Recommended Apps for Windows Phone 8

True Calendar 8

The native WP8 calendar sucks, it defaults to viewing one day, but doesn't fit it onto one screen, it doesn't have a week view at all, the month view is pretty much useless because you can't read the appointments and if you try to click on them or click on a day it switches to the crappy day view.

I can't recommend True Calendar 8 highly enough, it possibly has too many configuration options, and you can only have a maximum of one account each of Google, MS and Facebook, but apart from that it's pretty much perfect and is what the native calendar should have been.

Ocell (Twitter)

Ocell is buggy, crashing and refusing to load tweets relatively often, however in my experience, and given my demands, it is still by far the best WP8 Twitter app that I've seen. My demands mainly being configurable, swipeable columns, mainly consisting of my lists, just like Tweetdeck and then Hootsuite let me do.

Flickr Central / Flickr Booth

Flickr Central and Flickr Booth are both very good apps. They both allow you to automatically upload images, periodically update the lock screen image from particular pools of Flickr photos and view activity on your photos and your contacts' latest uploads. They also both improve on the manual uploading of images.

Flickr Central has a better photo page and a better page for showing you activity on your own photos, however it doesn't show replies to your comments on other people's photos.

UPDATE Aug 2014: I don't know if it's WP8.1 or what but recently I've been finding FC's auto-upload buggy and I can no longer share photo URLs and the developer is no longer responding to emails.

Flickr Booth has a nice tile for the start screen that can show you recent uploads from your contacts or activity on your photos. It also allows you to specify what album to auto upload from and what date to start uploading them from. However the lock screen image rotates too often IMHO and only uses your 10 most recent favourites.

The official Flickr app sucks, mostly because the logo and title always cover half the screen. Yes, really. It's also missing auto uploading and uploading multiple images from the share context menu.

Flickr Auto-Uploader

Flickr Central's auto-uploader stopped working for me, and then so did Flickr Booths. I uninstalled Flickr Booth in order to reinstall it only to find that it was no longer available in the store. I have now written my own Flickr Auto Uploader for Windows Phone which has the added bonus of being able to upload videos and high resolution images from Lumia 1020s, as well as the option of choosing any albums to upload from.

Phone Tracker

I don't expect this will be on everyone's essentials list, but I really like having a record of my location, mostly so that I can geo-tag my photos. Phone Tracker is just the ticket, very simple and straightforward, it can upload kml files nightly to SkyOneDrive. My only two complaints are that a) it puts the files in the root, cluttering them up, it would be much better if it used its own subdirectory and b) time stamps are saved without a time zone, which is a real pain in the arse.

SMS to Speech

Not an app, but the other day I found a setting which covered an app that I used to find very useful on Android, Settings -> Speech -> Read incoming text messages aloud. Unfortunately it's crippled somewhat by the fact that it asks you whether you want it to read the text message or not. Somehow I don't think that's going to be very practical when I'm riding through London :-/

Others

Authenticator for accounts that use such two step authentication like Google and MS. Has a handy copy feature. TV Guide for UK TV schedules.

Obviously

Facebook, Instagram, eBay and Whatsapp. Although I wish Whatsapp would use different colours for different people in group chats.

MIA

Firefox. I'd also really like a decent IMAP client. The native mail client is fine for basic stuff, but I'd really like something that handled folders with more finesse. Note that Mail Plus is not an email client, it's for sending emails with attachments.

Hide Yahoo! nav bar in Flickr etc

Firefox

You can use my Stylish style or add the same css to userContent.css in your profile/chrome directory:

@-moz-document domain(flickr.com) {
  #eyebrow { display: none !important }
  body.with-eyebrow { background-position: left 0 !important }
  body.with-eyebrow div#global-nav { top: 0 !important }
  body div#main, body div#Main { top: -20px !important }
}

@-moz-document url(https://www.flickr.com/photos/upload/)
{
  body div#main, body div#Main { top: 0px !important }
}

Google Chrome

You can use my Stylish style or my StyleBot Style.

Flickr API Authentication Pitfalls

Or Things That I Don't Think Are Clear Enough in the Flickr Documentation, I do accept however that they are (may be) standards documented elsewhere on the net. Examples are in PHP.

1. Your first request, to request the Request Token token (no, that is not a typo), should be SHA1 hashed using your API Secret (AKA Consumer Secret) followed by an ampersand as the key, since you don't have a Token Secret yet. ie:

    hash_hmac('sha1', $base, "$secret&", true)

2. Your second request, for an Access Token, should be hashed using your API Secret followed by an ampersand followed by the Token Secret returned in step one as a key. After this step you should start using the Token Secret returned by this step.
3. The "base string" to be hashed should be the exact query string (including both equal signs and ampersands, alphabetically ordered by name, values url encoded) url encoded. ie, query values should be url encoded twice, leading oauth_callback values to look like:

   oauth_callback%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.example.com%26...

4. The hash should be a url encoded base64 encoded binary, not hex as is the PHP default, so you need to include true as the last hash_hmac parameter, ie:

   urlencode(base64_encode(hash_hmac('sha1', $base, "$secret&$tokensecret", true)))

5. The oauth_nonce is a random eight digit integer, used to make each call unique.

Linux Shell Flickr Batch Downloader Script

For a while I've been meaning to write a Linux Flickr downloader, but I've been putting it off and putting it off as I thought it wouldn't be easy. But I hadn't thought about using curl and the Flickr API directly and, rather embarrassingly, happened upon a script a few lines long to do just that.

curl "###FlickrAPIURL###" | awk '/id=/ {print "http://farm"$6".static.flickr.com/"$5"/"$2"_"$4".jpg" }' | sed '~s/\(farm=\|server=\|secret=\|id=\|"\)//g' > p
wget -i p

There are plenty of options for FlickrAPIURL, and Flickr provides a very helpful URL builder, for search for example.

An improved script:

#!/bin/sh

# As is this script takes comma separated tags as argument one and downloads all matching
# images from a single Flickr user, probably you

# To get your API Key and Secret create a Flickr App at:
# http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/create/apply/

APIKey='xxx'
Secret='yyy'

# To get your token you can manually follow the desktop instructions:
# http://www.flickr.com/services/api/auth.howto.desktop.html
# If you do not want/need to sign your call you can remove the MD5ing and api_sig

Token='zzz'

# Note that *all* parameters in URI must be in alphabetical order, so this may not work
# for your method/parameters as is

Method='flickr.photos.search'
Params="tags=$1&user_id=YourUserID"

# Image size: _s small square, _t thumbnail, _m small, none medium, _b large, _o original
Size=""

(
IFS='\
'
Page=1
Pages=1
while [ $Page -le $Pages ]
do
        URI="api_key=$APIKey&auth_token=$Token&method=$Method&page=$Page&per_page=2&$Params"
        MD5URI=$(echo $URI | sed 's/[&=]//g')
        MD5=$(echo -n $Secret$MD5URI | md5sum | sed s/\ \ -//)

        for f in $(curl "http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?$URI&api_sig=$MD5")
        do
                TempPages=$(echo $f | awk '/<photos/ {print $3}')
                if [ $TempPages ]
                then   
                        Pages=$(echo $TempPages | sed '~s/\(pages=\|"\)//g')
                fi
                URL=$(echo $f | awk '/id=/ {print "http://farm"$6".static.flickr.com/"$5"/"$2"_"$4}')
                if [ $URL ]
                then   
                        URL=$(echo $URL | sed '~s/\(farm=\|server=\|secret=\|id=\|"\)//g')$Size".jpg"
                        wget $URL
                fi
        done
        Page=$(($Page + 1))
done
)

UPDATE: Note that if you want to download original sizes you must request the "originalsecret" by adding extra=original_format to the API URL and use that instead of secret. The awk line needs updating to do this, add -F '"' to separate on double quotes.

The Mess That Is The Mobile Web

I wanted to check an ebay auction on my mobile the other day. I typed in m.ebay.co.uk as the m subdomain seems to be the common mobile web shortcut (see m.google.co.uk and m.flickr.com). But that didn't work. Next I tried ebay.co.uk/mobile (I think I might have googled for that) which linked to pages.ebay.co.uk/mobile/web/ which in turn promised me that the address I was after was ebaymobile.co.uk. But that didn't work either! Eventually, I think through googling some more I found it at wap.ebay.co.uk. eBay isn't the first company to use the wap subdomain, see also wap.tfl.gov.uk. I think the most rediculous mobile subdomain I know of is nationalrail's pda.ojp.nationalrail.co.uk. Kai is against the .mobi TLD as he believes that it will fragment the web, but as all these subdomains suggest, we do need separate pages for devices with small screens, as good as CSS is, it cannot do it alone, and once you admit that we need different pages for mobiles wouldn't it be easier if we all knew that we could use the .mobi address? I really do prefer the m subdomain over all of this though, purely because it's fewer letters to type on a tiny keyboard. Incidentally wap.ebay.co.uk is pretty good and ebay.mobi forwards to ebay.com.

UPDATE: Another thing that annoys me is browser detection. If I go to a mobile site I do not want to be redirected to the desktop site just because the site in question doesn't know about the browser I am using.

UPDATE: I emailed ebay about their issue, and surprisingly they responded. In their email was this gem: "We do have carrier-specific mobile sites." WTF?