This update features integrated app settings (many users asked me how to change glucose readings to mg/dL) and fully editable insulin types.

You can now add your own custom insulin types and set their associated colour which is displayed in lists and graphs. The first type in the list is selected by default so you’ll want to make this the type you use most frequently. A default list of popular types is included which can be reverted back to at any time.

You can also choose to see low and high glucose readings highlighted. The low and high thresholds are set to 4.0 mmol/L (72 mg/dL) and 10.0 mmol/L (180 mg/dL) respectively.

Only a minor update, but I hope v1.4, which should be available next week, will make up for that.

The average 24-hours graph is available from the History Summary screen and displays a statistical average for each hour based on glucose readings and insulin doses in that period. A line graph is displayed for glucose (interpolated between where values exist) and a bar graph for insulin. A snapshot can be saved to your photo album.

Following some feedback I decided to add keypad support to the Add screen so that glucose readings and insulin doses can be added without using the sliders. Tap on the value, it will turn blue to indicate selection and the keypad will slide into view. Values for each digit must be entered so to enter 15.0 units of insulin you need to key in 1 – 5 – 0 when decimal units are enabled in the settings. Once you’re done with the keypad tap the Done key.

Finally I have improved the app’s performance – the List view especially is now much smoother. There are also the obligatory bug fixes.

The new feature comes in the form of a view of injection site distribution. This displays where on the body injections have been administered and can be based on the number of injections or the amount of insulin each site has received. The injection site view is available from the history summary screen for past months and the last seven days.

In addition, version 1.1 adds some more insulin types, increases the range of the glucose reading input selector and includes some bug fixes.

I’m almost done with the next update which I will submitting to Apple within the next week or so. This will bring some much needed performance improvements and some more new features including keypad input of glucose readings and insulin doses, but more on that nearer the time

Over the last couple of months I’ve been learning Objective-C and developing my first (and certainly not my last) iPhone app: Diabetes Diary. At the end of last 2008 I started developing an iPhone-optimised Ruby-on-Rails web app for monitoring my diabetes. I soon realised that while it was a nice way of recording glucose readings, the web-based experience wasn’t ideal and obviously required an internet connection. So I decided to learn Objective-C, build a native application and sign up as an iPhone developer.

I’m proud to say that Diabetes Diary is now available in the iTunes App Store and more information is available at mydiabetesdiary.net.

So what does it do? Diabetes Diary records your blood glucose readings (mmol/L and mg/dL are supported) and insulin doses. You can then look back at your activity and see statistical averages for glucose and insulin for each month and the last seven days and see graphs for these periods. To do more analysis on your history you can download a CSV file to your Mac or PC over a local wifi connection.

Its a simple application and I’ll be waiting on feedback to see how I should develop it further. I certainly don’t expect to make any money from it, although recovering my iPhone dev fees would be nice

The pop-up player presents a webcam feed of the studio so you can see Chris and the team as well as hear them alongside which we display images, now playing track information and incoming SMS messages. In addition to this you will also see barcharts and swingometers representing a public vote or poll.

I joined the project to develop the front-end which is an AS3 flash application built in Flex Builder 3. The components are made up of individual SWFs loaded as necessary and the client is driven through messages sent over the same infrastructure which powers the live text widgets on network pages and the Radio 1 tag cloud.

Early comments on the Radio Labs post and elsewhere have been really encouraging.

Today we launched Radio Pop, a social network around BBC radio. Its a project which has been around for over a year now and its great to finally get it out for people to start playing with. Listening to BBC radio through Radio Pop gives you some (hopefully) interesting information and what you’ve been listening to and what your friends have been listening to. When you hear something you really like you can ‘pop’ it – that’s Radio Pop vernacular for bookmark

The Radio Pop site is about displaying your listening, your friends’ listening and everyone’s listening. Your profile displays your recent activity along side your favourite stations and programmes (or brands to be more specific). Here’s my profile:

It also displays what you’re currently listening to so anyone visiting the site can see what you’re up to.

At the moment, we’re not doing all that much with all this listening data but in the future we are looking to provide recommendations and personalisation (no self-respecting web app can be without them!) and perhaps more integration with other BBC services. In fact its a good point to make that Radio Pop would not be the service it is without our excellent BBC programmes catelogue which provides us with schedule data and unique IDs for every programme, series and brand. While we’re not using the data in interesting ways as yet, we set out to make Radio Pop accessible and extensible so you can use your data for your own apps and mash ups.

For example, here’s my profile (including what I’m currently listening to): http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/fridayforward.xml.
And here’s my recent listening:
http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/fridayforward/listens.xml.
Its also available as an RSS feed.

I built an example app using user profile data so you can tell your blog readers what you’re listening to:

Check out the API documentation for more information on our feeds. The blog badge is available from the extras page where you can find an OS X widget which allows you to listen to BBC radio through Radio Pop from the comfort of your desktop.

So that’s Radio Pop. But how does it all work?

Radio Pop is a Ruby on Rails application (because that’s where our experience lies) which runs on nginx with the fair proxy balancer module and memcached caching (because its needs to handle a large number of requests). We support OpenID for login (along side a standard username and password) as well as OAuth for communication between Radio Pop and any clients which post data to it (including the desktop widget). This means we have an input API as well as an output API, should you want to build an on-demand Radio Pop player…

Tracking your listening is done quite simply, through a ‘pulse’ sent every 60 seconds. When you change the station you are listening to or listen over a programme boundary, the pulses are combined into a single ‘listen event’. Once this happens it will appear on the graphs on your profile and in your listening history. When you stop listening (and therefore stop sending pulses) a listen event is created after 5 minutes of inactivity.

I should point out that a lot of the initial development for this version of Radio Pop was done by Mint Digital, who worked from our initial internal prototype. Thomas from Mint also advanced my Rails and nginx knowledge ten-fold. At least.

Please check it out, sign up and start listening.

Behold! I suddenly have three times the subscribers I thought I had! And no-one has had to change the feed URL for my site either

A few months ago I realised I could (and should) do more with my web site and that my current hosting package simply wasn’t up to the job. I’ve moved to Dreamhost as they provide the features I was after at a pretty reasonable price and a 90 money-back guarantee if it didn’t work out. Reliability seems to be an issue with Dreamhost and I’ve already experienced some downtime, but we’ll see how we go. I now have shell access to my hosting which might kick me into playing around a bit more. I hope so.

The main reason I moved hosting was because Blogger simply wasn’t doing it for me and in order to migrate to Wordpress, I needed a PHP-enabled host. Migrating from Blogger was pretty straight forward using the importer (however I haven’t updated all the internal links) yet. The next step was to build my own blog template and that’s why its taken me about 3 months to final flip the switch. After a few failed attempts (and my MacBook dying, getting fixed and eventully being replaced) I’m pretty happy with the new look and if there’s anything you like you can check out the plugins I’m using on the about page.