Tag: github

Flokk contacts app

I recently gave flokk a run on my laptop as a snap. I was surprised how different a concept it is and also the decisions they made.

Its simply a google contact manager but its focused around social. Its not perfect but I wasn’t sure about it at first, I didn’t want to enter in additional information if it wasn’t actually syncing with my google contacts. I checked and all the details I entered into my contacts were correctly synced and not dumped into additional data. They were!

Quite a few friends have complained that I don’t follow them on twitter. This is a really neat way to see what they up.

Its got some work to do on the contact management but as a social tool its good. Currently it only supports Twitter and Github but I can imagine Mastodon could be easily added in the future. I know Facebook would be interesting for other people too I guess.

Looking at flutter more and more now

Makerba.se documents all projects

The Beauty Project

I recently joined makerba.se.

Makerbase is:

  • A place to tell the world what you made, and to find out who made the things you love.

  • Edited by everyone. You can change and add to anything that you see.

  • A way to see projects: Stuff like apps and web sites and digital works of art. (Not companies or employers.)

  • A list of makers: People who create projects, described by what they’vedone, not their job titles.

  • Limited access, for now, while we get things ready for everyone. We’ll add you to the waitlist if someone hasn’t already added you as a maker.

I like the concept, which allows you to document all types of project. When I say project I mean anything you class as a project. This means anything!

A while ago I mentioned documenting geekdinner and the past generally. I tried to do this with Wikipedia but my entries were rejected. Makerbase seems much more apt for this type of thing. The whole thing is a wiki, so you can easily link and join items together. It reminds me of Lanyrd in underlying structure, which is good. But like lanyrd I wondered about building up this tangled web of information and what happens when investment goes into it?

So before I signed up I read through the terms/end user licence agreement which was actually really well written with plain english. Theres nothing about what happens if the service ends, I was looking for a data portability angle but I’m sure its coming… something to tweet them about.

Is this a linkedin killer? No I don’t think so, its filling in the area in between linkedin and the stuff which happens on Github. Neither have the space for things like geeks talk sexy or personal projects like learning a diabolo trick. I can already imagine the links with other sites like meetup and even lanyrd.

I like it and the only thing better would be if it was distributed instead of centralised. It seems worthy of backing.

Put your git repo where your mouth is?

GitHub

I like this idea from Martin Rue… startupsmanchester.com

The idea is pretty simple. Assuming you have a git repo for your project, you simply register your project/startup on the site and you’ll get a post-commit git hook script. Drop this script into your repo’s .git/hooks directory and it’ll start sharing your progress with the rest of the community each time you commit.

It doesn’t share anything sensitive and stores only the commit message, the commit author name and a count of the files changed. It also calculates some basic stats for each project to give a better idea of how much continual work is happening on the project.

Now we’ll all be able to see who’s actually doing stuff and who’s just talking. Maybe seeing 3 or 4 other startups doing lots of stuff will even encourage you to keep up the pace. It certainly will for me!

As he says, “put your git repo where your mouth is…”

The making of Perceptive Media’s Breaking Out

I have been talking about Perceptive Media to many many people. Some get it some don’t… Everytime I try and explain it I use my perception to work out what method would work for them to understand it. When I did the talk at Canvas Conf way back in September I wanted to go into real depth about what we had done, but I had to explain the concept which takes a long while.

However now we got enough feedback, its time to reveal what we done to make it work. Theres a blog post coming soon on the BBC R&D blog but till then… Happyworm have done a excellent blog post explaining the whole thing down to some serious detail, including how to reveal the secret easter egg/control panel!

How to open the easter egg

To open the Easter Egg, Breaking Out must have finished loading and then click under the last 2 of the copyright 2012 on the bottom right. You’ll then have access to the Control Panel.

The easter egg, really unlocks the power of Perceptive Media like never before.

Everything is controllable and the amount of options is insane but all possible with the power of object based audio (the driving force behind perceptive media).

Breaking Out Control Panel

Practically just changing the fade between foreground and background objects can be a massive accessibility aid for those hard of hearing or in a noisy environment like driving a car? Tony Churnside is working on the advantages of object based audio so i won’t even try coming with conclusions on whats possible but lets say, the whole turning your sound system up and down to hear the dialogue could be removed with Perceptive media. Because of course perceptive media isn’t just the objects and delivering the objects, its also the feedback and sensor mechanisms.

Mark Panaghiston writes in conclusion…

The Web Audio API satisfied the goals of the project very well, allowing the entire production to be assembled in the client browser. This enabled control over the track timing, volume and environment acoustics by the client. From an editing point of view, this allowed the default values to be chosen easily by the editor and have them apply seamlessly to the entire production, similar to when working in the studio.

Web Audio API was amazing… and we timed it just about right. At the start of the year, it would not have worked in any other browser except Chrome. But every few months we saw other browsers catch up in the WebAudioAPI front and I’m happy to say the experiment kinda of works on Firefox and Opera.

One of the most complicated parts of the the project was arranging the asset timelines into their absolute timings. We wanted the input system to be relative since that is a natural way to do things, “Play B after A”, rather than, “Play A at 15.2 seconds and B at 21.4 seconds.” However, once the numbers were crunched, the noteOn method would easy queue up the sounds in the future.

The main deficiency we found with the Web Audio API was that there were no events that we could use to know when, for example, a sound started playing. We believe this is in part due to it being known when that event would occur, since we did tell it to noteOn in 180 seconds time, but it would be nice to have an event occur when it started and maybe when its buffer emptied too. Since we wanted some artwork to display relative to the storyline, we had to use timeouts to generate these events. They did seem to work fine for the most part, but having hundreds of timeouts waiting to happen is generally not a good thing.

Yes ideally we would want to be able to turn a written script into a Javascript file complete with timings. Its something which would make perceptive media a lot more accessible to narrative writers.

And finally, the geo-location information was somewhat limited. We had to make it specific to the UK simply because online services were either expensive or heavily biased towards sponsored companies. For example, ask for the local attractions and get back a bunch of fast food restaurants. But in practice though, you’d need to pay for a service such as this and this project did not have the budget.

Yes that was one of the limiting factors which we had to do for cost. And because of that we couldn’t shout about it from the roof tops to the world. However the next experiment/prototype will be usable worldwide, just so we can talk about perceptive media on a global stage if needed

As Harriet said, “OK, I can do this.” And we did!

Yes we did! and we proved Perceptive Media can work and what a fine achievement it is! This is why I can’t shut up about Perceptive Media. When ever we talk about the clash of interactivity and narrative I can’t help but pipe up about Perceptive Media, and why not? It could be the next big thing and I have to thanks James Barrett for coming up with the name after I had originally called it the less friendly Intrusive Media.

Not only did we prove that but it also proved that things off the work plan in R&D can be as valid as things on it. And finally that the ideology of looking at whats happening on the darknet, understanding it and thinking about how it can scale has also been proven…

I love my job and love what I do…

Happyworm were a joy to work with and the final prototype was not only amazing but they also believed into the ideals of open sourcing the code so others can learn, understand and improve on it. You should Download Perceptive Media at GitHub and have a play if you’ve not done so yet… what you waiting for?