Third place in VRT mashup competition

Over the past few months the VRT have opened up their APIs for developers to play with. They hosted a competition challenging webdevelopers to come up with interesting uses for their data and implement those ideas in the form of a mashup. And they do have a lot of interesting data: electronic programming guide for all their radio and television stations, a music database, traffic information, ...

My idea was to build a website that shows the current song and playlist for a radio station and add extra information and link it to social media. I had a lot of possibilities in mind (iTunes, Spotify, deep Facebook integration, Twitter integration, searching songs on YouTube, ...), but little time. I integrated it with Spotify and iTunes and added a player for the live stream. For the social aspect I was aiming for, I added AddThis (because that is only 5 minutes of work and I was running out of time) and chat (again, because I could do that really quick). The result is available on http://nowplaying.be

I used a few technologies and services I had never tried before and learned a lot: SignalR, HTML 5 audio, KnockoutJS, ...

The winners were announced during VRT Barcamp last Saturday, I couldn't be there but @greyscarlet on Twitter was kind enough to share a video of the announcement:

Bekendmaking winnaars #vrtmashup staat online: ow.ly/1EuDVY. Proficiat@wouterdevinck, @MatthiasDVr en @ikbenmartijn! #bcvrt

— Karen (@greystarlet) januari 21, 2012

And this is the video:



I got a third place and won an iPad, vrtwebradio.be is second and the winner is @hoeishetverkeer. I especially liked hoeishetverkeer, a deserved winner!

Honorable mentions (the few I have seen on Twitter): Radiofy and Stubrify. If there are any others that deserve a mention: let me know.

Nokia Lumia 800 launched in Brussels

Friday night I was invited to an exclusive event in Brussels: the Belgian launch of the Lumia 800, Nokia's new flagship smartphone.

About a hundred bloggers and other "influential" people from the community were invited to come take a look at this new device. I already new most of what they had to say, because of course the Lumia 800 has launched in several countries over the past few months and because I have been using Windows Phone 7 devices since before they were released in Belgium (over a year ago). Nevertheless, it was a fun and interesting evening. Nokia has given me a Lumia 800 device to review, so stay tuned! I am still in the middle of the exam period, so I will post my full review in about two weeks, but I promise that it will be a very thorough one. By then the device will be available in Belgium for 499 euros (release date: February 1st).

Earlier that day the press was invited, this is the television news report (VRT - Het Journaal 19u 20/01/2012):

Guest lecture at KHBO Oostende about Windows Phone development

Another one in our series of guest lectures: this morning Sebastiaan, Alexander and I are doing a guest lecture at KHBO Oostende. I am posting this while Alexander is still giving his XNA demo, so far so good!

The content:

• Introduction (slides below): me talking about the phone for 30 minutes
• Silverlight demos: I did the first, Sebastiaan the others
  Click here to download the source code.
  1. Flickr app
  2. GPS demo (more info, but slightly different code)
  3. Accelerometer demo (more info, but slightly different code)
  4. Worker demo
• XNA demo: Alexander did this demo
  Click here to download the source code.
• Workshop: students working on their own projects, exploring the samples, asking questions, trying some devices

The slides (or click here to download):

Guest lecture at KATHO about Windows Phone development

This morning I did a guest lecture / workshop about WP7 development with two fellow MSPs: Alexander Dooms and Sebastiaan Polfliet. It was well received and we would like to thank the audience for being so great.

The content:

• Introduction (slides below): me talking about the phone for 30 minutes
• Silverlight demos: I did the first three, Sebastiaan the fourth
  Click here to download the source code.
  1. Flickr app
  2. GPS demo (more info, but slightly different code)
  3. Accelerometer demo (more info, but slightly different code)
  4. Worker demo
• XNA demo: Alexander did this demo
  Click here to download the source code.
• Workshop: students working on their own projects, exploring the samples, asking questions, trying some devices

The slides (or click here to download):

Facebook Timeline privacy

I have been testing the new profile page that Facebook will start rolling out next week for a couple of days now and I really like it. However, I have some privacy concerns. Of course there is the obvious concern: on the classic profile page it takes quite an effort to click the "show more button" half a million times to see what a certain person was doing back in 2006, while on the new profile page -called Timeline- the same takes, well... a single click. But technically, nothing is exposed that wasn't exposed before.

However, there is a more hidden privacy concern. Facebook has algorithms that determine how much you "like" someone, based on your interactions, both private and public. It uses this information to determine which posts to show in the news overview and who to give a prominent place in the sidebar. That is okay as long as they don't share this information with anyone.

(or is it? http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html)

Unfortunately, timeline seems to use some of this information out in the open:

Note that one picture is bigger than the others. Why? Well, lengthy private conversations seems to be the answer in this case.

Suppose I don't want anyone to know (this blog post kind'a defeats that point). I went on a quest to figure out how to hide this and it took me surprisingly long to figure it out.

On top of your "Timeline" profile page you'll find the following buttons:

On the next page you can go back in time to the year and month of your choice and hide (or give even more attention to) whatever you want, including new friends.

So, the key takeaway from this story: if you want to hide something and there is no hide button directly next to it, go looking for it in the activity log.

Viking! 2.0

Today, I have pushed a major update for my Mobile Vikings application for WP7 to the marketplace. Version two is a complete rewrite from the ground up and is supposed to be more robust, more secure and above all: more feature complete. It uses OAuth for authentication. New features: live tile (experimental, as this is quite challenging), multi sim support, usage history, top-up history, vikingpoints, sim details, ...

It may take a couple of days/weeks for this update to appear in the marketplace.
Update 14 sept: Viking! 2.0 has successfully passed the marketplace certification procedure and will appear soon.
Update 15 sept: Viking! 2.0 is available
Update 17 sept: Viking! 2.1 submitted to the marketplace. This update fixes a few minor bugs and one major bug that prevented users from logging in if their password contained any non-alphanumerical characters.
Update 21 sept: Viking! 2.1 is available

Guest lecture at KAHO Sint-Lieven

This morning I did a guest lecture about Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 at KAHO Sint-Lieven, a university college in Ghent.

Here are my slides:

The PDC10 samples (links to the other samples are on the slides):

• Photobooth
• Barcode scanner
• HTML puzzle
• Rich notepad

The source code:

• FlickrLight
• FlickrPhone