I’m a Tourist – Get me out of Here!

Guardian Lite, an unofficial android reader for the Guardian newspaper, is now available on the Android Market (search for ‘Guardian’).

The application aims to encourage wide ranging browsing through the Guardian’s extensive collection of sections, tags and contributors as well as providing the fastest possible syncing for off line viewing.

Features

Online viewing

Articles are available for viewing immediately if a network connection is available. No pre syncing is required to begin browsing content.

Top stories

The current main stories from the network front of the Guardian website.

Contributors and tag links

Navigate through the Guardian’s current content with the tag and contributor links attached to each article. Discover relevant blogs and contributors for each section.

Favourite tags

Mark sections, tags and contributors for quick reference and offline syncing.
The favourites screen contains a custom news feed based on your favourites collection.

Offline syncing

Download your favourite article sets in the background for offline viewing.
Considerable attention has been given to making the syncing process as efficient as possible.

Syncing speeds of up to 100 articles per minute should be possible over a Wifi connection.

The application aggressively caches articles viewed while online for up to 24 hours. These articles can still be browsed when no network connection is available.

Guardian Lite is designed to run on any android 1.5 or higher device.

How does it work

Guardian Lite makes use of the Guardian’s excellent RSS feeds and Content API. The article content is sourced from the RSS feeds, while the Content API provides information about available sections and tags.

Information from these two data sources is collated in a Google appengine hosted proxy. The proxy formats and compresses the content for efficient delivery to user’s handsets over limited bandwidth connections.

To enable fast performance on low end devices, the application uses flat files and vanilla Java serialization for local storage.

Thanks to

Many thanks to those who assisted with device testing, including @gdb_, @robertomango, @bruntonspall, @brunns and Alan Lord.

NZ Govt feeds is an unofficial, experimental aggregation of New Zealand Government news items.

The list of source feeds is drawn from Mike Riverdale’s collection of Government feeds.

The site software was originally developed to drive the wellynews local news feed.

The system provides a number of outputs which might be of interest to developers:

- Content can be tagged.
Users may add tags to individual resources. These tagging votes are combined with automatic tagging to arrange news items into different output feeds.

- Every tag has an RSS feed.
For example, the Auckland tag page has it’s own RSS feed.

- Tags and publishers can be combined.
ie. Health and Wellington related items, or everything the Electricity Commission has said about Auckland.

- All feeds are also available in JSON format
See the API instructions for details.

The site still contains some references to it’s original Wellington related usage; these will be removed if this turns out to be of use to people.

Any enquires should be directed to enquires (at) wellington.gen.nz.

The Afganistan casualties feed developed during Guardian Hackday is now live at a permanent location.

The contents of the MOD confirmed fatalities page is available as an RSS feed or can be followed on twitter:

RSS feed: http://cambridge.wellington.gen.nz/feeds/afghanistan
Twitter: @ukcasualties

… for they’re cleverer than you think.

Two examples of user’s exceeding expectations this week.

1) Submitting availability from a cellphone

Squadlist is as web based system which allows rowers to share their availability for training sessions.

"POST /rowers_availability.php HTTP/1.1" 200 8381 "-" "Nokia6300/2.0 (05.00) Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1"

That looks like somebody in Wales using a cellphone to confirm their availability for an outing.
In the two years I’ve been involved in maintaining this system the idea that it might be accessed from a cellphone never occured to me.

In hindsight of course that makes perfect sense; the information in the system is most useful at 7am in the morning when everyone is standing around outside a boat shed; not when everyone is in the office in front of a PC.

2) Search Wellington tagging

This new submission for the Wellington City Chorus is correctly tagged with 4 relevant tags; even though the submission form is complete rubbish.

The tag selection form is the quickest, simplest implementation possible; a multiple select box.

It’s terrible for a number of reasons. Firstly, the user has to scroll through a massive list of options looking for possible matches. Secondly, to select more than one tag the user has to know who to perform a multiple select. This involves holding down a button somewhere in the bottom left of the keyboard and carefully clicking on a selection; then having to scroll to your next selection and clicking again (without been able to seen the effect on your first selection).

When this was implemented it was primararly for my own use; I expected no one would ever submit more than one tag through that interface.

In constrast, we’ve NEVER had a submission come through that form which didn’t have multiple, correct selections.

The spider which was crawling around the side of the laptop screen this afternoon.

It’s been far too warm to be working indoors recently, so most of my writing has been happening under the oak trees by the river or around Richmond Green. It’s definately a better working environment than the flat (and almost as good as the trains); creepy crawlies not withstanding.