to make hosting a major difficulty.
One other interesting consideration was how to go from being a single developer working in your spare time to a team of people. Neil, who has plenty of experience with this sort of thing, provided the succinct answer that “growing a team is hard”. However he believed that if things were done “right” early on when starting out small, it made life a lot easier at the other scale of development.
All in all I think the “Developing your £5 app” went well. As usual not a lot of preparation happened before hand (I’d been too busy with work and organising the £5app day itself), but I often find that can work quite well. Definitely helps keep things from seeming too inflexible.
Just upgraded the £5app site to include a blog. Pretty easy to throw together using Django. It’ll need some refining, but the site is proving to be a nice easy way to get familiar with Django.
Generic views (in particular the date views) helped a lot. Also managed to figure out the syndication framework some more. So now the rss feeds have proper pubDate fields and html text.
Features that can be seen include an rss feed for the next meetup and some microformats splashed around.
Beyond that the main reason for the move was to gain Django’s admin interface. Beats hacking html by hand any day. In the future it should also be very easy to add new features as we see fit.
This is my first use of Django and I’m quite liking it so far. There have been a couple of minor sticking points here and there, but I can’t wait for it to hit version 1.0 and for the book to finally be released.
So finally got around to putting something up on fivepoundapp.com. It’s just a single static PHP for now, more well well appear when I get around to it. We’ll be listing details of future events and summarising past ones there. Just need to start playing around with Django next methinks…
Details of the 3rd £5 App Meet are on upcoming here. It’s on Tuesday 12th of June and will feature Dan Glegg talking about Tails, followed by “pitch a £5 app”.
