22 Jan 2017

Uber Taxi equivalent in Norwich City, UK

I am new in Norwich and wasn't entirely surprised to find that Uber is not available in the area. I could see lots of evidence of well established taxi companies, but I was sad at the thought of perhaps not getting the same convenient Uber experience, but that was only until I tried out ABC Taxis.

ABC Taxis has a really neat smart phone app (available for both Apple and Android) that let's you request a pick up from your specified location, provides a fare estimate, let's you pay by card and tracks your taxi - The whole experience is very much like Uber.


My first trip with ABC taxis went like clockwork - from booking through the app to being picked up on time, I was safely delivered to my destination in a Toyota Prius by a friendly driver with 10 years experience and paid for the trip without handling any cash or cards. Based on that I can recommend the service as professional and reliable and I will be using them again.

21 Jan 2017

BBC Sport App notifications for Android

I had trouble getting the push notifications from the BBC Sport App working on my Huawei Ascend Mate 7 smartphone (running Android Marshmallow). I wanted to be notified about Sports results for specific teams but I was not receiving the alerts unless the BBC Sport App was actually running which was a pain because I tried to leave it open and running in the background but I kept on closing it by accident or forgetting to open it in the first place.

I am not sure if this is a quirk of my specific phone model or of the BBC Sport App itself (I haven't tried it with any other handsets) but fortunately there is a simple fix... Instead of trying to leave the BBC Sport App running in the background, simply add a BBC Sport App widget to  your home screen. The widget will have the same effect as keeping the App running all the time and the notifications will be more reliable.

I think the generic approach of using an App's widget (where a widget is available) could solve similar notification problems for other apps, apart from the BBC Sport App. But if you are having trouble with push notifications on your Android phone, you should check out the 'Push Notification Tester' App - It runs push notification diagnostics for you to help with troubleshooting.