Leeds Hack 2010
I've been doing a bit of tinkering with ideas and technologies lately, one of which was for Leeds Hack 2010 where small teams of programmers shut themselves in a room for 24 hours and see what interesting projects they can come up with from scratch.
The project I worked on with my friend was a system where you'd start a long journey (for instance driving from Southampton to Leeds for a hacking festival) and your phone would update your progress along your route and send a tweet to the people who'd subscribed to your journey when you were a set period of time away (so they could put the kettle on, or knew that you'd not become too lost).
We did okay but then were given 15 minutes 'tinker time' which gave us just enough rope to hang ourselves and we hosed the system (not helped by Google deciding we'd hammered their maps system enough for one day).
But that was Call When Close (and we'll fix it and extend it when we've got the time).
V&A Local Item Finder
The ease at which you can get a phone to give you its location means that all sorts of things are possible. The V&A museum in London has an API that gives a location for where works were produced which, with a bit of tinkering, can give you a site that shows things produced near you. Knocked that up in a few hours so it's not particularly pretty.
Semantic Editor
The other tinkering I've done was a 'Semantic Editor' to try and give people entering content into a CMS a guided sense of structure - the problem being that most plug-in editors for CMS's quite merrily allow all sorts of strange structures. So I came up with this which isn't pretty but it was more about getting the background stuff working.
