 The project that I've been really exploring Android with is called Planning Alerts AU. It's really an exercise in exploring what Android can do as well as hopefully providing something useful. The first thing I should tell you about is what Planning Alerts is and before I can tell you what Planning Alerts is, I need to tell you about Open Australia. Hands up, who hasn't actually heard of Open Australia? And now you've got to do some more. You've got to get out there some more. Open Australia is basically at the moment a couple of guys who are dedicated to the idea of open government and developing the tools to help open government. As you can see, basically what they want to do is use technology to open up government to the people. They want to give all the tools in it, the Australian people, all the tools they need to affect the change that they want. We want to create technologies that encourage and enable people to participate directly in the political process. It sounds very dry, but it's actually quite interesting and in terms of a technological and social problem solving, it is actually quite interesting. Planning Alerts is a website that the Open Australia Foundation has put together to actually allow people to find out what's happening in their local area with regards to development applications, what's being built, what's being knocked down, what improvements are being made and so on. Has anybody actually tried going to the local government, local council website and finding out what's happening in terms of development applications? How many people have actually successfully done it without the desire to hit somebody hard? Exactly. Planning Alerts is trying to solve that problem by making it easy to read and easy to see what's going on. Development application, who doesn't know what a development application is? Okay. So what Planning Alerts does is it allows you to track all the development applications that are happening in your area, your postcode, your suburb, depending on where you're searching. It also helps people get more involved because the idea is the more barriers you remove, the more people will actually get involved. Okay, Planning Alerts.au is an open source Android application. That logo is the one that I pinched. I haven't, one thing you'll find is that I'm not a designer. I'm not somebody who makes things very pretty. That is the fave icon that I pinched off Planning Alerts. So if anybody can come up with a better logo for the application, that'd be great. So the plan is, Planning Alerts, the website, actually offers an API, which spits out GeoOSS. So the plan is to create an application on the mobile that will actually allow people, okay, start again. Using the publicly available Planning Alerts API, the idea is to produce a tool that'll allow people to easily keep track of what's going on and save results and all the rest of it without having to go back to their website and continuously check up. The other idea is to offer the code as an example of what not to do or what to do considering how well you think my Java is. And as a platform for other people to build on. People, the code is open source so you can take that code and apply it to other applications. I'm talking to a couple of guys in the UK through my society. They're running a similar service to Planning Alerts and they're thinking of building their own Android application based on this. The other idea is for me personally is to explore areas of Android that I'm interested in such as how to store data locally, the location services such as accessing GPS, how to do all that sort of stuff, mapping and other areas. So here's how it works. Now keep in mind, I am not a designer so this is gonna be ugly. This is the process. You have a search form. Depending on what search is selected, the form actually changes to offer different things. You have five different search types being provided by the Planning Alerts API which is address, suburb, postcode, council area and current location. Now the API actually allows for the geo-tagging of an area but I haven't figured out how to work that into the phone itself yet. So at the moment you just pull down your GPS location and then submit that to the Planning Alerts site. Depending on what the users choose, a get URL is generated and sent to the Planning Alerts site. This is a couple of examples. You have the suburb type which actually is meant to have a state variable attached on the end. I've picked out the wrong one and also a postcode type. There are others including council area which is formatted slightly differently but those are two examples of what is sent. Now if there are results, then this is what you get back. A whole bunch of geo-RSS. Now there's plain geo-RSS with everything involved in it and what happens is this is how it's presented. It needs to be prettied up but basically people can now have a list of all the Planning Alerts sorted by date. So the latest ones up the top and the earliest ones down the bottom. And we have another couple of different ways of viewing the Planning Alerts in the system. I've managed to tag it for GM apps, for Google Maps. Now every time you touch one of these it'll actually come up with a little box that says this is the alert that's happened, this is the development application that's happening here. Or you can actually go to the mobile site for Planning Alerts which will give you a bit more detail than what just comes down on the geo-RSS. Now there's a number of issues that I came across when building this application. Number one, I suck at design. I do not make things pretty so if anybody here knows of a UI developer or a UX developer who is looking for an open source project to get involved in, please send them away. Multi-device support. Now Android because it's so widely spread and so widely adopted amongst a range of different sized devices actually requires you to support small to large to medium screens. It's actually not that hard to do once you get your head around how it happens. Data veracity is the other big problem that we had. Now one of the things that this application did was it stress tested the Planning Alerts API itself. Now there was a number of bugs that we discovered in that and that the guys at Planning Alerts in open Australia fixed them really quickly and basically got it sorted. But it was a beneficial in that way. But what we had, the other problem with Planning Alerts is that it's a volunteer basis. The Councils don't actually submit their information to the site. Planning Alerts website actually has a number of different scrapers written depending on the Council website themselves. So there will be Councils that aren't covered because a scraper hasn't been written. There are, how many Councils actually put? Yeah, how many actually submit their DAs as something you can use? Yeah. So if you're in a local government area that isn't covered by the Planning Alerts website and you figure you could write a scraper, please do because the more information we can get on there and the more useful the tool becomes. And also the more appealing it becomes to local government as a lazy way of doing what they have to do. And so we get built up in some sort of impetus. The future for Planning Alerts AU is basically make it look prettier. Tighter integration with existing social media services like Twitter or Facebook. That's the next thing I personally want to have a look at is how to say, okay, I found this alert, I wanna tweet it to my friends or put it up on Facebook. Something else that's been asked for routinely and I think you've actually got it on the site now, the walking path. There's a ticket for it. Okay. Thanks. Somebody suggested that we create a walking path of all the existing alerts so that on Google Maps, say on your phone, you start at one development application and then develop a walking path that you can follow around. It's a bit of fun. The other thing is search caching because at the moment it just does, when it makes a call, it just makes a call, it doesn't actually cache it for future reference unless you save the search itself. So that might, if the application does get a bit more popular, it might pound the site a bit harder and that's not good. I probably just raced through this in less time than I thought I would. So basically, yeah, that's Planning Alerts. The one thing I did find is that it's not actually that hard to work with the Android setup. It's not, and Java isn't that painful. This is where you can find stuff. Basically, the code for Planning Alerts are used on a code.Google site. The application's available in the marketplace. If you wanna have a look at Planning Alerts, the website, it's up there, planningalerts.org.au and the API documentation there is there as well. There you go, that's Planning Alerts. Yes. Okay, I knew there was an area that I missed. Basically, Android uses a couple of different ways to save data to the mobile, but it does actually have a SQLite implementation, which is what I use to do all the... So basically, you get a small SQL database setup and you can use SQL calls and everything else to it. Everything. Basically, it's divided up into searches and search results. Two tables, searches and search results. Basically, it records everything that comes out of the GeoRSS into a readable format so that it can be fed back in when you go into view your saved searches. There is also an update function, a manual update function at the moment, because I haven't worked out Android's background threading and I'm also not sure if I want it to be sitting in the background updating that often, considering they don't update that often. So I think it's a manual option for the moment, unless somebody can tell me a good argument for automatic updating, it probably isn't called for. Open Australia would love any data sources they can get their hands on, really. Yeah, there are. For what they're doing, they do... Have you had a look at the Open Australia website? Okay. The Open Australia website is their take on federal parliament. So they do things like your representative, hands-hard searches, they've got to deal with hands-hard now. Do you scrape or do they feed you? You're still scraping. They scrape the hands-hard and put it into a searchable database and link it back to people, to your representative so you can do searches based on the representatives or keyword searches. They have another site called LeaFlitz. Electionleaflets.org.au, which they ran at the last federal election for just to try and keep up with what people were distributing at the election. There was some pretty nasty stuff they came across as well. But yeah, I mean, if there's more stuff that they can do and if there's more open government stuff, they're always looking for new projects. Yes, as far as an Open Australia, high-solder scrapers, don't they? Yeah, you go, go. Yeah, come down here. Shaden. So Planning Alerts, the actual web application is a Ruby on Rails application, just because me and Matthew Landau, the co-founder, kind of like Ruby. So the initial scrapers were written in Ruby, and that's fun, and it's really easy to do. And he kind of showed me how to do it, and I'm happy to show other people how to do it so you can learn a new skill at the same time. But we're moving a lot of these scrapers to a project called ScraperWiki.com, and this is made by a group over in the UK, totally amazing website. You basically put code into a web code editor, and then they handle going off scraping it, storing the data, and doing all of that. So if you write a scraper on ScraperWiki that formats the data in a nice way, and we've got an open format that you can see, basically a dress description, that kind of thing, we'll then go off to ScraperWiki and download it off there, and then present it on the Planning Alerts website, and save it in the database and everything. So you can actually do it completely independent of us, and then just say, hey guys, we've got the scraper, and we just point to it, really, really easy. And I'm happy to show anyone how that works, and a small plug, there'll be an open Australia, open government kind of boff during the lunchtime of the public sector mini-conf today. So if you wanna come along, that'd be great, or just grab me anytime, I'm really happy to talk about any open Australia related things. Yep. You especially, yeah. Yeah, the LGA Conf, I work for the LGSA, which is the Local Government and Shars Association in New South Wales. So yeah, every organisation has that sort of LGA meeting or the Shars Association or something like that. The main thing we're having at the moment is that it's too hard. That's the main feedback that we're getting when we push the question, because basically the people who are pushing for this are still coming up through the ranks, and they're saying, yeah, we should be doing this, but the people who are sitting on top are still saying, no, well, what's the value in it? Where's the value in doing something which is slightly out of the ordinary, as opposed to just doing exactly what we've done before? So we'll get there, it's just gonna take a bit of time and just continually working at it. Oh yeah, as I said, I work in the LGSA, so I'm knee deep in it. Yeah, look, the latest one is Pittwater, who's decided, Pittwater Council in New South Wales has decided to come on board with Planning Alerts. They're actually hosting their own page with Pittwater specific feed. Well, that's the thing, I have family in the building industry and they are exactly that. They have their phones, they live off their phones and that sort of application would be perfect for them. Okay, Android development is done using Eclipse, so you get Eclipse. It does have, the one thing that really does suck for Android development is it doesn't really have a good UI development tool at all. It's, the UI is actually written in XML, in Android XML, but it does, it's meant to have a sort of graphic UI setup tool, but it doesn't really work that well. In turn, I mean, if you compare it to say XCode's UI development tool, that craps all over androids. I mean, which is, to be expected, it's Apple, it's pretty. So, but in terms of actually working with it, there's a hell of a lot of documentation out there on the website itself. Stack Overflow has an Android specific section which is getting questions and answers all the time. So there's a very active developer community behind it. And it is quite easy to get your head around. I mean, it is Java, but really, you see that that are objective C with Apple. So it's, it's reasonably easy to use. The third party sort of cross-plat, yeah. I haven't had a, I haven't really had a look at them yet because basically, because I've been trying to, this has been a get, introduce yourself to Android sort of experiment as well as something useful. I might have a look at them a bit later on, but up until now, no, not really. Basically, the mindset that data is an income stream is very, very embedded in government because for a lot of departments, that's their only income. And, you know, everything else is red ink and because you get around to budget time, you've got to show you've made some money otherwise you're going to lose money. We're trying to change the way that works, but again, it's trying to, there's a hundred years of inertia that you're trying to push against to do it. Some councils are coming up, coming on board with it. I mean, Pitwater Council, Mossman Council, they're more ahead of the game. They realize that it's more useful to have the data out there. We also had one example with the Sydney State Rail. They released their data set on their timetable data set, but they had an incredibly hideous license attached to it. It was so restrictive that you, I mean, even interpreting it one way, you could actually say that showing your train wasn't on time breached the license. So basically we're getting there, but it's going to be slow, hard slog. Yeah, anybody else? One minute to go. Yeah. Sorry, what was the, what did you implement? If you had a, if you've got an API, please open it up. Yeah. Because that's, well, that's a good point. The recent floods and everything else is brought in to start, basically brought in to view the fact that there's a whole heap of data that needs to be out there for people to be able to use, but isn't. A guy I know in Google, then, in Sydney, Anthony Baxter was working on and built a nice set of layers for Google Maps, showing where the floods were, what roads were shut and everything else. But he's basically got a large dent-shaped hole in his forehead, because he's been having to deal with the Roads and Traffic Authority, which is notoriously hideous for their licensing. All the various local governments, because they all have their own separate road closure stuff, and all that sort of stuff. And so he's basically having to scrape that off and turn it into something useful. You change the layout and the screen-scrape a lot. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a major problem, and I'd love to talk about it more, but I'm getting the cut signal. So I'm going to have to let Simon take up his speech. So next up, we're going to have Simon Horns talking about, wrong one, using Zboot to boot Linux directly from Flash or SD or MMS MMC cards. So where's Simon?