I made a last-minute dash down to the London OSM Hack Weekend and had a lovely time there.

I worked on a mobile app which I was pleased to get into a basically working state. It is called osmbi3, which stands for OpenStreetMap Building Information and/or Zombies. The aim was to geolocate the user and find nearby buildings using an Overpass query. This could then be linked to building management information or form the basis for some location-based game. Having managed the basic task, showing a map with annotated every building with an icon reading “yes!”, I set out to try and get OAuth working against the OpenStreetmap server from a mobile device, a task which I have yet to achieve.

So, what last weekend was a very simple but perfectly functional app, is now buggy as hell while it tries to do more. However the source code is on github and i will probably keep working on it, because I could use a very lightweight building editor which doesn’t require any typing.

I am doing a dangerous amount of app development now, helping finish up a project from the last codethecity event in Edinburgh, and working on a dinosaur card game app for - eventually with? - my boy. But it’s all apache cordova and webviews, so i’m not doing anything too evil.

Apart from a successful weekend’s hack, I was very glad to visit London put faces and voices to some names I only know from the internet; also to reconnect with some folks I hadn’t seen for the last ten years. If only more people in the wider community would make the journey up to State of the Map Scotland!