Links from 2009

"A Growl client for the iPhone. Notifications from your Mac (or even Windows! see the FAQ) can be sent to your iPhone over push, with a full range of customization and grace you expect." Beautiful.

"Over the past 2 months the city government, in cooperation with business groups and non-profits, has turned a corner of one of the busiest intersections in San Francisco into a public plaza. The 17th Street Plaza project took 72-hours to implement, and is carefully called a “reversible trial.” Like the phrase “reversible pilot”.

To date, we’ve only had machine tags “extras” available for upcoming:event= and lastfm:event= tags but starting today we’re adding support for three new projects: Dopplr, Open Plaques and the Open Library.

A simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

I persevered, I obediently followed the tutorial, and I discovered all the things that make Django such a powerful framework; the excellent separation of concerns, the superb templating system, the lack of so-called front-end “helpers” that cripple other server-side frameworks. I think Gareth was really onto something when he noticed the way that the web standards world appears to be choosing Django.

A service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.

Jeremy Keith's notes from Jared Spool's talk at An Event Apart Boston.

Area/Code takes advantage of today's environment of pervasive technologies and overlapping media to create new kinds of entertainment.

Spool's excellent talk on Amazon from An Event Apart Boston.

[If you] import a specially formatted vcard.vcf address book file with the proper Emojis already inside, you'll be able to type out Emojis a chunk at a time, and delete the ones you don't want. It's a gimpy way of doing it, but it's free.

"Free set of software tools that enable designers to easily "sketch in hardware". With no programming at all and working in the familiar environment of Flash, designers can hook up a physical sensor (e.g. a knob) and immediately get that knob to control a motor or a video projection. The toolkit works with a wide range of sensors, wireless sensors, input from the Wii Remote, controls motors and LEDs, communicates with MIDI devices, controls sound, graphics, and video in Flash, and communicates with DMX computer controlled lighting equipment, all with a simple drag-and-drop interface (of course, programming hooks are provided as well)."

"Q: Are there honestly 46 new Transformers in the movie?" "A: I have no fucking clue."

Festival celebrating independent music (labels) in the UK. Gigs at the ICA etc.

You can be doing agile without performing any of the current recommended practices and you can perform all the recommended practices and still not be agile. Lots of teams believe they are practicing agile just because they are doing standups or TDD… That’s like pretending to be a musician because you have the best instrument.

Photojojo’s Photo Time Capsule

“Twice a month, enjoy an email with your [Flickr] photos from a year ago”.

I should have known better than to get drawn into a conversation about awards. It’s a trap. It’s a mugs’ game. But awards are addictive. It’s the closest most of us get to a pat on the head from mum and dad. Teacher’s not handing out gold stars any more. But the feeling of acceptance and recognition that creative people feel from awards isn’t far off. It’s hard to ignore their shiny allure. And of course we crow about them loudly when we win. But we know that’s wrong. It should all be about the satisfaction that we get from making brilliant things. And the impact they have on real people. And clients.

Automatic Image Stitching for the iPhone

"It's like a lot of similar projects where the goal is to improve the speed of page load by allowing scripts to load in parallel. The thing it does slightly differently than most others like it is it allows you to "block", which is to say, load one or more scripts in parallel, then wait for them to finish, before going on to something else, like loading more scripts."

Portfolio built with Google Maps controls.

For those who have no control over which clients and projects come to them, there is still hope, because everyone on the web (not just professional designers and developers) has the ability to produce meaningful content, and every designer and developer additionally has the power to create products and services. As your own client, working alone, or with a carefully hand-picked team, you can produce great things

Complicated but clever non-JS video object-fallback method.

Best film review of the year.

That's a matter of opinion. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

Exhibitions, events and other interesting things in London.

For this short project I wanted to photograph the cubic shape of the open-front stalls, shops and spaces in and around the market in On-Nut in Bangkok, Thailand. I was interested in the fact that each one looks like a miniature theatre production with the actors on stage and the scene lit from above.

"teepay is a place where you can buy, design and make money from T-shirts". Started by howies.

a term used in the history of architecture, design, and archaeology. It refers to a derivative object which retains ornamental design cues to structure that was necessary in the original. Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar, such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines."

It will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment - even discussion - we want to highlight it.

Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months

Tracks the online buzz around BBC shows. It's an experimental prototype.

At some point during the dot-com bust it turned out that the written word was the payload, and regular people started using alternative browsing devices to access text from the web. Arguments about device-independent, semantic markup and graceful degradation suddenly have an additional halo of legitimacy because they affect everyone.

Bicing recently launched a mobile application that consumers can use to get location-based information about bicycle and parking availability. Residents of Barcelona use Bicing by applying for a personal card and then using that card to rent and pay for use of one of the service's 6,000 bicycles. Bicycles can be picked up from and returned to any of 400 stations throughout the city.

Farm, cafe and park all rolled up.

Grazing lunch options in Noho.

ScotRail’s Caledonian Sleepers... overnight train services operating between London Euston & Scotland.

We're building a service to help people make their own newspapers.

Another brilliant talk from Matt Webb.

Bandstand Busking

“There are loads of bandstands in parks across London, and most of them are looking fairly tattered from lack of use. When did you last see/hear one surrounded by hordes excited by the sounds? …well we hadn’t so we decided to do what we could to change that, to fill the parks once more (at least for a wee while every couple of weeks) with some talented people capable of carrying a tune or two.”

Google hops on the performance bandwagon. Should be interesting.

"Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking." Brilliant.

"Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999." And so say all of us.

Here’s my thesis: As a profession, we do a lot more software maintenance than we do greenfield development. And it’s at the maintenance end where TDD really pays off. I’m starting to see lapses from the TDD credo as more and more forgivable the closer you are to the beginning of a project. And conversely, entirely abhorrent while in maintenance mode.

An independent radio promotions company based in East London.

Jasuto

“The first truly modular synthesizer for the iPhone”