New Project: HealthWhere

I've got another Android project on the go at the moment: HealthWhere. It's an adaptation of a utility by Russ Philips to help find local hospitals and pharmacies, using the data from OpenStreetMap.

The plan for the project as a smartphone app is to use the positioning tools available to smartphones (satellite positioning, or just approximate cellphone mast positioning) to get the user's current location, rather than just asking them to input an address. The OpenStreetMap database can then be queried, and the results returned for quick and ready reference. It should also be possible to fire those co-ordinates over into a navigation app to provide instant directions. Just add water - or something!

Plan:

The interface is roughly divided into two halves. The first half is to determine the user's location (or a location to search in, if you want), and the second is to display the results of that search in a usable and meaningful way. Of course, there needs to be a bridging part which actually gets those results, but that'll be behind the scenes.

My plan for working at the moment is to consider the app in order.

1) Determine a position to search from.

2) Carry out a search, and parse the results.

3) Display those results.

4) Give an option to upload location data if it's not there already.

I'm sure that other ideas will occur to me as I go, as well, so we'll have a (5) Other interesting stuff.

Progress:

The first stage of the app is just about complete. The opening menu screen fires up and gives the user the various search options:

• choose between searching for hospitals or pharmacies.
• choose a search radius
• choose to input a location, or to use the phone's positioning features to find the current location.

From this point, the geocoding and reverse geocoding work as well, to either determine co-ordinates from the address entered, or to determine a local address from a set of co-ordinates.

The second stage is going well: the search query is constructed, and an XML file is returned which contains the results.

Next steps

The next step is to write up the classes for the different healthcare amenities, and to parse the results file into something meaningful.

Lastly, I'll be working on displaying those results as a list for the user to scroll through.

At some point, I'll also need to have a look at how to upload data as well.

I have never done this

In all my time working at P&C, I never made this mistake.*

I did make a few others, though, and I'm well aware of that sinking feeling that Mr. Brooker describes so well. It is pretty easy to do, though. You can have comfortably five or six different proof versions, from the first proofs through to the final to-the-press proofs, and even then it's possible to have someone be looking through the book at the last minute and discover that you've spelled the author's name wrong on the title page (it's happened!), so your file of "Final, final, no really final, book.pdf" is suddenly invalidated.

Actually, an entertaining part of this story has been the blame game going since Friday, as each of the parties involved tries to point the finger at someone else.
- Franzen himself initially blamed the printers: "They printed the wrong file."
- The printers (qutie fairly) pointed out that "we only printed the one file we got given guv'nor - and we're not responsible for the content". They blamed the publisher.
- The publisher, on receipt of this hot potato, smoothly and immediately tossed it across to the typesetters: "The typesetter passed the incorrect version of the text to the printer. It's nothing to do with us."

At this point, my sense of professionalism kicks in. At no point should the Production Manager ever sign off on something he's not seen. You don't just get a phone call from an outsourcing company saying "We've done the work, OK?" and say "Sure, good job guys, bung it over to the printer and tell them to run off a cool 80,000 copies, right?" instead of getting the file back, checking it, and passing it to the printer personally. And you know what? If you do, you deserve something like this to come and bit you in the arse. No matter who ends up copping the blame in the media, there is a Production Manager over at HarperCollins who will be feeling the burning glare of a thousand angry supervisors for the next wee while.

*: One of my first assistants did, though, but fortunately the mistake was deemed insufficiently awful for the book to be pulped. Thank goodness.