This week I got some quality time with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad SDK – ok so iOS… but the iPhone and the iPad are so far apart until November at the earliest it’s not worth thinking of them as the same… yet.

• I watched the Steve Jobs presentation of the new iPods – it’s available over on the Apple Site. I have to say that, Steve didn’t seem that excited on stage this time. I mean, yes the iPod Shuffle… meh. The iPod Nano… really!? In fact my wife loves watching videos on her Nano on the tube and specifically doesn’t want a touch… The Touch… well, that was an interesting update. It’s bought it back in sync with the iPhone 4.
• The iPad 4.2 update was announced – for November. It was supposed to happen in 4.1. Turns out too many people went on vacation over the summer and the project slipped!
• Now, my own stuff. Pushed an update for my Tube Notify app to Apple for approval. The last version had a slight bug in it where people who were installing it on new devices, wouldn’t of registered for push notifications. I also added support for Mutlitasking so it doesn’t behave stupidly and refreshes items on coming intro the foreground.
• Started implementing CoreData and StoreKit into the Tube Notify app – why!? Well, you’ll have to wait and see.
• On a side note, managed to do Reverse Tethering with my Android phone using bluetooth. That is, I used PAN from the phone to use my laptops wifi connection then used tethering on the phone. Why? Who knows – was fun to do though!

That’s it for this week – not many items… but again – it is summer!

This week saw a lot of work involving Node.js. For those that don’t know, Node Knockout is also taking part this week. Unfortunately I’m too busy to take part – noooooooo. Anyway, on with the show:

• Deployed Green Man Gaming‘s new backend systems! This was a complete rewrite from Tornado/Python to Node.js. This was a lot of work – but well worth it. Everyone noted just how much faster the new architecture was. For me, it’s not about the speed, but the fact that it is now fully asynchronous, all the way down the stack.
• Having a love/hate relationship with TweetDeck on Android. Even on the latest Beta, it is using way too much battery to be on the phone. Sorry Max!
• Did some field testing of my Android application to discover I get Force Closes in the oddest of situations. Nothing major, looks like one gets Intent floods in certain network scenarios.
• Liking the new iTunes Connect screens for money handling. My word they are just ACE! So much easier to handle/deal with.
• Picked up a iPod Touch 3G. Why? Well, new iPod Touch will come out next week and I wanted the certain processor/RAM combination. The only device I am missing is the iPhone 4G – which I still can’t be bothered with. Seriously. I know I will have to at some point… but I’ll put it off for as long as possible in the mean time.
• Sticking to the first beta of 10.6.5 for now. Simply because I don’t want to have to deal with the VMWare USB device problem that they mark as a Known Issue.

Another slight shorter update… need to sort that out! Well, it is summer. Another “This Week” post next week then!

Not so much to report this week. It’s been rather hectic doing things I don’t actually usually do – so we’ll get to it:

• Spent a lot of time doing work with Google AdWords.
• I also managed to do a lot less coding this week. Although I did get a chance to check out the newly released Node.JS 0.2.0 that has come to pass.
• Played some games! Now that the Graphics Update is out for Snow Leopard 10.6.4, I can finally actually play some games at a decent FPS. Ok, so yes I have actually had installed for weeks – but it’s not covered by NDA now! Yay!
• Updated to the new TweetDeck for Android beta. This week they’ve done a couple of builds, still no trackball support however, which makes using it a little awkward sometimes – I happen to use the trackball.
• Finally saw my Tube Status app on a proper iPhone 4 to discover it’s looking mighty fine on the new display.

That’s it, not much happened this week really. Ho well! It is summer after all.

This week has been another bumper week of exceptional busyness. So… let’s see what I’ve got up to this week:

• So near the end of this Node.js project for Green Man Gaming that it hurts! Hoping to have it properly finished in the next week or so.
• Restarted some work on Android again. Looking specifically at Content Providers and Services for something rather cool. Or, at least I think it is.
• Talking of Android… Tweetdeck released their Android Beta client this week and Max has done an amazing job with it. The leap forward in scrolling reminds me of the same leap that Tweetie took on the original iPhone.
• More Android… I unrooted my Nexus One. I’ll post a guide for how to do that at some point. I had never unlocked it using the standard ‘fastboot oem unlock’ method – so I could unroot it using a lot of recovery/image trickery. Glad I am now back on stock again. Not that CyanogenMod is bad or anything. Just that I’d rather go back when 6.0.0 is released finally I think.
• Had to replace the battery on one of my MacBook Pro’s this week (the 2008 Unibody that had the removable battery). It was… bulging! I know that’s not a great sign of a battery’s health, so bought a new one and then went back to the Regent Street store to hand in the old one. They are legally required to take them back… and they did without any argument. In fact, I think they were shocked that someone actually did it!
• This week I installed the second Graphics Update from Apple made available via ADC. Well, I can’t talk too much about it… but WOW they’ve made some massive improvements.
• Discovered a new board game called Pandemic this week when a friend bought it round for after dinner entertainment. Never played a board game where the board plays against the players. Made for an interesting bit of entertainment.

There we go – that covers off this week… now onto the next week…

My word, what a title! So if you are in the UK and have a rooted Google Android phone (and if you don’t, why don’t you!?) – then you probably are quite disappointed with the new Google Voice Commands that have come out. Even if you don’t have a rooted phone – Google Voice Commands doesn’t give you all the features you’re excited about from the blog post.

First, let’s cover what to do with a rooted phone to make Google Voice Commands install. It’s not anybody’s fault other than Google’s in my opinion. They are shoe horning applications over system apps, and that doesn’t work very well for everyone. Cyanogen has promised to fix this – and in fact, in the latest nightly it behaves really well – but if you’re still having problems with installing from the Market – here goes:

Remember that this is doing stuff to the /system partition of your phone, and that is dangerous. Make sure you do a Nandroid backup before continuing! This was all tested on my Nexus One which was rooted using the ‘non-safe’ way (i.e. I don’t get the padlock when booting the phone). Also a quick thanks to the various forums out there – but in particular the official Cyanogen Forums for working out how to make Google Voice Commands work on CyanogenMod.

$ mkdir ~/tmpandroid
$ cd ~/tmpandroid
$ # Backup the old apps
$ adb pull /system/app/VoiceSearch.apk
$ adb pull /system/app/GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk
$ # Remount the base OS
$ adb remount
$ # Uninstall the built in stuff
$ adb shell rm -f /system/app/VoiceSearch.apk
$ adb shell pm uninstall com.google.android.voicesearch
$ adb shell rm -f /system/app/GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk
$ adb shell pm uninstall com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox
$ adb shell reboot

Now the phone will reboot and you’ll now be able to install from the Android Market just fine. The QR codes for Google Voice Commands and the associated widgets are below.

Now onto the other annoyance. You can’t use any of the commands if your language is set to anything other than English (US) – thankfully you don’t have to change the whole phone to achieve this – simply go to Settings -> Voice input & output -> Voice recognizer settings -> Language and select English (US). Personally I’ve had no problems with it recognising commands after this! Yay!

For what it’s worth – I also installed the latest nightly after performing the above steps and the search button behaved properly even though it didn’t in the previous nightly. So update to the latest nightly after doing this. Remember to always wipe cache/dalvik cache whenever installing a nightly for a smoother experience.

So there you have it, I hope this is helpful to somebody.

Voice Search

Search Widget

This week I’ve been mostly…

• Battling with a complex nested async. queue issue in some work I’m doing for Green Man Gaming
• Did my first oDesk contract! It’s just a shame that I now have to wait another 1.5 weeks to get the money for the work.
• Upgraded my home broadband and network to include new Powerline adapters to make use of the even newer 50Mb broadband. Yay for Virgin Media’s network/speeds. It really does blow ADSL out of the water in the UK – if you can get cable, you should.
• I started playing Alan Wake at last on the Xbox 360. Yes I’m bit late to that game – but then it came out around the same time as Heavy Rain and I played that one through first. It’s a very atmospheric game, I’ll give it that – I’d prefer more atmosphere and less gun action though.
• Started doing some work with the Facebook API again. It’s good, I guess.
• Did some research into the different ways people are scammed on Facebook. It’s quite scary the amount of people in my own social circle that fall for the ‘OMG THIS IMAGE MADE A GIRL KILL HERSELF’ type scams that are just there to collect your e-mail address. Scary scary scary.
• Updated to the latest nightlies of Cyanogen for the Nexus One – now with 720p video recording. Shame my lens appears to be permanently dirty! They also updated the boot animation for the ROM and it’s really nice. I did have a link to the video – but I can’t find it now – doh!

This week’s quite a short one – sorry!

This week has been another long week – but quite a productive one… or at least I would like to think so!

• Carrying on with my URL shortener and vanity ‘via’ links on Twitter, I downloaded the Adium source code and started tinkering with adding a few more custom features to it. My aim is to allow anyone to use the 1.4.x version of Adium to manage their own vanity applications. I’ll post a proper summary of URL shortening and business uses (still writing it!) very soon.
• I got to do some C++ work for a client this week. It was fun to open the bonnet on some code I wrote a few years ago to tweak/fix it.
• I popped a Three SIM card into a spare iPhone. Discovered it’s just Vodafone and O2 that can’t penetrate my apartment. The downside of Three is their customer support not being in the UK – something that is very important to me. So I’ll have to think long and hard about that one. Vodafone’s reception and service in central London has been awful of late… hence the consideration of leaving.
• Upgraded the version of Cyanogen on my mobile to 6.0.0 RC2 and then promptly hacked up the build.prop file to enable HSUPA – result… around 3-4Mbps downlink connection on my mobile phone. That’s quite nice.
• Picked up one of the new Magic Trackpads from Apple. They are fairly cool. Overall I’m not that sure about it if I am honest. I find myself reaching for my mouse still and that sort of sucks.
• Fixed up my Android development environment again. It’s quite hard to keep that all in order if I’m honest.
• Had a look at the new Android Market Licensing that Google have release for Android. It’s about time they did something about .apk file piracy… so many sites are out there offering subscriptions to effectively pirate games and utilities. Amusingly, this new library makes piracy harder on Android than it is on iPhone/iPad (where it is insanely easy) – let’s hope it attracts more developers.

And that’s it! Yay! Another weekly update post done and dusted.

Let’s get straight to it…

• .co domains came out this week. I managed to grab leepa.co and turned it into a URL shortener. I used some code I found on Github, changed it to use my down and deployed it up on Google App Engine and tada, job done…
• I then made my own Twitter Tools extension to make shortened URLs using it when things were posted…
• And I made a custom @Anywhere application that is called Lee Packham and points to this blog!
• Started work on a massive overhaul of my online presence to actually perk potential client’s interests rather than just be a.n.other blog on the internet.
• I may have bought a couple more .co domains – but more on what they are for another time!
• Life’s been busy at Green Man Gaming – the work on the component being ported to Node.js is coming along very well. Hoping to finish it in the next week.
• Had to deploy mod_security to a client’s server this week. It’s grown into quite the beast – and is actually quite useful. I was surprised.
• I got anther damned text about my mobile data usage from Vodafone. I KNOW I WENT OVER 500MB THIS MONTH – NO NEED TO REPEAT IT.
• Last week I was tempted to root my N1 – this week I did it. Running Cyanogen 6.0.0 RC1, very cool. Wish I had done it earlier.

Bit shorter this week – but I’m really keen to get back to the website update!

This video is just a nice cartoon of Darth Vader calling up Apple about the problems with his new iPhone. It’s rather comical.

Today I switched off ‘frodo’ – my old VPS server with Slicehost. With it goes my Quakenet bouncer, which I have decided not to install at the new host. Goodbye Quakenet – it’s been a good run.