Just now, I'm trying to improve the UI for the Factory's first iPhone app. While doing this, I've come up with a list of available areas and gestures in a touch-driven app that you can use for actions. I thought I'd put them here so other people could point out where I've gone wrong and what I've forgotten:

• Menus
  • Permanent on-screen menu
  • Transient on-screen menu (requires trigger)
  • Different screen menu (any number of them, requires trigger)
• Static (can be overloaded with function based on position)
  • Single-tap
    • Single-tap 1 touch
    • Single-tap 2 touches
    • Single-tap 3 touches
  • Double-tap
    • Double-tap 1 touch
    • Double-tap 2 touches
    • Double-tap 3 touches
  • Touch and Hold
    • Touch and Hold 1 touch
    • Touch and Hold 2 touches
    • Touch and Hold 3 touches
• Dynamic (Gestures)
  • Touch and Move 1 touch
    • Up
    • Down
    • Left
    • Right
  • Touch and Move 2 touches
    • Up
    • Down
    • Left
    • Right
    • Apart (Zoom)
    • Together (Pinch)
    • Rotate clockwise
    • Rotate anticlockwise
  • Touch and Move 3 touches
    • Up (Swipe)
    • Down (Swipe)
    • Left (Swipe)
    • Right (Swipe)
    • Apart (Spread)
    • Together (Gather)
    • Rotate clockwise
    • Rotate anticlockwise

So, I couldn't help myself. I had a niggling idea at the back of my head that I needed to get out. After coming up with this Twitter weather idea last week, I decided to spend a couple of hours this weekend building it. As if I didn't have other things I should have been doing instead...

It works pretty much exactly how the pseudocode I mentioned last time describes. Every few minutes, a script will search Twitter for mentions of any weather words from several different languages. It will then look up the location of the person who tweeted that and store it. Single reports might be wrong and users might not have stored their actual location but over a large enough sample, this system becomes more accurate. The script removes any matching twets older than 6 hours.

To display, I actually ended up using Geohashes instead of Geotudes because it is easier to simplify them when you zoom out just by cutting off the tail of the hash. For example, the physical area denoted by gcvwr3qvmh8vn (the geohash for Edinburgh) is contained within gcvwr3 which is itself contained within gcv. There are a few technical problems with geohashes but it seems the best fit for this purpose. If anyone knows of any better suggestion, please let me know. I do realise that this is quite possibly the slowest, most inefficient JavaScript I've ever written because it makes an AJAX call for every graticule and it probably should just send the South-East and North-West bounds and get back an array of them but, like I said, there were other things I should have been doing. Because the overlaid grid changes resolution based on zoom level, there are a few places where it is either tragically slow (resolution too fine) or terribly inaccurate (resolution too rough). That's just a case of tweaking the algorithm. Similarly, it's set to display reports of weather if there are 2 or more matches but it could be tweaked to only show if a larger number have reported something.

So go, play with the Twitter-generated weather map. If someone can come up with a good, catchy name, or some better graphics, that'd be great, thanks.

• 

The next step in ego-googling: how many letters of your name do you need to type into the google search box before you are the top suggestion? The lower the better, obviously. Including spaces, My name is the top suggestion after 10 characters so I have a Google Suggest Number of 10. My darling wife (who has recently changed her name) has a Google Suggest number of ∞ as she can type in her whole name and Google doesn't suggest her.

Turns out somebody proposed this first over 5 years ago. Oh well. Nothing's new on the internet.

• 

After reading Aza Raskin's post about Firefox moving its tabs down the side of the window, I decided to give it a go in Opera. It turns out to be very useful when you have a widescreen monitor. I usually end up with several dozen tabs open at once and it's much easier to be able to put them down the side in an area which is, for most websites at least, dead space. On the rare occasions I do find myself on a website which requires more than the 1470px horizontal space this gives me, I can just tap f4 and get my full 1650px back. As the window sidepanel also groups by window and lists all tabs open across all windows, I can keep them ordered thematically, too.

This arrangement definitely doesn't work, however, when you have a small screen. When I tried this on my netbook, I had to choose between losing half of my screen to the tab list or only being able to read the beginning of each page title, even if I only had one tab open.