I just got a new Galaxy Nexus at Google IO and installed all the apps I had on my old phone. The annoying thing, however, is that I would have to start from scratch again as the game data (which levels you completed, how many coins you got) isn’t stored in the Play store per device. To me, this is a real lack of functionality in Android and annoyed me. So here is a hack how to transfer both the game data of Cut The Rope and Temple run from one Android phone to another:

Here are the steps to take:

1. Backup your old phone via USB to your harddrive, just create a folder and copy everything in there. In my case this was a ICS phone and you had to connect the phone, say yes to “turn off USB storage”, get the phone as a HD in OSX and go wild)
2. Download Android Filetransfer and install it (on Windows, this is not needed)
3. In Android File Transfer, create a folder called “Cut the Rope” and copy all the files from your hard drive backup there (remotesavefile and remotesavefile.experiments – if you also played Experiments)
4. When you start Cut The Rope on the new phone, it will ask you to restore a previous state. Say yes.
5. For Temple Run, go to Android/data in Filetransfer and create a folder called com.imangi.templerun
6. In there, create a folder called files and copy both ALT_recordmanager.dat and recordmanager.dat from your hard drive into this folder
7. Temple Run automatically detects the old state

This probably works for many other tools, too. Sadly not for Angry Birds – it seems.

Breaking news: The Guardian once again involved in committing a data awesome! As before, the UK newspaper graced developers with a really cool piece of information published on the web: all the World Cup 2010 statistics as an Excel Sheet.

Now, the easiest way to play with this data is to use YQL, so I simply took a copy of the information and shared it as a CSV document on Google Docs. That way I can use it in YQL:

select * from csv where url=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?

key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&x=1&

output=csv” and columns=”surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves”

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Using YQL to filter and sort this, you can do some interesting searches on that information. For example:

What were the German mid field Players?

select * from csv where url=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?

key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&x=1&

output=csv” and columns=”surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves”

and team=”Germany” and position=”Midfielder”

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Using sort() and reverse() you can do rankings. For example:

Who was the goalkeeper with the most saves?

(Neuner of Germany, Kingson of Ghana and Enyeama of Nigeria in case you wonder)

select * from csv where url=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?

key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&x=1&

output=csv” and

columns=”surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves”

and position=”Goalkeeper” | sort(field=”saves”) | reverse()

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Which was the player that spent most time on the pitch?

select * from csv where url=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?

key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&

output=csv” and

columns=”surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves”

| sort(field=”time”) | reverse()

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Who were the players who were the least on the pitch in the German and Brazilian teams?

select * from csv where url=”http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?

key=0AhphLklK1Ve4dEdrWC1YcjVKN0ZRbTlHQUhaWXBKdGc&single=true&gid=1&x=1&

output=csv” and columns=”surname,team,position,time,shots,passes,tackles,saves”

and team in (“Germany”,”Brazil”) | sort(field=”time”)

You can Try this out in the console and see the results here.

Using the CSV output and YQL you can do all kind of cool things with that data – as YQL also releases it as JSON it makes it easy to create interactive interfaces and visualizations, too – why don’t you have a go?

I just finished a quick podcast demo for the 200th podcast of Boagworld, streamed live on ustream. I thought I had an hour but it turned out to be half an hour. My topic was YQL and I wanted to actually do something like shown in the video that was just released (click through to watch or download the video in English or German):

The story of this is:

• We spend a lot of time thinking about building the interface and using the right semantic markup and trying to make browsers work (or expect certain browsers in certain settings as we gave up on that idea)
• What we should be concentrating on more is the data that drives our web sites – it is boring to have to copy and paste texts from Word documents or get a CMS to generate something that is almost but not quite like useful HTML.
• You could say that once published as HTML the data is available but for starters HTML4 is bad as a data format to store information. Furthermore too many pieces of software can access web sites and the cleanest HTML you release somewhere can be messed up by somebody else with a CMS or any other mean of access further down the line. Sadly enough most content editing software still produces HTML that is tied with its presentation rather than what it should structure and define.
• Having worked on the datasets provided by the UK government at data.gov.uk I’ve realised that we are nowhere near as a market to provide re-usable and easily convertible data to each other. XML was meant to be that but got lost in complexities of dictionaries, taxonomies and other things that you can spend days on to define English content but have to re-think anyway once you go multilingual. Most content – let’s face it – is maintained in Excel sheets and Word documents – which is OK cause people should not be forced to use a system they don’t like.
• If you really think about the web as a platform and as a media then we should have simple ways to provide textual data or binary information (for videos and images) instead of getting bogged down in how to please the current generation of browsers.
• If you really want to be accessible to any web user – and that is anyone who can get content over HTTP - you should think about making your content available as an API. This allows people to build interfaces necessary for edge cases that you didn’t even think existed.
• YQL is a simple way to use the web as a database and mix and match data and also a very simple way to provide data in easy to digest formats – give it a go.

In any case, after the 2 o’clock podcast where most of my questions were eloquently answered by Jeremy Keith and the Skype connection died in the last 5 minutes I spent the afternoon putting together some demos for this YQL talk as YQL is really easiest to explain with examples and to have something for the people on flaky connections to play with. So if you go to:

• http://isithackday.com/boagworld.php

You can see what I talked about during the podcast. People in the chat asked if this will be open source. Yes it is, the passcode is pressing cmd+u in Firefox or whatever other way you choose to “view source” in your browser of choice.

Normally I would not do any of these calls purely in JavaScript (as explained in the video) but this was the quickest solution and it can give you an insight just how easy it is to use information you requested, filtered and converted with YQL.