Here you find some samples of our own projects we work on while not busy in customer projects. Some of these are just some brief studies we made to learn about a particular subject and wanted to share the results, but there is also a more ambitious project aiming to produce a new service for regular customer interaction for small businesses.
BeCustomer.com
BeCustomer.com (in Finnish also as Asiakkaana.fi) is going to be a service for small businesses to increase their interaction with their regular customers. The service is still in its beginnings, but if you are interested in the subject, you can register on the above links for more information once we get closer to the launch.
MongoDB backed sessions for CodeIgniter
We decided to use PHP/CodeIgniter as well as MongoDB in the BeCustomer project mentioned above, and that created an immediate problem: MongoDB support in CI is still quite limited, for example the sessions work only with SQL database, if you want to make them persistent. However, the default CI session is quite nice and not wanting to ditch it and stick with native PHP sessions I decided to derive a MongoDB version of the CI session class.
Get the implementation is here and give it a try if you are working with CodeIgniter on MongoDB!
Twlip
Twlip is an experimental, very basic client for Android that was done as a study project to learn about Android programming. Unfortunately it is currently not suitable for public distribution, so you will not find it in the Android Market. However, if you are interested in our experiences of Android in general or would like to discuss on starting an Android project, please drop me a line and let's discuss more.
I got this idea to experiment with Android by writing a simple Twitter client. Not that the world would need one more, but I thought that Twitter would be non-trivial enough to test various aspects: some layout and UI event programming, using OAuth and external libraries to log in to the Twitter API, calling the API to retrieve and post information ovar HTTP, JSON processing etc.
My assumption turned out to be true. Even if the coding took only a few days' worth of effort (I started with absolutely zero exposure to Android, or Twitter API for that matter), there were plenty of details that kept me busy and also gave some insight on how easy or difficult it is to find information in the Android world. Very interesting exercise.