tom courthold

In an effort to keep up with regular updates while things are so busy here I thought I'd start a regular post with a selection of links and stories I've seen throughout the week.

Star Wars Minimalist Posters

A fantastic set of posters based on the Star Wars universe - I'm actually going to get some of these put up here in the flat, very cool stuff.

TV Catchup

Yes, I know, this has been around for a while - yet somehow I managed to completely miss it. Free and entirely legit streaming of UK freeview channels in your browser. That's not all though - it also works on the iPhone, and over 3G with surprisingly good quality (far better than youtube's pixelated clips when you're not on wifi).

Steam for Mac released

This could be one of the biggest steps into Mac gaming in a long time - steam has hundreds and hundreds of titles for Windows, and now providing a great way to distribute Mac games too - including the ability to pay once and get access to both systems. The launch selection is limited (Portal, Torchlight, Civ IV) but is going to grow each week, with TF2 coming soon!

More updates to the site soon when I get a little time!

Hopefully this weekend the 2.1 update to Tesco Finder should get submitted.

Changes include:

Shopping list totals We added totals for lists to give people a rough idea of what the cost of their shop is going to be. At the moment we're still working on a better way of updating list prices if they change since the list was created, so this is going to be slightly inaccurate but still useful.

Also, there seem to be a lot of people unsure of how to delete products and shopping lists - as with most iPhone applications, you can swipe across a product or list to delete it - this has been there since 2.0 was released.

Barcode Scanning Barcode scanning using the RedLaser SDK is included in this release, which will perform a search over the API and return that products page. Obviously the product has to be sold at Tesco, and I suspect things like individual multipack items might not be found but YMMV. I'd like to extend this to add to lists more quickly, or work with lists in a different way - but for now we're just throwing the feature out there to see how people find it.

There were also a few other tweaks like some explanatory notes on empty lists, a bugfix for removing lists, and a few others. Hopefully the updates should start to come more regularly now too. We read all the feedback posted on iTunes (unfortunately there's no way to reply to people directly on there) and are going to be working on the future of this app soon. We definitely want to make the list-making process better for one thing, help with people who want to share their lists with family and friends, as well as making use of your favourites. Searching does have some issues to work through for both the website and this app (it's all done server-side using the same backend and algorithms) but this should improve as well soon (and we don't need to release an app update for these changes to be made)

In non-Tesco news, more site updates coming soon... finally.

Alright, so I failed terribly at updating my blog while away - although the photo album was getting some updates most days. Here's some highlights below, and you can view the entire photo album as well

Tesco HSC Foundation Day
We happened to arrive the week that all kinds of events including inflatable football pitches, trampolines, and all manner of other fun stuff was going on outside. This ended with a whole day of performances on stage and food until late into the night.

Tourist day on Saturday
With one free weekend, we had a busy day Saturday going around as many sights as possible. The first stop for the gang of 4 (Myself, Zara - and our 'guides' for the day Vidhya and Sweta) was a temple which was built as a commercial place that many tourists visit. The walk round (minus shoes and socks!) went from temple scenes and buildings and statues and ended with lots of stalls trying to sell books and things - I think next time I'd have liked to see a temple that wasn't quite so commercial, but was good anyway.

Next stop was a guided tour of Bangalore Palace, a very old and dusty place by the looks of it, but still some interesting things to see. After that we stopped by some streets with a mix of old and new shops, and then went to a mall which was much more modern - although my only purchase was a mini display port -> VGA cable for the mac, not so exciting! Finally we found an Indian Restaurant and everybody ate too much, so a good end to the day.

Lizard attack

After the weekend we had a quieter week of work again and some more good UI sessions with the guys, as well as my iPhone presentation to the interested few! Late Thursday I was packing up everything and spotted a small lizard running under the bed. Well, it wasn't a spider - but still didn't quite fancy sleeping with it running around, so thought I'd call up room service to sort it out - what I didn't expect was the army of 2 staff who turned up to slay the lizard, armed at first with a hoover, and later 2 more turned up with what looked like an electrified tennis racket. It was quite a scene with the bed being moved around while they chased it, but eventually problem solved and they left me to my packing.

Back in the UK now and a drop of 30 degrees in temperature, and I'm already hoping for another trip soon. Oh well, back to my own cooking.

The picture above is the view out of my hotel room here in India - I don't think even seeing the road there for 2 weeks will get us used to the madness that is Bangalore traffic. Lanes, traffic lights, indicators - all just for decoration here. The main skill to driving here seems to be great horn honking skills.

We arrived at the hotel in Bangalore - (after a long flight, a long queue through immigration, and a long drive) - at around 7am local time. The hotel staff looked after us very well, and the room here is fantastic - I'd quite happily trade my flat for one of these (with the room service, of course)

After a brief sleep, we took a trip to the Tesco office in the afternoon for a few hours to meet people and get the boring bits sorted (ID cards etc.) Off to try the Indian restaurant in the hotel now!

view India trip Gallery

So I figured the 'coming soon' page which has been up for well over a year had got a bit old now, and should probably be replaced with an actual website - nothing fancy, but here it is. I'm away on a trip soon but I'll be adding more to this as time goes on.