Open a php project in PHPStorm using Alfred

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I have been using PHPStorm for a while now and after the recent release of version 5 (seems to be much faster) I am sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

I have also been using Alfred for a long time too. I purchased the Powerpack to get access to some of the more advanced features and have never regretted the small expense.

Today I found out Syd Lawrence has built an awesome plugin called Alfred Dev Doctor which helps developers find the correct documentation whilst coding. It needed Alfred v2 and the Powerpack.

I did not know there was a version 2 avaliable so I immediently downloaded the new version. Unfortuntly I then found out that my licence key for the version 1 Powerpack did not work with version 2 so I had to upgrade my Powerpack licence. The upgrade was a small fee of £10, worth it in my eyes. Since 14 May 2012, I have used Alfredapp 6,591 times, which is an average 20.9 times per day.

Since I had the all new singing and dancing version of Alfred and the Powerpack I began looking at other things I could get him to help me with. For months I have been trying to get Alfred v1 to open a folder with PHPStorm. I was never able to get this working. Luckily in Alfred v2 this was easy.

I have created a Workflow in Alfred which allows me to hit ‘alt+space’ then type ‘phps’ and then type a folder name to find it. Once it has found it I simply hit enter and it will open that folder up in PHPStorm. Yay!

A video of this working can be found here: Video showing Alfred opening a folder in PHPStorm

You can download the Workflow here, unzip and double click to install: PHPStorm Alfred Workflow

Dribble.com account up for grabs

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Howdy!

I have had a Dribble account for a while now and have never really used it. As I am not planning on doing any design work in the future I would like this account to go to a good home. I understand they are still in high demand. It is a full account.

I sent a Tweet out last night to see if anyone was interested and it would seem a few people are. Now I am left with the dilemma about who to give it to. I thought that I would run a little competition. It will be focussed around Twitter using the hashtag #IWJDA (I Want James’ Dribble Account).

All you have to do is send a public tweet which includes the hashtag #IWJDA and a link to this blog post. In your Tweet you have to include something that will convince me that you should be the one to take my Dribble account over. It can be anything, a link, a picture, a sentence or anything you want! I will pick the winner at 15:00 on Thursday 14th February.

Have fun :-)

 

February Refresh Teesside & new venue!

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Ladies and gentlemen, it gives us great pleasure to announce that we have secured a venue. Our next event will be on Thursday 7th February at Sassari in Middlesbrough.

In 2012 Refresh Teesside grew beyond our wildest dreams. This was down to the community spreading the word and encouraging others to get involved resulting our numbers growing month on month. This also would not have been possible without our sponsors.

Capaldi’s Restaurant has been fundamental in getting Refresh Teesside to where it is today. They have provided a superb venue, friendly staff and great food every month for the past 10 months. Unfortunately at the beginning of January we received news that Capaldi’s is now permanently closed. We therefore made the difficult decision to cancel the January event due to needing to find a venue.

We are really pleased to announce that Sassari Restaurant on Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough has agreed to host the February event as a trial with the prospect of carrying on as our event sponsor throughout 2013. This is great news as it will enable us to continue to provide events of the same quality with the same relaxed atmosphere. The function room at Sassari is very similar to the room we have grown fond of at Capaldi’s with the added bonus of a little more space. Thanks to our sponsor, we are still able to offer free food.

Sassari is a great location for Refresh Teesside. It is only a few metres up Linthorpe road, on the other side of the road from where Capaldi’s used to be. Click here for a map.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Capaldi’s for all their help and support over the last 12 months and also thank all the staff who helped out at the events. We look forward to building our relationship with Sassari’s.

February event – Thursday 7th February 2013

The February event is our first event of 2013 and as it’s a trial at Sassari it’s going to be a big one. If you are only going to make it to one event this year, it has to be the February event.

The February talk will be from Urban Pioneers. This is an excellent opportunity to hear about this exciting project. There will also be lightning talks. If you are interested in giving a lightning talk please contact James at james@refreshteesside.org

As this is a trial event at Sassari we really need to blow their socks off. We need your help. Please help us spread the news that the February event will be on Thursday 7th February at @sassari. Please forward this email to friends and colleagues to help broaden the Refresh Teesside family.  You may have noticed the change in date. We previously ran on the second Wednesday of the month. It is our intention to now run on the second Thursday of the month. However, in February this happens to be Valentines Day. We didn’t want to make life difficult for people (Refresh Teesside Vs romantic night with your partner…tough decision!) therefore as a one off we are running a week early.

Please help us secure Sassari for our new venue throughout 2013 by following these simple steps:

  1. Head over to refreshteesside-february2013.eventbrite.co.uk and register for the February event.
  2. We sent a Tweet out at 10.30am with all the information about February’s event. It would be great if you could retweet it, that would mean alot to us.
  3. Tweet about the event using @refreshteesside and @sassari
  4. Forward this email to friends and colleagues in the creative industry.
  5. Like our post on Facebook.
  6. Share in the conversation on our LinkedIn page.

Does anyone in Teesside creative industry really give a monkeys?

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I have been reluctant to make this post for fear it is going to sound negative so let me set one thing straight right from the start…

  1. Teesside creative industry is huge and is still growing.
  2. We have some of the most creative minds in the North East.
  3. We have one of the best Universities in the UK outputting bright graduates year after year.
  4. We have a thriving community where people are willing to collaborate on projects, share knowledge and experiences.
  5. We have the most successful networking event for creative people that Teesside has ever seen! The last event attracted more than 60 people.
  6. We are home to some very successful creative companies, agencies and start-ups.

For those who do not know me, I am a web developer working for Thap in Middlesbrough. I am a graduate of Teesside University. I have worked in Teesside since graduating and live in Thornaby with my wife Fiona who was born in Middlesbrough. However, I am not from this area. I was born in York and bought up in Leeds. I came to Teesside to attend University. So why am I still here and why am I so passionate about the local creative industry?

About three years ago, I was working for a creative company in Stockton. We were just starting up and I was a sole developer working in a three-man team. I started to look for events I could go to meet other developers in my position. I wanted to talk about the technical aspects of the projects I was working on in order to get others opinions on the way I was going to approach them. I found myself having to travel to Newcastle to attend events because there was nothing in Teesside. This frustrated me because I knew that Teesside was marketing itself as a ‘digital hub’.

I started to speak to the few contacts I had at this stage. I did some research and stumbled upon Refresh Cities. Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavours in their areas. They promote design, technology, usability, and standards. Their manifesto fitted what I was looking to achieve therefore I decided to launch Refresh Teesside and the first event was held on Thursday 2nd April 2009.

Attendance was good. However three years ago it felt there was an unhealthy attitude towards networking in Teesside and this seemed to impact on who could get involved. Refresh Teesside is not and was never about pure networking. I leave what I class as ‘pure’ networking for the likes of BNI and events like that. I am personally not keen on ‘pure’ networking events although they do have their place. What I was interested in creating was an event which was relaxed, informal and welcomed people of all levels from any sized business in the creative sector. However, in 2009 it appeared that business owners were reluctant for their developers to go to these sort of events because they feared other businesses would poach them. They also seemed to worry that they might talk about projects they were working on and other businesses would then poach their clients. In my opinion this is totally unjustified. Although the event in 2009 was successful, the negative atmosphere meant I decided not do another event at that time.

Three years later my position had changed. I had made new connections in the region and once again it became apparent that there was still a gap in the market for an event like Refresh Teesside. I felt frustrated with hearing that Teesside is a ‘digital hub’ and that we were on the same level as Newcastle, Leeds & Manchester. In my opinion, we are not on the same level as these cities and I doubt we ever will be. That’s not a negative thing as I actually don’t think we need to be like these cities.

When I re-launched Refresh Teesside, I opened the event in February with this:  “People keep talking about Teesside being a creative hub. Have a think about that. Now think about Newcastle, Leeds and Manchester. Do you still think we are a creative hub?” This is a thought provoking statement. Teesside is an area which has lots of people saying Teesside is a creative hub but doing very little to promote the talent we have and boost collaboration in the region.

I re-started Refresh Teesside to combat these issues and create one well -known brand to represent the creative industry in and around Teesside. Refresh aims to give people a voice and a focus. It appears that people are keen to help make this happen. Each monthly event attracts more and more people, with sponsor’s being keen to support the event.

What Refresh Teesside is and what we promote:

  1. Give people an event to network with other people who are running businesses in the creative industry.
  2. Provide a relaxed, unthreatening atmosphere for people to share problems and solutions to every day problems.
  3. Allow people to connect and calibrate on projects to use the skills we have locally.
  4. Allow freelancers to make contacts with established businesses.
  5. Give graduates the chance to speak with the regions leading figures in the industry to help boost their confidence and improve there chance of winning a job they want to apply for.
  6. Create a brand that groups all things creative together for the creative industry in Teesside so people know where to go for news and to find professionals.

News of Refresh Teesside is spreading every day. People are realising the true potential of being part of something so fresh. I really hope that others in the region will work with Refresh Teesside to help promote what we have and help connect more of the talent we already have in and around Teesside.

I have a number of success stories which I am in the process of collating to produce a fact sheet on how Refresh Teesside is doing positive things for the creative sector in the region. Refresh Teesside has helped people find jobs, helped connect freelancers with opportunities and helped keep business local.

The future for Teesside’s creative industry is very bright; however even after campaigning and running events for the past 12 months we are only just starting to make a difference. Starting early next year I will be announcing a Refresh Teesside Board. At the time of writing it will consist of three people passionate about making a difference: Matt Kirwin, Chris Scott and myself. This is a true testament to where Refresh Teesside is today and reflects all the hard work from everyone involved and everyone who has ever attended the event.

Please help promote Refresh Teesside and what it represents. Let’s start to pool resources and start to make a difference under the already established, trusted and respected brand of Refresh Teesside. Teesside has something huge to prove and it is by no way unachievable.  If we promote the talent that we have, people will start to see what we have to offer. If we work with one another to produce the first class work we are all capable of peoples’ heads will start turning and people will start to look to Teesside as well as Newcastle, Manchester and Leeds. “Let’s gather great minds, share all of our knowledge, all grow and learn, promote local talent, be more than we think can be, make our cities better” and turn Teesside into the digital hub we all know it can be, together.

So to answer my original question, why am I still in Teesside and why am I so passionate? I am really excited about what’s happening. Every time I think about where Teesside will be in the next 12-24 months I think about us being a true powerhouse where people recognise the talent and enthusiasm we have to produce outstanding work. People are coming together, getting to know one another and sharing one voice. I have a feeling I am not the only one who goes home after a Refresh Teesside event energised and ready to take myself and Teesside to the next level. Come joins us!

Community Champion Awards 2012, Champion Ambassador

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(Photo from the Gazette article, Copyright Gazette)

When the Gazette announced the Community Champion Awards for 2012 a few people noticed that there was a category for Champion Ambassador and started to mention that I should be put forward for my work with Refresh Teesside.

Luckily not everyone just talked about it and Rick Trotter filled out the form to nominate me. I got a lovely full page spread in the Gazette and some great coverage for Refresh Teesside. The article was also posted online. Huge thanks to Rick for filling out the form and to everyone else who commented on Twitter saying I should be nominated.

Yesterday I was contacted by Lesley from the Gazette to inform me that I have been short-listed for the Community Champion Awards 2012 in the Champion Ambassador award category! Wahooo!

So on Friday 30th November 2012 I will be heading to the Riverside Stadium with my lovely wife to enjoy a drinks reception, three course dinner and award presentations.

Wish me luck!

World cities database

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I am currently working on a project that is focused around locations. The main thing I need to know is the City that the user is either in or wants to browser information about. It is a mobile website so I am giving the user a couple of options how to pick their location.

On the page where the users selects the location the first button is to allow them to use the browser to set their location ‘Use my precise location’

There is another button that uses a IP geolocation script which should say ‘Cityname’ which should be the city in which the user is.

The third option is to list a load of cities for the user to click to choose.

I am saving the latitude and longitude to be used throughout the application. The browser will return this, the geoIP will return this so I needed a way to get the latitude and longitude for each city I wanted to list. I started buy using Google APIs which worked well. I stored this information in a database table. The problem was that I wanted to give the user as many options as possible and I wanted to use cities in the US. I went on the hunt for a database and successfully found a couple of resources which had exactly the information I needed. One of them even had population so I was able to use this information alongside our other background research to influence our decision on which cities we would actually list so we were not trying to list all of them!

I thought I would share these two links are they will probably be of use to me in the future and I hope this will help someone else out.

Thanks to Brian Suda and Rick Trotter for the replies to my original Tweet.

A little something extra: Thanks to a Tweet from Philip Poots I have recently found out that if you append .json to the end of any gov.uk page you will get the information in json format! For example, if you wanted to know all the UK bank holidays then you can find this information at https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays and if you add .json to the end… https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json! This is awesome!

Recent Tesco API downtime

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A couple of weeks ago I decided to jump back into my project My Shopping Assistant which uses the Tesco API to wrap the idea of packages around grocery shopping. Unfortunately about a week ago the Tesco API went offline, great timing hu! Just as I was trying to get people to use the alpha!

I immediately notified Nick at Tesco via Twitter and email, unfortunately he was away on holiday and I had nobody else to contact. I did eventually get a reply from him with the contact details of someone else at Tesco to contact. I did contact him, via email and Twitter but to this day I have not had a response from him.

Nick is now back from holiday and has looked into the issues. The API is back online however the ability to register for a new API account has been disabled and all past accounts have been deactivated. So if you have registered for a developer key in the past and your still having problems connecting, even though the Tesco API Health page is reporting everything is ok, thats why. You are probably getting errors retunred like ‘Service problem when API tried to access developer portal for authorisation – result returned was:’.

If you visit the main Tesco API Developers Portal you will see an updated message (3rd Sep 2012). Registration for new developer keys is still disabled however if you have already registered for a key then you can email your developers key (NOT your application keys) to nick@lansley.com and your keys will probably be cross referenced with the log files to make sure you have not been abusing the API and if your truly committed to innovation then I am assuming your developers key will be re-enabled. I have done this but have not had a reply yet and my developers key has been reactivated! Yay!

My understanding is that someone (who needs a slap) has been using the API for things that are against the Terms and Conditions. This has resulted in really por performance from the servers which run the API and eventually has caused an error in one of the system files and taken the server offline.

I had noticed that the API was running quite slow when I was testing it recently so I hope that this crack down and performance monitoring will help my app run even faster with faster response times from the API. I also welcome the introduction of a less open access policy to the API. Before you were able to go to the portal, register for an account and you would receive a developers key in a matter of seconds that would allow you access to the API. There are certain things that you are not allowed to do with the API but from reading certain posts online it is obvious that people are using the API for things that would be frowned upon and also which will be effecting the performance for people like me who are using it how it is meant to be used. I hope that they stick with a locked down application process and request a little more valuation and maybe vet the applicants and their ideas before they give out keys in the future.

I am currently working with a company working with them to implement the Tesco API into their product. It has taken me a while to convince them that the API is stable and that it will be around in the future. The recent downtime means that my reputation has taken a hit, I don’t blame Tesco directly, I blame the individuals who have been abusing the API. I do, however, think that Tesco need to take the API a little more seriously and maybe dedicate a little more resource to it.

Nick Lansley has done an awesome job of getting the API to where it is today. He has also done a great job of supporting me, as a developer, since I have started to use the API. The T-jam event was a great thing for Tesco to put on for developers. There has been talk of a Tesco Public API Version 2? There has been talk of another T-jam event…. I know Nick is busy and as far as R&D it’s probably reached the end…. but what now? Please don’t forget about us!

A helping hand with your grocery shopping

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A while ago, actually in August 2009 I blogged about attending the Tesco.com T-jam event in London. In my blog post I mention that I was going to start work on a project called My Shopping Assistant that would allow me to play with the Tesco.com API and also produce a product that would help people when doing their grocery shopping online.

I started work on a website but work on that slowed and I ended up putting a holding page on that domain for the past few years. I did some work on a Facebook app which allowed people to shop within Facebook. The idea was if you were browsing Facebook and you suddenly remembered you needed some milk you could quickly go to the app page and add the item directly to your Tesco basket. It worked and it got quite a few users. I even got mentioned in The Grocer magazine. Unfortunately changes to the Facebook API and lack of time meant the app stopped working so I had to turn it off.

For years Fiona and myself have been doing our grocery shopping online using Tesco.com. Every week Fiona will ask me what meals I want for the week ahead. She has to really battle to get my input and I hate the entire process. We ultimately come up with a list of meals that we want to have and pick what days we will have them on. We then have to work out what items we need for those meals, search for each individual item and then add it to the basket.

For a long time I have had the idea of creating a website that will allow you to create meals. You then add the items you would normally have to that meal including the quantity you require. When you have a list of meals you would simply click the meal and the app would add all the items in that meal to your Tesco.com basket for you. Simple.

Over the past couple of weeks I have managed to put some time aside to work on the idea. A couple of days ago I put the Alpha version of the website online. You can find it by going to www.myshoppingassistant.co.uk

With My Shopping Assistant you create packages, which can contain a number of items. You choose which items to add to a package so you pick the brand, size, colour or flavour you prefer. I decided to go with packages because you can create a package for; things for pets, cleaning items, meals, bbq food etc…

When you’re ready to do an online shop you no longer have to go through the tedious and laborious task of searching and adding individual items. You simple select the package you want to add, confirm you want all the items in that package and then add them directly to your Tesco.com basket.

If you shop online at Tesco.com then I would love it if you would try out my website. You don’t have to register as you just sign in with your Tesco.com account. Go to My Shopping Assistant and give it a go. Please let me have your feedback and thoughts.

Remember at the time of writing this blog post the website is still in development. What is online does work but its slow and there will be bugs and things that are not there yet. As and when I find more time I will keep working on it and with your feedback I think we can make it into a really helpful service.

Have fun!

#RFTees August

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The next Refresh Teesside is on Wednesday 8th August at 6pm in the function room at Capaldi’s in Middlesbrough. This months event is going to be one of the best events yet, do not miss out! We are really pleased to welcome Kevin Mann as our ‘Spotlight’ speaker this month. His talk is entitled ”The Princess is in another Castle“. Nothing else is being shared about the content of the talk but I would advise you not to miss it! We are going to showcase the new Refresh Teesside branding thats been worked on by Chris Scott. We are really exciting to announce our new sponsors who are supporting the event for the forseable future. They have also informed me there are some goodies in the post for all our members so don’t miss out! As always we have t-shirts to give away and a stack of free stickers from all over the web.

The next event is a week today.

Please register now to guarentee you get a ticket. The tickets for the events are limited and are avlaiable on a first come first served basis. Past events have seen us really close to being sold out and the demand for this months event is set to be high so please only register for a ticket if you can make it.

Click here to signup to the August event now!

Really looking forward to seeing you in a week.

Boom!