My first thought (as a developer) was “I’ll write an app for it!”. My second thought, following close behind, was “Someone must have already written an app for that!”. Along these lines, I did a quick search of the android market and the iTunes app store (for my wife’s iPhone). Indeed, there are apps out there that let you track expiry dates on food. However, there were generally two problems with them.

1. They cost money
2. They were for single users only

The first point is self-explanatory, so I’ll expand on the second. One of the big problems in our apartment is when one of us buys food but forgets to tell the other what they got. This inevitably leads to us finding mouldy food that we didn’t know was there in the first place. Any solution to the problem must therefore allow multiple users to enter data separately.

This is when I had my third thought, which went as follows: “I don’t need an app for this at all!”. I realized that all the functionality I needed was already available to me through Google Calendar ¹. Want to know when food will expire? Create an all-day event for it. Want to be notified when food is about to go off? Set an email or pop-up notification. Sharing is also trivial: As long as the events are in their own calendar, the whole thing can be shared with as many people as you need.

The idea is that I will be able to add items to the calendar using my phone as I put them in my basket at the store. That way I don’t have to assign any extra time to data entry than strictly necessary.

The proof is in the pudding (pun definitely intended) however, and I’ve yet to see how this new endeavor pans out. My hope is that it will help us reduce food waste and save us money at the same time. I certainly think that the idea is sound, the main point of failure (if any) will be me forgetting to add things to the calendar. I’ll have to see how it goes.

Instead, I’m now using a free wordpress theme called LightWord. The design is far superior to my previous attempt, if somewhat generic. However, I can now tweak this theme to my own needs without worrying too much about all the little details that I would miss if starting from scratch. This approach appeals to me because it’s an example of one of the central pillars of good programming: Code reuse. There are literally thousands of existing themes out there, so starting from scratch would mean repeating the work of many, many people. Seeing as I don’t plan on making design work part of my professional portfolio any time soon, I’m perfectly happy to borrow existing works (within the terms of their license) and bend them to suit my needs.

This week, I was tasked with gathering and analyzing some data at my job. The task involved generating a couple of thousand data-points and examining their spread. The first part was easy, and accomplished in a couple of hours. What happened next was interesting though.

My script to gather/generate the data was written in python, so by the end of each run I had a large data structure in memory with all the results in. After printing some random samples to make sure the data was all in the correct ranges, I considered how to analyze it. A graph seemed the obvious choice and for my particular data-set an x/y scatter plot would be very useful. This decided, I went looking for a way of drawing such a thing.

My thoughts immediately went to finding a python library that would render the chart for me. After asking around a couple of my fellow developers I took a look at matplotlib and was very impressed. It seemed to offer a huge range of different graph and chart types, along with a whole host of rendering options. I say ‘seemed’, because I never actually used it. I realized that there was a much simpler solution to my problem.

Excel!

Excel, the spreadsheet software I was taught to use way back when I was 13 and not touched since. Technically, it’s all the things I dislike about software: bloated, over-engineered and closed-source. However, it does draw some pretty good charts with minimal work. Five minutes after realizing this, I had a thoroughly understandable representation of my data without writing a single extra line of code. Who’d have thought?

Could matplotlib have made the same chart? Of course. It probably would have had more colours, been in 3D and made you tea when you got up in the morning. On the downside, I didn’t really need any of those things, and it would have taken a whole afternoon, if not longer.

Similarly, I could have used an open-source solution such as OpenOffice or something lightweight like Google Docs. Excel just happened to be the most convenient option as it was already installed on my laptop at work.

The lesson I drew from this is that even though I can do some pretty cool things, I don’t always have to. Sometimes, existing solutions perform a task well enough and much faster to boot.

Firstly, what kinds of activities were Apple showing off in the keynote? Let’s see:

• Reading a book
• Watching a film
• Answering/Writing email
• Browsing the web
• Playing a video game
• Listening to music

With the exception of the last item, I don’t think I’d want to combine any of those two tasks, especially on the same device. Who watches a movie while they’re trying to read a book? Even if I do want to switch between two such activities – Look up the name of an actor in the movie I’m watching for example – I’d have to pause/save/bookmark my movie/game/page in order to do so. Even if I could keep my movie playing while I did a search on the web, I wouldn’t want to: I’d miss some of the action!

Music is an exception that should be addressed, and indeed already has. Like the iPhone, you can play music ‘in the background’ while you do other things. Problem solved! The same can be said for services that need notification; Mail, Twitter, etc. Can all notify you that a message has arrived without interrupting the current task.

The iPad is definitely not for everyone, but anyone who is on the fence shouldn’t be too concerned by the lack of multi-tasking. When you’re buried in your favourite book or watching the climactic scene of a movie you won’t care.

As of June 2nd, MaxTo stopped being a free application licensed under a Creative-Commons 3 license and went commercial. There is nothing wrong with this. However, I am miffed that I only discovered this after MaxTo had installed an update to my free version and turned it into a 30-day trial. What the hell? Here’s the dialog box I clicked on to install the new version:

I’m not impressed. I clicked on the ‘Yes’ button hoping to see a new, improved version of the app that I loved, not a sudden notice of impending termination of functionality. Instead of giving me something new, the creators decided to take it all away. That makes me sad.

However, there is a happy ending to this tale! The old version of MaxTo may have been removed from the official site, but my downloads folder is very big. I have downloads in there from waaay back. After a bit of digging, I found the old installer for the free version. Hooray! I promptly uninstalled the new, commercial version and re-installed the older one. Balance was once again restored to the Desktop. There’s even a handy checkbox in the options that turns off the update-checking.

Best of all though, because the old version is licensed under CC, I’m free to re-distribute it here for anyone that wants it. Yay!