Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make digital toys and write guides on web development.
I'm a senior web dev on Nokia Maps in Berlin.
All too often, I have ideas which might make a cool website or iPhone app or whatever and I know I just don't have the time to build them. I'm going to post them here in the hope that someone else might find a use for them. These ideas might already be in existence, of course. I'm not claiming they are unique in any way (although some might be).
You are free to take these ideas and do whatever you like with them. Of course, if they become amazingly successful, I could do with a bigger TV...
If you wake up every morning and think, "My t-shirts are so dull, I wish I had interesting clothes...", you need to have a look at my online shop.
My latest pointless programming project is just about finished. There's just one little bit left to figure out and then it's done.
I'm building this using the new Google AppEngine system (mostly because I needed an excuse to learn python) but there seems to be a bit of a problem with the User object. They haven't finished the User nickname bit yet so when you sign into an AppEngine application or site using a standard Google Account, it uses the bit of your e-mail address that comes before the '@' and, although Google accounts can use any e-mail address, the majority of them will be gmail.com or googlemail.com. This means that if you want to make any kind of public forum, you have to do one of the following:
None of these are particularly great. If it were even possible to access the user's first name, that'd solve the problem but, until the nickname functionality is finished, it's not as useful as it could be.
As an aside, doing a project in python means that I've written code in pretty much every mainstream (i.e. not esoteric) programming language except COBOL.
