Last year, I bought a starter set from Touchatag. An RFID kit that uses NFC. The starters pack had 10 NFC tags. The Nexus S could read them, but it points to a URL that you need to set up a redirect for. This is pretty cool with Touchatag, but what about other tags that you pick up at some event and that you’d want to reuse?

So I started to think: would there be some way to make that URL contained on the NFC tag map to another URL? And that’s how I came up with this app idea.

The use is quite simple: just read a tag. If it wasn’t linked with the app yet, it will propose to link it to a URL that you can also fetch from your bookmarks. Next time you’ll read the tag and select the AnyTag app, it will redirect you to the URL you’ve just associated the tag with.

Cool thing to do: go to the mobile site of a venue in foursquare and save it in your bookmarks. Associate a tag with the URL of that venue. Next time you’ll scan the tag, it will offer you to either open it in your web browser, or, thanks to the magic of intents, in the Foursquare Android app where you’ll be able to check in straight from there!

Apart from giving that training, I did some tourism in and outside Beijing for some days. The highlights were the Forbidden City, the Hutongs but also the unmissable Great Wall of China. I did a hike between the less touristic and more authentic sections of Jinshanling and Simatai, which represents around 8 km of wall. But those 8 kilometers weren’t flat, some parts were quite steep with steps on the stairs of different heights.

This hike was my first real occasion to do GPS logging with MyTracks. I tested it before, but usually for 500 meters in my flat part of the world.

MyTracks is awesome. It records your latitude, longitude, altitude, bearing, speed and time. It puts it all in statistics and graphs and having a look at it afterwards is a really great thing to analyze your elevation and speed, how steep the hike wa, etc. but it’s also fun to show to your friends and family. Let’s have a look at some screenshots:

MyTracks allows you to export your files to GPX, KML (download it here) and even publish it straight to Google Maps and Google Docs. Here is a screenshot, using the KML in Google Earth:

I really love this type of software as location is one of my favorite things to do with mobile. MyTracks is available on the Android Market and is published by Google. It’s not new, I know, but I love it and wanted to share that with you.

Ow, let’s just end with one picture of the wall.

The even better part is that this application was presented in a press conference organized by Google. As a developer, it really is an honor to have a company like Google feature something you made in a press conference, along with one of their products: Google Transit.

Last week some persons on the Flemish twittosphere/blogosphere complained about the lack of mobile services of the Flemish public transport company De Lijn. The timing couldn’t be better to announce such an app, but it’s not on iPhone nor for Flanders, but for Brussels on Android!

What this application does:

• Get the closest bus, tram and metro stops in function of your geographic location
• See where the vehicles are on the line
• Get the realtime waiting times at a stop
• Get the theoretic schedules at a stop
• See where your stop is on a map
• Mark your stop as favorite
• A widget that shows you the 3 closest stops you marked as favorite
• … and probably some other things I have forgotten.

The app is available in French, Dutch and English.

I made this little demo video with my girlfriend, it is in French but you should be able to see what it’s about. Anyway, I can only advise you to download the application on the market, even if you don’t live here. It might be a nice app to show to your local public transport operator so that he does the same, we could even work on this together !

The QR-code for the download

And last but not least, screenshots!

Header photo by Azariel

Most of my OS stand points are subjective. Don’t blame me for that!

Yesterday night we put the last hand on the FOSDEM schedule application and made it available to everyone on the Android Market. The application is compatible from Android 1.5 to the latest version.

Features:

• List of events by day and track
• Room maps
• Share an event by text, mail or on your social network
• Application-wide search
• Favorites
• Notifications when a favorited session is about to start

The schedule is downloaded the first time you start the application. You can manually update it later, as the schedule still gets some events added or updated. Since the downloaded schedule XML is over 500K and a lot of visitors come from abroad, we advise you to download it over WiFi to avoid roaming charges.

I worked on several parts of the application: The XML parsing, this is very slow on Android, using the XMLPullParser API, the DB and a content provider for the events, the app-wide search, the favorite’s mechanism and their notifications, the design of the event screen and a share feature to post the sessions you’re attending to Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, text, etc.

I also intensively used the next things:

• Sending and receiving broadcast events
• Using a background service
• The notification mechanism
• How to make a content provider
• How to implement search in your app
• Make better use of intents

The application is open source under the GPL license. You can grab the source on our sourceforge project page. We’re 3 persons working on it: Christophe Vandeplas, Pieter Iserbyt and me. If you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to tell us, we’ll be glad to add it to the next update.

To download the application, search on ‘FOSDEM’ on the market or just scan this QR code.

For sharing, I used a function that takes as a parameter the subject and text. You could add the context to the parameters and make the method static in a utility class, for example.

Here are the few lines of code to use:

public void share(String subject,String text) {
 final Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);

 intent.setType("text/plain");
 intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT, subject);
 intent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT, text);

 startActivity(Intent.createChooser(intent, getString(R.string.share)));
}

I know there are a lot of sites out there that are telling the exact same thing, but I’m using my own blog to keep my own code snippets and share them, so enjoy.

3 months to go, let’s start the countdown. Will you be there? Registration is here and early bird booking costs about 400$ (€275).

And I apparently won’t be the only one going there from my side of the globe. A “webmission” leaving from Belgium seems to be in the works as well.

I don’t know who is to blame for that. Is it the Google database that is not reliable? Is it my handset transmitting wrong data? I’m not going to judge, but this has really become problematic.

If your application is using geolocation features in urban areas, you might consider an alternative that has proven itself on the iPhone: SkyHook Wireless. SkyHook has had an Android and Symbian API for several months now and I have been testing it with one of my applications. The app is VilloHelper! but I haven’t yet put this up on the market, but I must say I’m pretty satisfied by its accuracy.

You can go check it out on their site. Their documentation is explaining how to use it. I’m planning to do some seamless positioning class where I can provide just a parameter for what I’ll be using: GPS, network or SkyHook. I will put this up here any time soon.

MADDE is a technology preview but allows someone that is using a Mac or Windows computer to install a development and debugging environment which lets them write, compile and package a C++ or Qt application for Maemo devices.

Installing it was really easy, just follow the guide on the Maemo wiki. The only thing I did that was different from the guide was the USB networking (could not get it to work on the Mac-side). Instead, I just used my N900’s WiFi instead of setting up an extra connection on it. It also works that way. I was really happy to get my “Hello World” screen to work. Now the serious part can start, I’ll have to dive back to C++ first

Right now MADDE only supports up to Qt 4.5, there is a workaround to get Qt 4.6 to work but I think I’ll just stick with 4.5 while waiting for a MADDE update.

I did not want to install an application for just a simple conversion, so I thought I would map the stations in Google Earth and save it as a KML, so I could read out the placemark names, latitudes, longitudes and altitudes to import them into my database using the CSV format. I made a little script that you could also use. It’s available here.

The script does nothing spectactular: it just looks up particular tags using xpath and formats it as a CSV. You have the option to download it or to just copy-paste the result from the web pages. Enjoy!

Go to Simple KML to CSV converter.