Un mixto por favor

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Smartphones and seniors

Digital live is evolving very fast, but some people are left behind, a great example are the elderly or seniors. Nowadays lots of the communications are done through mobile and online services, but those are not easy for them, they get lost, and usually the hardware is not designed for them.

Well, thankfully there is always a solution. I have been in LivLiv Solutions for some time, and there we are trying to close that gap, bringing the digital life to their terms, so families are connected no matter their age, or technical abilities.

The best part is that it doesn't require a specific device for the elderly, any Android device with a decent screen is OK, and family members can assist and help from their own devices. As easy as that.

Do you miss to be able to send pictures to your grandma? Then now you have an option to do so. 

Check:

www.livlivsolutions.com

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Check your finances in a new way

It has been out for a few days, but in case you missed it Bankbu is open to everyone who wants to use it.

So what is it about? It all started to scratch my own itch, when  I checked my online banking tool, it was very difficult to figure out where and how I was spending my money. I saw you could export the transactions as a txt file, so I started to create my banking tool.

I showed it to some friends, I found out that I wasn't the only one with that problem, so I made it a little it nicer, got the help from Desde1979 to make it good looking, and there you go!

In my opinion that is a starting point of what banks should be offering to their customers. They are missing completely the point, we don't want raw data, I want meaningful data.

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Almost ready

Lately I have been working on a project which aims to change the way you see your bank statement. 

Right now banks have online tools that haven't changed in years. Maybe if you are lucky they have an app or a mobile web that helps you access your finances from your mobile devices.

But in my opinion, they are lacking many features. I don't want to see just a list of my transactions, I want to get some meaningful data out of it. Not just raw data, crunch it for your users!

So, I started a project that does exactly that. You download your bank statement and process it in Bankbu. I hope it will be able to provide you some better understanding on how, when and where you are expending/earning money. (The earning it is usually easy :) )

So stay tunned, in a few days it will be live.

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Update in the OAuth and Stackmob

Some days ago I posted a snipped of code that showed how to use StackMob and Oauth 1.0. 

There was a bug, that prevented the POST calls to work properly. I have updated the gist , all that was needed was to set the content-type properly.

Enjoy

https://gist.github.com/4038850

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Android PhoneGap crashing if picking a picture from DropBox instead of Gallery

If you are using a PhoneGap from Android (now Cordova, but I still don't get used to see Cordoba spelled like that) and you get crashes of complaints from users if they are picking a picture from DropBox instead of the local gallery, that is using the call Camera.getPicture() and the type is PHOTOLIBRARY.

Up to PhoneGap 2.1 there is a bug that causes a NullPointer if the URI of the image picked isn't one from the gallery. It is fixed in 2.2 version, but if you want to fix it for previous one all you need is this patch, and then compile it to get the new jar. If you haven't done it, it is not more than a few minutes to get it.

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Using StackMob Javascript SDK with OAuth 1.0

StackMob does a pretty good job providing the JavaScript SDK using OAuth 2.0. But in some cases you might need still to access using 1.0. In my case I wanted to reuse the same code base for some admin scripts that access the whole database. For that I needed to authenticate using he private key, only available with OAuth 1.0

This is a small code that you need to add when you init the sdk to be able to do it. It uses JsOauth so you need to add it to your project. It overrides the SDK ajax call with a custom one using the OAuth 1.0 authentication.

Please remember that you cannot put this online as your private key will be available to everyone!

https://gist.github.com/4038850