So there’s this saying, “There’s nothing more dangerous than a bored engineer”; I tend to think that it’s true. I’ve had very little to do at work lately, which has been in equal parts frustrating and annoying. I like having stuff to do. I like having plans for the future, but at the moment, there’s very little.

Anyway. I popped into Westfield the other day, and caught a Free BBC Prom. Very cool. Then I had a poke around on my mobile and realised two things.

  1. There is no mobile proms website.

  2. There is no mobile proms app!

So I thought I’d have a go at writing one. Given that I have a Google Nexus S, and all of the SDK bits.

I wrote a parser/scraper for the BBC Proms website (about 100 lines of python, using BeautifulSoup and simplejson) - I might Github this later on.

I then set about writing a thing for the Android that would let me browse the list of proms, give me information about where they are, what time, etc. It’s pretty close to being complete. Another day of development and it’ll do most stuff.

If you’ve got a 2.1 or better Android, then you can have a play with the v0.2 Beta of PromGuide by clicking here

Application Source Code

If you find it useful, or broken, or totally hopeless, leave me some feedback.