James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

 Just a quick update on the iphone version of the openaustralia search app:

House of Reps Search:

Currently hardcoded to search by postcode. Need to include a Picker so that people can choose how they search for their members, however, the Picker widget on the iPhone is hucking fuge! Seriously, the thing looks like something out your local hotels Pokie room.

Senate Search:

Nothing done here yet

Hansard Search:

While the general search functionality hasn't been touched yet, I've started working on the  Rep related Hansard search, tends to crash right now, but still going :)

My Rep:

Nothing done as yet.

If you want to have a look at the horror that is my objective c then have a gander over here

Okay, here's version 0.4 of planningalertsau, the android app I'm building based on the Planning Alerts API.

In this version I've fixed the following:

Map crashes when there are 0 alerts

• Added About dialog
• Preferences Menu option now works in AlertsDisplay
• Alert TextView now clickable (calls AlertWebDisplay and displays Planning Alerts Page for specific Alert)
• AlertDisplay now shows a message if there are no results

Now, there are still councils for whom Planning Alerts doesn't have results for and they are still looking for help, so if you want to contribute please head along and let them know

As always if you have a bug, please submit it here. It would be helpful if you could include the following information:

• Suburb
• State
• Postcode
• Longitude and Latitude

It'll help me when testing to see if the issue is a Planning Alerts or planningalertsau issue :)

It's been a while since I last did anything with the OpenAustralia Search Droid so I thought I would give it another crack. Over the weekend I've brought it up to what I think is worthy of a 0.1 release and in fact have taken it a little further.

It is a very basic project, something more along the lines of a teaching project, but it has the following features:

• House Of Reps Member Search: By entering the name of the seat you will now get very basic information about the member, including a picture of the member and a listing of the last 20 Hansard mentions. Note this feature actually dies horribly on 1.5 and 1.6 enabled devices, something to do with how it handles a JSONArray.
• Senate Member Search: This is an incredibly basic search. Select the state you wish to search from the drop down and it will produce a list of the Senators for that State or Territory. Note I've also had reports of this crashing for similar reasons on 1.5 and 1.6 based devices.
• Search Hansard: Basic keyword searching of Hansard is allowed. However there are bugs here as well :)

To grab the package go here

If you want to look at the source or log an issue then please drop by here

There is a lot of work to be done yet, both on stupid bugs and features, however it has allowed me to learn a bit more about how Android works.

So before I start on the Grand Adventure that is PlonieBot, I thought I would start with something smaller, with a much more limited API that I could practice against. I've also been wanting to play around with the OpenAustralia API and so openausbot was born.

The idea is to create a participant that can be used to search the Open Australia database and return the information to the wave for dicussion or further dissection by the participants. If you want to play with it, the id is openausbot@appspot.com. Just keep in mind it's pretty damn Alpha :)

I know people are starting to get annoyed with the very limited access that has been given out so far and I can understand why.

On the one hand I can see why the Google Wave people have limited access. Wave is still very much Alpha tech. It's not yet at the Beta stage that GMail has only just escaped, and as such, there could much breakage as it evolves rapidly. On the other hand the Wave could benefit from "Real World" usage. That is usage not only by people like me and other hackers, but by people who would use Wave as simply another communications tool. That's when the boundry pushing will really begin.