With recent news about Facebook’s new ‘Places’ feature it looks like location based social networking could become the next big thing over the next couple of years. In case you can’t wait for this to be fully rolled out and you want to give one of the established location based social networks a try, here’s some background info.

I'll be posting another CodeIgniter book review for Packt Publishing shortly: 'CodeIgniter 1.7 Professional Development' by Adam Griffiths.

I'm really looking forward to reading this book, in particular the chapter on user authentication through Twitter and Facebook Connect.

Sample chapter

• Chapter 3: Form validation and database interaction

Well, it's now April and many T-Mobile G2 Touch owners are waiting for the Android 2.1 update for their handsets, although all is still quiet on the news front. The last update from T-Mobile I saw was back in February when T-Mobile announced that they will be releasing "a firmware upgrade in April for the T-Mobile G2 Touch". We're all hoping that this will indeed be the Android 2.1 Eclair update we've been waiting for. There are some rumours out there as to the exact date and content of this release, but none of these are confirmed, so all we can do is play the waiting game for now.

I'll be checking the Android Updates section on the T-Mobile website throughout the month to see if anything appears, Eclair or otherwise.

The CodeIgniter framework is a secret weapon for many web developers as it allows you to quickly build complex web applications in a structured and organised way. I started using CodeIgniter over a year ago now so I've approached Packt's CodeIgniter 1.7 by Jose Argudo Blanco and David Upson as a way of expanding upon when I've already learnt from the user guide, forums and a book which I had previously read from Wrox called Professional CodeIgniter by Thomas Myer.

For some reason, even though I have the PHP Development Tools (PDT) installed in Aptana Studio (2.0), I'm not able to select 'PHP nature' in the 'Project natures' of an imported project. I can start a new PHP Project which will have the 'PHP nature' selected as primary nature, but this doesn't even appear as an option in imported projects. The only two natures that are available are 'Remote Nature' and 'Web Nature'. The 'PHP nature' adds some really useful functions, like grouping my @todos into Aptana's Tasks view and also other handy things like auto-completing PHP docblocks.

To get the 'PHP nature' associated with your imported project you can manually edit the .project file which Aptana creates in your imported project directory so that it contains the 'PHP nature'. To do this, add the following code between the <natures> tags in your .project file:

<natures>
   <nature>org.eclipse.php.core.PHPNature</nature>     
</natures>

You may need to re-load Aptana to refresh the project but you should now find that your imported project has a primary 'PHP nature' set.

Note: Please do this at your own risk; although it worked fine for me I don't know if it will cause any side effects to the project or Aptana.