Version 2.0 of buUuk the Singapore iPhone food guide made it into the App Store today.

There’s a bunch of new stuff in the app including:
- add restaurants by sending a photo
- a section for newly opened restaurants
- easier sharing of information with other users

But we’re most proud of buUrps. They’re kind of like tweets for food. In fact we’ve integrated with twitter so that any buUrps, as well as appearing in the app, also get sent to the buUuk twitter timeline and the users own twitter account, if they so choose. buUrps can include photos as well as text and provide a way for users to interact and discuss particular locations, or just share simple information like “long queues at Aston’s tonight”.

If you’ve got an iPhone you can get the latest release now through iTunes. If you’re not an iPhone user you can still partake of the buUrps by following buUuk in twitter.

Popularity: 36%

buUuk has just become available in the iPhone app store. buUuk is a location based app for the iPhone which contains information on over 4000 restaurants and bars in Singapore. It’s a free download from the iPhone app store. You can find it here.

For those of you without an iPhone I’ve posted a couple of screen shots. (Disclaimer: buUuk is partly a SinGeo production…).

Popularity: 42%

Google have got me all excited, no posts for over a month and now two in a day. With the revelation that we now have geo-coding in Google Maps for Singapore, I thought I’d try reverse geo-coding (going from lat/lng to address rather than the other way around). No real surprise that it works. But playing with it shows just how good the geo-coding is.

I’ve built a quick map so that you can try it out. Click anywhere on this map and you’ll see the lat/lng and address details returned together with some other data. If you’re interested in the accuracy, this is from the Google Maps API documents:

0 Unknown location.
1 Country level accuracy.
2 Region (state, province, prefecture, etc.) level accuracy.
3 Sub-region (county, municipality, etc.) level accuracy.
4 Town (city, village) level accuracy.
5 Post code (zip code) level accuracy.
6 Street level accuracy.
7 Intersection level accuracy.
8 Address level accuracy.
9 Premise (building name, property name, shopping center, etc.) level accuracy.

The best way to check the coverage is to choose “hybrid” view, zoom in and click on an individual building. Or use the “map” views if the map has the building footprint for the location your interested in.

Popularity: 44%

I wrote a few months ago about Google playing the long game with Google Maps in Singapore. Back in July they started adding building footprints and now they’re finally getting on top of their geo-coding deficiencies. I haven’t done any extensive testing, but it seems that 6 digit Postal Code geocoding is now supported, in addition to full address geocoding.

So for example, if I search in Google Maps for the postal code of one of my favourite local eating places, 428893, it gets it pretty close (after I tell it I mean “428893, Singapore, Singapore” - is there another Singapore in the world I don’t know about?). If I put in the address, 187 East Coast Road, it gets even closer. This is a great step forward, up until now the lack of good geo-coding has been the one area where Google Maps is deficient compared with it’s local competitors. In particular, plugging the geo-coding hole will be of enormous benefit to anyone developing their own mashups.

Let me know how the geo-coding works for you, do they have full Singapore coverage? Here’s a Google my map showing the results of my searches described above.

View Larger Map

Popularity: 42%

If you’re an iPhone user, you can now get access to Changi airport flight arrivals and departures from a webapp. Just load isinjet.com into your browser and away you go. If you already use isingeo.com on your iPhone it’s also available there under the “Travel Information” section.

Type in a flight number.

Get the status….

Popularity: 41%

It would appear so, according to this cnet article which says the Google car has been sighted in Singapore. I’m not entriely convinced about the practical value of Street View, but it’s great fun and I’m sure some interesting applications will emerge once it’s here.

If you’re not sure what Google Street View is here’s an example from Sydney.

View Larger Map

If you see the car, be sure to smile…

Popularity: 40%

The wisdom of the crowd seems to suggest I’m wrong, but I see no point in driving a car in Singapore. So the Google Maps directions feature has been of limited use to me, since its focus has been driving directions.

The option to avoid highways gives some control that provides simulation of a walking/cycling route, but now Google has gone a step further and provided a facility for calculating walking directions (this has been available in some other countries for a while). Here’s how it performs.

Either click on the “Get Directions” option underneath the Google Maps logo at http://maps.google.com or right click on map and select from the options “Directions from here” and “Directions to here”. I chose to calculate a simple route from the National Library to the Cathay Building, short enough to be a viable walk. Here’s how the default driving directions come out:

If the “walking’ option is selected the route is re-calculated as this:

Not bad. The walking route clearly doesn’t have to take into account the various driving restrictions in the area so is able to shorten the route from 2.7km to 1km.

If you look at the link for the directions you’ll see that the piece that controls whether driving or walking directions are presented is this “&dirflg=”, &dirflg=d for driving and &dirflg=w for walking.

Walking directions can be a great asset in the mobile world. If you’re out in Singapore and need to find your way around, you’ll often be walking and always have your mobile phone. Here’s how directions work on the iPhone in isingeo.com. Set your location and choose to find something; here I’ve set my location to the National Library and I’ve “found” my nearest cinemas:

The cinema at the Cathay is listed as the fourth closest, if I press the white up arrow to the right of the listing I can access directions from my location to the cinema using the iPhone’s Google Maps application. Here’s the result:

Notice a small problem? Even though I’ve used the “&dirflg=w” parameter for these directions The iPhone Google Maps application insists on giving the driving directions. It seems that while walking directions have made it into the browser based Google Maps they aren’t yet implemented in the iPhone application, the very place where I’d use them….

Popularity: 45%

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, you may have wondered how the Google Maps application is able to locate you even when your inside a building and GPS doesn’t function. One way in which this is done is to use WiFi router locations. A company called Skyhook Wireless has built a database of routers, including their locations and MAC addresses (every router has a unique MAC address). This database seems to be surprisingly complete for Singapore.

Via this article I learnt that Skyhook have an API which allows you to discover the location of any router for which you know the MAC address (provided it’s in their database). Combining this with the “airport -s” terminal command in OSX, means you can scan all WiFi access points within range and get their locations in latitude and longitude. How?

Well it requires quite a bit of geekery, but to avoid you the trouble I’ve used some of the ideas from the article to produce a ruby script that automates the task. You can download the script here. It can be run from within the terminal by typing “ruby locatemymac.rb” in the directory where you downloaded the script.

The scripts does the following:
- runs the “airport -s” command, this returns a list of all wifi access points within range
- parses the output to extract the MAC addresses
- submits the MAC addresses through the Skyhooks API
- prints the results to the screen
- writes a kml file with the results

This is pretty cool, but I’m not quite sure yet of a good practical application. Maybe combining it with remote ssh access means I now have a poor man’s Bak2u for my MacBook Pro. Also, since I have remote access to my niece’s MacBook, I can always find out where she is… but maybe that’s more information than I need.

Popularity: 37%

You probably already know that you can book a taxi in Singapore using SMS. Just send your location (address and/or postcode) in an SMS to 71222. To make this service easier to use on an iPhone I wanted to have an icon on the Home Screen to allow “one-touch” taxi booking.

It wasn’t easy, but here’s how it can be done.

The iPhone supports bookmarklets, these bookmarklets provide a powerful way to get the web browser to do things, like sending an SMS.

I’ve created a bookmarklet that uses the sms:// url schema supported by the Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone to create an SMS message addressed to 71222. There are a few steps you need to follow to get this bookmarklet onto your iPhone Home Screen as an icon.

1. Make sure you’re reading this in Safari on your desktop or laptop.

2. Drag the image below onto your toolbar. It will create a new book mark in the toolbar called “SMS a Taxi”. This bookmark won’t work on your desktop or laptop (they don’t have SMS) we’re just doing this as a way of getting the bookmark to your iPhone.

3. Sync your bookmarks with your iPhone. This may take a little while.

4. On your iPhone open Safari and open your bookmarks, find the “SMS a Taxi” entry and select it. You’ll be taken to the SMS app and a new message will open addressed to 71222. Close the message (I’m assuming you don’t want to call a taxi in the middle of following these instructions) and return to Safari.

5. You’ll see a blank page and some text in the url bar starting with “data:text/html….”. Press the + symbol in the bar at the bottom of the blank page and select “Add to Home Screen”. You can now change the label if you wish, once you’re ready press “Add” in the top right hand corner of the screen.

You’re done, a new icon should now appear on your Home Screen, if you tap it a new SMS message will open addressed to 71222. Type in your location and wait for the response (don’t send for a taxi now unless you need one, they don’t like it….).

If you’re successful with these steps, why don’t you send me a message, here’s a bookmarklet for you to use (I did this for my wife, but I’ll let you use it too):

Some Extra Information

This worked for me using Safari 3.1.2 on a Mac and the iPhone 3G, your mileage may vary.

The content of the SMS a Taxi bookmark is as follows:

[sourcecode language=’xhtml’]data:text/html,%3Chtml%3E%3Chead%3E%3Ctitle%3ESMS%20a%20Taxi%3C/title%3E%3Clink%20rel=’apple-touch-icon’href=’http://www.singeo.com.sg/images/taxi.png’%3E%3Cmeta%20http-equiv=’refresh’%20content=’0;url=sms://71222′/%3E%3C/head%3E%3C/html%3E[/sourcecode]

You can edit the bookmark (best done in Safari on your desktop or laptop) if you want to have shortcuts for other SMS numbers, just replace 71222 with your new number, you’ll probably also want to amend the title and remove or change the image used for the icon.

If you’re wondering what the icon is, it’s a Black London Taxicab.

This method will also allow icon access to the other url schemes supported by mobile Safari, as far as I know they are:

tel://nnnnnnnn - used to call a phone number.
youtube://id - used to load a video from YouTube by id (though I can’t get it to work…).
sms://nnnnnnnn you know that one by now.
maps:q=1.305851,103.90763(Chapel%20Road) - load the Google Maps app with a location pin.
mailto://jimmynomates@nomates.com - compose an email (this probably also supports the body parameter to specify the message content and the subject parameter).

There are two downsides to this:
- the sms:// url schema does not support the body parameter so you can’t embed a location for pick-up (e.g. your home address) in the SMS booking.
- when you use the Home Screen icon to send an SMS you’ll find a blank page is opened and not closed by Mobile Safari, I can’t find a way to close the page.

Popularity: 37%

One of the problems with using SBS Transit’s iris real-time bus arrival information has been the cumbersome interface on mobile devices. Now Deepak Sarda of Sounds From The Dungeon has produced a mobile interface that allows you to quickly find out the arrival of all SBS Transit buses for a particular bus stop, point your mobile device to http://sbsnextbus.appspot.com/ to try it out.

Deepak’s kindly let me use his work to improve the Singapore Bus Stop Map on this site and the bus information available on the iPhone at http://isingeo.com.

On isingeo.com you can use your iPhone to find the closest Singapore bus stops to your location, it’s available under the “Transport” section.

As shown above, the static map displays the nearest five stops (open them in Google Maps for navigation). Each stop is listed with the iris arrival times (the purple button) and information on the route of each bus service (the green buttons). Selecting “All Arrival Times” takes you to this screen (provided by Deepak’s system):

Selecting one of the green buttons for a bus service will open a new window in Mobile Safari with the TransitLink information on the bus route. This information displays quite well using the iPhone’s zooming and orientation features, even though there can be a lot of detail.

The Bus Stops and Bus Services map now uses Deepak’s system to display the arrival times for all buses at a bus stop in the info window that pops up when you click on a bus stop (this can take a little time to appear if there are many buses).

Popularity: 39%