Ian Hawkins

Something new coming soon [teaser]

Ian — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 15:20:11 +0000

Here’s a nice picture of my blackberry – a device I also use. Nice icon in the bottom right corner…

Torque dedicated website coming soon

Ian — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:34:13 +0000

Hard at work at the next big version update for Torque, including a dedicated website for the online component. Forums will be moved over when everything is complete!

WinterSun MMORPG for Android

Ian — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:12:43 +0000

Here’s something else I’m working on – an MMORPG for Android called “WinterSun”. It’s in closed beta at the moment but hopefully it will be released soon.
The video shows a small part of the game engine, networked to a server (this is very optimised so it can run on very basic GPRS, as well as 3G) and also shows me getting owned by an NPC.

Excuse the blurrycam video, I don’t have a very good macro function on my recorder.

Torque videos

Ian — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:27:20 +0000

Here is a video of Torque ‘Jesse’ made and posted on YouTube!

Pretty cool! In fact a number of people have uploaded videos of Torque to YouTube!

Theme support in Torque v1.1.8

Ian — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:46:48 +0000

Torque now has theme support, meaning you can now customise the screen to some degree to make it how you want it to look.

Perhaps you want to make the screen look like the rest of the dials in your car? or maybe you just don’t like the default look and feel of the screen. Here’s your chance to change it.

Themes are fairly easy to create – basically a theme package is a .zip file containing 3 files (at the moment). A sample of a theme file is downloadable here

You can test your own themes by extracting the contents of your .zip file to the /.torque/themeDir/ folder on your SD card, then restarting Torque

Once you are happy with your theme then please consider sending it to the theme server so others can enjoy it! You can email the archive directly to me (my email address is available via the android market developer links, or just post it to the forums!) and it will be included in the theme server, simple!

Torque and Extended (EOBD) PID support

Ian — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:38:17 +0000

Good news!

Torque now supports an easy way to add extended PIDs for any particular model of vehicle to the list of PIDs that you can monitor. This complements the existing custom PID editor so you now have a highly configurable OBD2 tool! If you have access to a list of EOBD PIDs for your vehicle and want to see them added to Torque then drop me a message and I’ll see what I can do!

Here’s a screenshot that shows how easy it now is to configure Torque for your vehicle

Torque backgrounds and themes

Ian — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:29:41 +0000

Torque is always being improved thanks to useful feedback from the many people that use it,
and couple of requests back when Torque was first released asked if I could put something in to allow you to skin the application.

In most recent release of Torque (currently 1.1.3) you now have the option to change the background to whatever you want – a sample illustration with the help of my cat, Noodles is shown below

There has already been work done creating theme packages for Torque, so you can quickly customise (and share) new looks for dial displays, along with a few new dial types. They aren’t quite finished yet, but will be going into the main release sometime soon.

Torque has moved websites

Ian — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:47:17 +0000

Torque has now moved websites to http://torque-bhp.com/ which is dedicated to the Android Torque application. Anyone still registered on the forums should still have their accounts

Enjoy the new site!

LOL Sites funny picture viewer

Ian — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:28:03 +0000

LOL Sites for android combines several of the internets funniest sites (LOLCats/Icanhazcheezburger, Ihazahotdog, FAILBlog, ThereIFixedIt, etc) into a simple and easy to use lol viewer.

Separating it from other viewers is the ability to pre-cache the latest lols on your phone so you have no waiting time and the ability to configure many behavioural options for the program (Rotate, scaling, etc)

LOL Sites can be downloaded from the android market

SpeedHUD Head Up Display

Ian — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:03:09 +0000

Speed HUD uses your GPS and phone screen to display your speed, direction and acceleration.
You can reverse the text so you can put your phone on your dashboard at night and see your speed on your windshield like a Head up Display (HUD)

Some features included are:

Logging / KML export to Google Earth
Speech support
Safety Camera database support (beta)