It’s a simple list of ingredients, that have a checkbox next to each item to mark when I have put it in my basket.

So I have built myself a simple Sinatra app that does just this:

• http://sl.whomwah.com
• Source Code

If you look at it on your iphone it will look styled, whereas on other devices it will just look simple and standard.

From the site you just need to post the url of a recipe you want the ingredients listed, for example the screenshot above is what happened when I posted this url into it:

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/spicychorizopennepas_84044.shtml

It’s very simple, give it a try, see what you think.

Ok, one thing I should note, is that I can’t be sure it will be 100% correct every time. This is a real pain, but out of may hands. The BBC recipe pages look very nice and all, but the most important part of the page “The Recipe” is not only terribly marked up, but it’s not consistent. I suspect this is due to being a free text field in a legacy CMS? but it means that when I get my application to try to look at it, and turn it into a list of ingredients, I can’t be sure of the structure and have to make a bunch of assumptions, which are sometimes wrong.

It would be great if this could be rectified, as we could then see lots of experiments like this out there. In fact with well marked up recipes, and there does appear to be a recipe markup spec:

• http://www.formatdata.com/recipeml/spec/recipeml-spec.html

People could build some great application around all this information.

I mentioned there that I needed to add some caching to the application, and also that it didn’t live anywhere. Well it now has caching (a feeds cached for a day) thanks to rack/cache and it now has a url:

• http://gw.whomwah.com

Which you can now use in your iCal enabled calendar, one of which is Google Calendar, which is used in the photo below where I have subscriber to:

• http://gw.whomwah.com/planner.ics?s=houseplants,greenhouse
• http://gw.whomwah.com/planner.ics?s=hedges

I was having some strange problems the other day, where Google Calendar was showing the calendar titles as long email addresses. I think this may be a Google Calendar index thing (anyone know?), as it appears to fix itself over time so ignore it.

I really like being in my garden, so I was looking at the BBC Gardening site the other day for some gardening tips. The hardest part for me, is the lack of experience I have in knowing what needs to be done and when.

The BBC Gardening website solves this by having a gardeners’ planner. Great I thought, there’s loads of really useful stuff in there. The problem is I have to keep going back to the site, to check what I’m suppose to be doing. As it’s a planner, it would be great of I could have this information to put in my own calendar, so I could see it along with other jobs I have to do. Even better if I could subscribe to this information, so if it ever changes, I’m kept up-to-date. Maybe they will provide this one day (I really think they should), but in the mean time I decided to roll my own:

I’ve created a web app that reads this planner data, and converts it into the iCal format that you can now subscribe to. It’s written using Sinatra, and I choose to run it under the awesome Passenger via mod_passenger. It’s currently not hosted anywhere (other than on my laptop), so you’ll have to run it on your own server. Maybe that will change if I can find somewhere to stick it, I’ll keep you posted. I think some caching may be needed before that happens though.

Once running on your computer of choice, you only really have one uri to stick in your calendar of choice. You can extend this uri by passing in section names to filter the information displayed in the calendar. Here’s a few examples:

# to subscribe to a calendar of everything ( quite big! )
http://mydomain.local/planner.ics
 
# to subscribe to a calendar of tips on just trees, ponds and wildlife
http://mydomain.local/planner.ics?s=trees,ponds,wildlife
 
# to view all the available sections
http://mydomain.local/

And here’s what it looks like in Apple’s iCal once you have subscibed:

Get your own copy of the app from github. You get up and running in the same way you would with any Sinatra/Passenger app. The structure and config file is already written, so you really just need to do the vhost and symlinking :

• Check the apps README file
• Get a copy of GWPlanner

Happy Gardening!

• Visit the KeyCell website
• Download KeyCell from the App Store now

KeyCell is based on a puzzle game I remember seeing in a ActionScript book about 8 years ago. It’s a kind of reverse Tetris. Touch a cell that has adjacent cells of the same colour to make them disappear. The more cells that you remove in one go, the more points you get. The challenge is to try and clear all the cells and achieve the highest score.

Now this appears simple, but actually, to get the real high scores you really have to think about it, making sure you remove the cells in such away that they setup the next bunch of coloured cells to remove. Here’s a screen shot of the game in action:

You can also share your scores with the world. This option is off by default, as I wanted the game to be as simple as possible out of the box, but you can turn on the feature via the settings page. The score are then submitted to cocosLive. Check out the scores.

Thanks once again go out to David Wilson who created the wonderful App Icon. I asked him in passing if he’d be interested in creating an icon, and a few days later it popped into my inbox, thankyou again David.

The game is written using the iPhone cocos2d game framework. This was something I’ve never used before, but has been a very enjoyable experience to use. If you want to write iPhone games, this is certainly a good starting point.

Head on over to the Radio Labs site to download and install on your machine. Please note though, it’s for OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard only.

Oh, and on a slightly different note, the puzzle game I’m writing “KeyCell” is almost finished. Here’s a little sneek preview:

The next release 1.2 is on it’s way soon, and adds custom goals and measures as this was a popular request by people who have already installed the app.

Oh, I have know idea how they work, but you enter them by going into the itunes store, and clicking the redeem link on the right hand side.

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It’s a simple concept. Hydrate helps you manage your daily water intake. Something I don’t do, hence the app. You can use it to keep track of how much water you drink a day. Every time you have a drink, you just log it with the app. You set goals, get a summary of your drinking habits as well as being able to look back over previous days. Simple!

Coming up with a new app idea that isn’t in the App Store is pretty much impossible now. When I started mine, there were no others that did the same, but there now appears to be a couple.

So, please give it a try. I’d love to know what you think.

Oh and if you didn’t click on the links, it has it’s own website: http://hydrate.whomwah.com

I need to thank my friends David Wilson and David Johnson for their help with the app, as well as everyone who helped with the different language translations.

Mr Wilson helped me realise the design of the app, and was very patient with me. Although I had a picture of what I wanted the app to look like, and how I expected it to function in my head, without his input and ideas, it wouldn’t of looked as polished as it does now. He also created the new app icon that will be in V1.1.

That counts of Mr Johnson too. He rendered the glass tumbler and sliced it into manageable layers to allow the water to be seen inside. Again, I knew what I wanted but did not have the skills to make it. As you can see from the final rendering, he did! He also created a great transition animation, which I hope to incorporate.

I really enjoyed the experience of developing on the iPhone, so I’m now working on a couple of new apps which will be completed at some point during future train journeys to work. One is a game using the cocos2d library and the other is for teachers. I’ll leave it there. Stay tuned.

So the error I was getting was:

Code Sign error: The identity 'iPhone Developer' doesn't match any valid
certificate/private key pair in the default keychain

I won’t bore you with all the variations, forums, websites read and ways I tried to solve this, and will leave you with the solution in this case. The problem was that the KeyChain App had changed it’s default keychain over to ‘system‘ and it should have been ‘login‘ as this is where all my keys and certificates are installed. Also, the default keychain is where Xcode looks. The default keyChain in the one in the keychains list that is bold. To make one the default, you right click on it and select the ‘make default’ item from the list.

Yep, That’s It!! and to be honest the error message make a little more sense now I’ve fixed it … Dam!