Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make digital toys and write guides on web development.
I'm a senior web dev and evangelist for 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...
JavaScript libraries and CSS frameworks are very popular these days. With each library, plugin, extension and template, comes another licencing statement. For most of these licences (MIT, for instance), you must include the licence statement in order to be able to use the code. In many cases, you also have to provide the original source and your own modifications. While, for uncompiled technologies such as these, this is a trivial matter, both this requirement and that of including the licence are awkward to implement if you like to minify your code. The licence is usually kept in an uncompressed comment at the top of the library (the YUI compressor specifically takes this into account with comments marked /*! */ ) and, although anyone can read your modifications to whatever you've used, post-minification code is much harder to follow (cf. three of my last four blog posts) and is really not 'in the spirit' of sharing your code.
I'd like to be able to bundle all the licences and sources together outside the production files. Somewhere the interested user would be able to look them up if they liked but not somewhere that would automatically be downloaded on a standard visit. To that end, I have looked around for an established standard for this and not found anything. If you know of one, please let me know. Until I do find a good standard, here's my suggestion – a simple XML file located at /licences.xml in the format outlined below. It contains details of the file the licence pertains to, the uncompressed source (optional), the title of the licence and a URL where the full licence text can be found (on opensource.org or creativecommons.org, for instance). It also includes a (probably superfluous) shortname for the licence. I might remove that bit. You can optionally include this meta in your HTML if you want an explicit link between your source and the licence file:
<meta name="licences" value="/licences.xml" />I'm currently undecided as to whether to go with XML or JSON. They're fairly interchangeable (barring XML attributes) but JSON takes less space. Then again, there's not as much need to save space in this file. Anyone have any recommendations? The entire format is, of course, up for discussion. Have I forgotten anything? Have I included anything unnecessary? I'm going to start using this in my projects until someone points out some major legal problem with it, I think.
<licences>
<licence>
<source>
<url>
/includes/script/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js
</url>
<uncompressed>
/includes/script/jquery/1.4/jquery.js
</uncompressed>
</source>
<deed>
<title>
MIT License
</title>
<url>
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
</url>
<shortform>
MIT
</shortform>
</deed>
</licence>
<licence>
<source>
<url>
/includes/script/custom/0.1/custom.js
</url>
<uncompressed>
/includes/script/custom/0.1/custom.min.js
</uncompressed>
</source>
<deed>
<title>
Attribution Share Alike
</title>
<url>
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0
</url>
<shortform>
cc by-sa
</shortform>
</deed>
</licence>
</licences>
{
licences:{
{
source:{
url:'/includes/script/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js',
uncompressed:'/includes/script/jquery/1.4/jquery.js'
},
deed:{
title:'MIT License',
url:'http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php',
shortform:'MIT'
}
},
{
source:{
url:'/includes/script/custom/0.1/custom.min.js',
uncompressed:'/includes/script/custom/0.1/custom.js'
},
deed:{
title:'Attribution Share Alike',
url:'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0',
shortform:'cc by-sa'
}
}
}
}
This must exist somewhere. I just can't find it.
I listen to a lot of podcasts in a week and I use quite a few different computers. One desktop at home, one laptop while out and about and a PC and an iMac at work. I want some service (or combination of web service and application) that I can use to manage my podcast subscriptions regarless of where I am.
At the moment, I have iTunes installed on my desktop, my laptop and the iMac at work and I have subscribed to my collection of podcasts in each of them. I want to be able to plug in my iPod and have it delete the podcasts I've listened to and get the latest episodes of each of my subscriptions. At the moment, I plug it into the desktop, copy on the latest 'Planet Money' and listen. A couple of days later, there's another episode released so I plug into my laptop and it offers the episode I've just finished listening to and the new one. A few days later, I'm working on the office iMac and plug in my iPod, it suggests the last weeks-worth of episodes. I have to manually go into every subscription and drag over the individual files that I want to listen to.
What I'd like to have is a web site where I can put in my podcast subscriptions and it will track the latest episodes of each. I can then either point iTunes to this site so that I can point all my installations at it or it will provide an application which can be used to put the latest episodes onto my iPod. When I plug in my iPod, the application tells the site which ones I've listened to and it removes them from my listening queue. The application could, also be stored on the iPod itself to enable it to be used wherever the iPod is plugged in, not just on computers with iTunes.
Am I explaining myself clearly enough? It just seems so simple, it should already exists within iTunes. It is entirely possible that Apple's recent acquisition of Lala could be the first step in an online iTunes which would solve these problems. If anyone has any suggestions for the best way to achieve this, please let me know. I thought of a way of doing it with Dropbox but it would only work if the music bit of my iTunes library weren't bigger than my Dropbox account.
This is a more general version of the #uksnow map idea. It's a crowd-sourced weather map which relies on the fact that any one individual tweet about the weather might be inaccurate but given a large enough sample, enough people will mention the weather in their area to make this a workable idea. It doesn't require people to tweet in a particular format.
Have an array of weather words in various languages (rain, hail, snow, schnee, ame, yuki) every 5 minutes: foreach weatherword search twitter for that word http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=rain retrieve latest 100 tweets foreach get user info http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=username get user.location if available geocode save: username, time, lat, long, geotude, weatherword Remove any tweets about this weatherword older than 6 hours.
Show a Google map Based on current Zoom level, split the current map into about 100 geotudes foreach geotude search database for any weather results for that block (probably using an ilike "1234%" on the geotude field) sort by weatherword count descending draw an icon on top of that block to show the most common weatherword If the user zooms in, recalculate geotudes and repeat.
I quite like that this uses geotudes which I think are an excellent idea.
A site which track which episodes of TV shows you have watched. You create an account and enter the name of a TV show (AJAX completed, naturally). Before the show is associated with your account, you are shown a list of broadcast episodes and you must select the latest one you have watched. You can add as many shows as you like. When you visit the site, you see something like the visual here (although with the design not totally ripped from Automatic) so you can instantly tell what the next unseen episode is.
You can ask to be notified when a new episode is broadcast in a variety of ways (twitter, e-mail, rss). Shows can be broadcast anywhere in any country and so to get around the problem of detecting when a show is broadcast, the site actually follows a collection of well-known torrent providers. Note: this site doesn't provide any links to torrents or video files, it just relies on the fact that shows usually turn up on the torrent scene shortly after they have been broadcast. You can buy episodes or seasons from iTunes or Amazon links provided next to your tracking panel.
The visual isn't great as there will also be some big button on each show panel to increment the last show watched.
