Go Movies!

Go Movies! is my last gadget for iGoogle.

It lets you search for cinema theathers nearby your town, and see what is showing. It is a convenient way to keep up-to-date about premieres, timetables, etc.

Basically, all data is retrieved from Google Movies service. Due to some technical bugs, UTF-8 characters (like Japanese, Chinese, etc) are not correctly handle. In addition, it is important to notice that Google Movies services does no provide movie information for some places, i.e, Hong Kong, Beijing, etc.

Lastly, it provides links to IMDB for extra movie information and YouTube for previews, trailes, etc.

If you are interested in the technical aspects, please check this link: "Google gadgets & OpenSocial".

Artist cloud

Today I went back to do some Google Gadget hacking for Amarok Atom Syndication.

Amarok Atom Syndication Reader is fine for knowing what I have been recently playing on my Amarok, but enlarging the list does not make it look neat, so in the end, I am just showing the latest 7 entries of my play-list.

I wanted to have a look of what I have been recently playing with a glimpse of an eye. So, I thought of the convenience of tag clouds and came up with the idea of an artist/band cloud. Pretty easy, grabbing the Atom xml file of my recent tracks played, grab nodes by tag name, count them, assign them an style depending of their relevance and fill up the html view via DOM.

Every band links to Seeqpod. I find it very useful at work when I do not know what to listen to, I grab the list, peek at what I listened to the day before (lately I tend to tune last.fm tag radios), and create a playing list in Seeqpod.

I failed at ADC...oh no!!!

So, finally the so-longed Android Developer Challenge results come up and unfortunately I failed :P. It was not a big surprise for me honestly, since I never expected to win. Being active on the forums and chat channels for the last couple of months were sufficient for me to know the bar will be too high to get qualified for the next round (and win the 25,000 USD btw)

However, I got fun developing my little application. Developing something with a goal was a clever way to learn the platform. For those who may not know what I am talking about, Android is a new OS (based on Linux) from Google for mobile devices (mainly mobile phones). Likewise Linux, it is open source, which means anybody can get the source (although is hasn't been published yet, that'll happen when v1.0 come out), modify it, customize it, fix it, etc. Developing is made in Java and together with the programming language there is a whole framework which the developer interacts with.

Developing in Android is quite fast (specially if you avoid using Eclipse and go for the de-integrated developing environment approach, in this case, vim & ant). Android framework relies on 4 key concepts:

• Views, user interface
• Activities, the logic to be performed
• Actions, the thing to be done
• Intentions, the way activities communicate each other
  

There are also Services, which maybe consider a kind of Activity without an UI.

The Android platform is supported by the Open-Handset-Alliance, or OHA. The OHA encompasses teleco companies, handset manufacturers, and content-providers all having in common the mobile handset market.

In my opinion, with this strategy Google is trying to accomplish the following goals:

• Neutralize the mobile business by making it vendor independent
• Being searching and advertisement its main sources of income, Google needs to open new channels of communication and strength its position there. There are 1000 million internet connection worldwide, but 3000 million mobile handsets. Soon those 3000 million phones will be 3000 million smart-phones. The internet goes mobile.
• By making mobile software development easier, Google tries to follow the same road as the web. Although writing Android apps is not as easy as writing a HTML page, Android states closer to the pro-am (professional- amateur) principle than other platforms. Almost anybody will be able to write applications for Android. That will bring lots of crap, for sure, but also innovation.

About my app, it is a purikura application for mobile phones, surprisingly called MyPurikura. Have you ever wander what to do with the pics you take on your phone? Well, one thing you could do is decorate them and make them funnier by adding icons, catch-phrases, etc. Purikuras are small photo stickers very popular in Asia. Applications like this have already started to spring up in Japan (where mobile innovation is actually happening) [1]

Although it needs some bug-fixing and code refactoring, I prefer to release it now. I know how these things work, if I delay it till got something that truly satisfy me, I will be postponing it till the end of time. It may be useful for somebody today, although I plan to carry on developing it in the next weeks.

Lastly, I may need some warm-hearted person who enjoys drawing and would like to contribute with new cute icons. Please contact me if you are interested!

Purikura power!!

[1] Graffiti Photos: Expressive Art in Japanese Girls' Culture

Labeling with Gmail

This is a rather old trick, many of you may know it, but today I came up with this at work, and showed it to some of my workmates. Interestingly enough, I learned this trick myself from my workmate Quique.

Using gmail, it is possible for the sender to send an already labeled email. For example, let's guess that I saw an interesting job offer and I though of my friend John who maybe interested. I want to forward this job offer to him, but I want also my email to skip his inbox and go straight to his job hunting folder. In gmail there are not folders, at least not as in other webmails. Emails are labeled, and with the help of filters we can organize incoming emails and archive them automatically.

So, if I want to send an email to John regarding a job position I will send him an email to the following address: john+jobs@gmail.com. Anything after '+' means a label. That means that if John has the label jobs created on his account, that email will skip the inbox and go straight to his jobs folder. In case label jobs did not exist on John account, the email would be delivered straight on his inbox. So, remember: email+label@gmail.com

There are many other uses of this address schema. Some people use it for keeping track of spam. For example, whenever you leave a post on a discussing board, you could add a significant label together with your email address, so if later you received any spam you could always know from where did the spammers get the address (and by then, knowing which boards are reliable and which ones are not).

Another interesting use it is to register many times on a service without bothering creating different fake email accounts xD.

Further reading:

• http://blog.codefront.net/2004/06/26/sending-to-yournamelabelgmailcom-labels-your-email/

Amarok Atom Syndication Reader

Here is Amarok Atom Syndication best friend: Amarok Atom Syndication Reader!!!

Last week I saw on a blog a Last.fm gadget for showing what last songs have you recently played on Last.fm. I use a RSS Reader widget from Blogger to do that with my syndicated Amarok track list, but I was not totally happy.

Google implements a policy on Google Reader for only refreshing caches every hour, the same applies to the Blogger's RSS reader widget. So I made my own widget this weekend using Google Gadgets. It was great fun! I tried Google Gadgets last April and it was good but documentation and work environment are much better now. It is very easy to pick up if you got some knowledge on HTML and Javascript. In addition, Google API provides lost of stuff already implemented like XML reading and easy DOM manipulation.

Here is the result. The best feature is that now contents are refreshed every ten minutes. There still other features I want to add but would do it later. Now I got to publish this on Google Gadget Repository or find a way to make this available to other users who may be interested.

By the way, there is a new version of Amarok Atom Syndication available (now even easier to set up)

Googleized

It seems all-powerful Google is embracing and extending the Internet these days. There is not little space on the Internet Google do not have a business plan for it.

First was Flickr (I always get confused writing it) and now is Picasa Web Albums. I love Flickr, they have increased the space quota for its users up to 2GB, a big stake to be honest. They also have increased the amount of MB a user can upload every month, but on the other hand, now there is a annoying restriction by which only last 200 pics on a album can be shown. And I am not going Pro...

Then, Picasa Web Albums come to the rescue. Apart from being one of the funniest and well-thought image programs I have ever tried (OK, Irfanview continues to be unbeatable as image viewer), now Picasa issues a feature that allow users to upload their pics to the internet. Space quota is just 1 GB by now, but it seems it would get bigger in the future as GMail.

So, I got googleized and I am going to start migrating my Flickr photo albums to Picasa. Hope some Yahoo! executive read this post and change their business plan. I think I am not alone...

Apart from Picasa, I am using Google Docs & Spreadsheets at work these days since upgrading my OpenOffice 1.1 to 2.0 seems to be a non-easy task to do...

I am feeling lucky!!! do you???

Google, la navaja suiza

El que no conoce google hoy día, o es que ha estado desconectado del mundo los últimos 7 años, o es que simplemente, vive en Asia porque aquí todo Dios usa Yahoo! (joder, con lo malo que es...)

Vivimos en un mundo gugelizado. Buscar en internet es sinónimo de Google, de hecho en inglés se puede gugelizar la red (why dont you google it?); gmail ya es el mejor cliente de correo web y no web; tenemos las news, los groups, el writely, una hoja de cálculo y ahora incluso hasta Youtube! pertenece a Google.

Pero no sólo de Google vive el friki, la música hay que seguir bajándosela via programas p2p como eMule, Azureus, etc. A veces resulta imposible o muy dificil usar esos programas, sobre todo cuando trabajas dentro de una intranet detrás de un firewall. Pero no, Google viene al rescate. Que te quieres bajar un wma o mp3 de Angra, por ejemplo:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Angra"

El truco está en usar los parámetros de google para acotar las búsquedas por tipo de fichero dentro de repositorios FTP.

Este truco lo he sacado de:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/google/turn-google-into-your-own-personal-free-napster-207672.php

Gracias a Manuel Dublín por el enlace. A partir de ahora lo tendre más a mano, colgado del blog.