Archive for category Projects
And introducing: “uninot.es” as “My Final Year Project”
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 6 October, 2011
Hurray, I successfully registered a Spanish domain name, which as it turns out is no mean feat. It used to be only Spanish people were allowed to at all, so I guess I should be grateful. But George, you don’t know any Spanish! Que pasa? Well, calm down and I’ll explain.
My new site is http://uninot.es. That’s “uni” as in university, “notes” as in things that you write down, and that last part, “.es”, is short for España, a.k.a. Spain, thus taking the place of the more run-of-the-mill “.co.uk” or “.com”. But that’s not important right now.
Uninot.es will be the web address for my new final year project, which forms a major part of my undergraduate degree programme. I plan to make a site that curates online collaboration sessions, probably taking advantage Google Docs’ existing capabilities, which will be based around university curricula. It will help you connect and share knowledge with your fellow academics, and will help you find the right channels using the places and people you know (read: geo-location and social network integration).
Anyway, check back for more as things progress. Mostly this post is a flag so that Google and co. will pick up the existence of the new site, and work out what it’s about. By the time I get some working stuff up there, search engines should have an idea already of my site and it’ll be easier to gain traction in search results. This is what us nerds like to call Search Engine Optimization. So now you know.
Introducing – Settle GCSE Maths Revision
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 19 September, 2011
I’ve been working with McKenna Consultants this summer on an iPhone app, and it’s finally been approved by Apple and is available in the App Store now! The game was designed by students Megan Dawson & Sophie Thornton of Settle College, North Yorkshire in order to help their fellow students pass their GSCE Maths exams. I’ve worked on the internals and features of the app, working with an external graphical designer in turning their designs into reality. I hope to hear soon if the app meets our competition-winners’ expectations 
We used PhoneGap as a way of writing an iOS app without having to know any Objective-C (I still don’t!) and a combination of HTML5 (particularly the new localStorage capability) and Javascript, including a couple of notable libraries (jQuery Mobile for the UI and jQuery original for offsetting some of the unpleasantries of working in Javascript!).
New GitHub profile
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 1 May, 2011
I’ve set up a new GitHub profile, and I’ve been adding to a couple of repositories this week while I’ve had some time off work. I decided to abandon the small project I started, but I did add a new function to a Ruby on Rails plugin I was using, so I’ve submitted a Pull Request to see if the originator would like to reuse my code. Maybe at least something may have come out of it in addition to learning a lot!
Come follow me, I’ll follow you… Social Coding and all that
Announcing Student Veggie – my new food microblog
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 27 May, 2010
Today I’m launching a new microblog hosted by Tumblr but found at food.georgenixon.co.uk. As a student I don’t have much time to cook or many fancy ingredients in my cupboard. I’m a vegetarian and I know how easy it is to get stuck eating the same old things when your local shops don’t offer a great variety of meatless foodstuffs (love that word! food + stuff = foodstuff??).
This microblog will basically be photos of things I’ve knocked up in the kitchen, so it’ll be simple, quick tasty and occasionally nutritious food, and a little blurb about why the dish is good and how to make it. If you make a wickedly simple yet delectable dish, send me a quick email or comment and I’ll have a go, and post the results! But please, no meat! Fake meat, such as Fake Bacon, or Facon as I call it, is fine.
Java Demo – Twitter App
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 21 April, 2010
<click for bigger>
Since I use this blog to show off some of the things I’ve been working on at well as post useful tidbits occasionally, I got permission to put one of my recent pieces of coursework on here.
We were asked to create a desktop Twitter application in Java. It’s not fully featured due to time constraints, so I wouldn’t recommend using it in place of your usual Digsby or Tweetdeck clients, but it lets me demonstrate my coding style etc and maybe it’ll be useful to anyone planning a similar project. If you are, I recommend the Twitter4J library, which does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
I’ve uploaded it in both source and distribution (just unzip and run the .jar – requires JRE) versions, as well as the report I prepared highlighting some of the features I was proud to have completed.
Update 28/4/10: Not to blow my own trumpet too much here, but I’m proud to say that I got my marks for this coursework back today, and I was astonished to find I’d been awarded 100%! Out of 60 or so other students, the next best grades were 92% and 90%. FYI, I’m still hunting for a 12-month work placement to do as a sandwich year, if any prospective employers are reading! Draig Technologies will now be benefiting from my immense talents 
Update 24/6/10: Twitter say they won’t be supporting basic login requests from the end of the month, and as far as I can remember, this is how my application works. Enabling OAuth would be a quick and easy fix if you do use this code, but I’m not personally supporting the app in any shape or form. It’s provided As Is!
Button Hero – Can YOU press a button?!
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 23 December, 2009
Button Hero was a strangely fun little thing I made quite a while ago that got me a small amount of internet attention. I noticed it’s had a few visits lately for whatever reason, and I thought I’d move it from its old home at 110mb.com, a free hosting site, to this one. Two reasons, one it might help with the old SEO for this site, you never know, and two I think some people found they couldn’t access it at 110mb as that site is sometimes blacklisted as a haven for naughty internet practices like phishing.
Anyway, to make up for any inconvenience, I swapped out the now-defunct Last.fm player for a Grooveshark widget playing some songs I like and thought would fit. Grooveshark is a site I heartily recommend, particularly if like some of my friends, you can’t find a Spotify invite. Let me know if you’ve got one to spare and I’ll pass it on with much thanks
Open In Songbird added to Softpedia
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 20 May, 2009
I just received an email saying my Open In Songbird add-on for Firefox has been added to Softpedia. I don’t know how much of an honour this is as they seem to have pretty much everything on there, but it’s something!
Open in Songbird add-on for Firefox
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 8 May, 2009
Tools menu after installing the Open in Songbird add-on
Songbird is a great piece of software – a halfway-home between media player and browser that turns the web into a playlist. Since version 1.1 added the possibility of opening a Songbird tab from Firefox through a special ‘songbird:’ protocol, I’ve been meaning to try to make an extension that does just that, and in a user-friendly manner. Having never made a Mozilla add-on before, it also seemed a relatively simple project to get help me get my feet wet.
Skip much head-scratching and cursing and here is is: Open in Songbird for Firefox. It adds what it says on the tin: an ‘Open this page in Songbird’ option to Tools, right-click and toolbar menus in the browser. If you want the toolbar button, you have to add it manually after installation, as Mozilla try to prevent users’ virtual real estate from clogging with each new extension by hiding buttons by default. Just click ‘customize’ and drag the Songbird icon to the toolbar.
I’m no artist so I’ve re-used the icon file that comes with Songbird 1.1 in Windows. If this is a problem I am happy to change it, but as it is I’m hoping this extension could be of use to the Songbird faithful. Props also to Chris Castiglione for this post on using bookmarklets to achieve similar results as my extension – it’s a simple operation behind-the-scenes, but Open in Songbird should make it a lot more pleasant for those lacking the requisite javascript know-how.
Announcing Mister Mckees
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 3 April, 2009
Just a quick post to help Google index a new site more quickly – Mister Mckees is a project of mine for a shoe repair company in Hull. I will do a full post on this when I have time.
Update: Mister Mckees is now up and doing business, and I’ve added it to my new Showcase page listing various sites on which I’ve worked. My thanks to Alan Mckee, my first paying customer!
Introducing Twistband – read music tweets from Twitter
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 15 March, 2009
Update: Appjet has ceased hosting little projects such as Twistband in order to focus on their runaway hit, Etherpad – an online notepad that people can edit simultaneously and see the results live. I can’t blame them, as it’s a cool and innovative app with a million uses, and apparently business customers want in. As Twistband was just an experiment, I won’t be migrating it to another host.
I was reading an article on TechCrunch about Twitter, or rather how its uniquely opinionated and blunt content combines with a good API to give it a huge potential as a search weapon of the future. Having watched from afar the gold rush as early iPhone apps made massive bundles of cash even for lone developers, I wanted in this time! Er, that is to say, I had an idea for a search-based Twitter app and was in no way tempted by fame and/or fortune. So I introduce <drum roll>… Twistband:
Twistband screenshot
As you can see, my page takes the band or artist name that you are interested in, and searches the latest Twitter posts, or ‘tweets’. If you aren’t aware what Twitter does, try watching the short video, Twitter In Plain English. Done? Good. So, why use Twistband and not just search.twitter.com?
Well, very simply, mine is more specific. Try searching for “the Killers” normally and you’ll get results about murderers as well as musicians. “Bush” will render more tweets about a certain ex(phew!)-president than briefly popular 90s post-grunge band, Bush. I’ve tried to narrow down the results by adding keywords behind the scenes, such as “listening” or “mp3″. It works quite well, though it’s not going to change the world.
No, it doesn’t have any serious applications (I can think of!), and perhaps it won’t make me rich, but maybe someone will get a kick out of it. Try a few bands you really love; it’s kind of nice to see how they fit into the daily lives of strangers too. But I guess I’m going to have to think harder if I want to harness Twitter and be a millionair this time next year…
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