Premasagar

@ckorhonen @chrisdavidmills Hrm. And this heralds the dawn of the almighty location-aware, pushbutton web 4.0 Golden Age of Aquarius?

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:22:07 +0000

@ckorhonen @chrisdavidmills Hrm. And this heralds the dawn of the almighty location-aware, pushbutton web 4.0 Golden Age of Aquarius?

I must be missing something. Foursquare just seems to be people sharing which bits of meat they've eaten in different places.

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:52:54 +0000

twitter:

I must be missing something. Foursquare just seems to be people sharing which bits of meat they've eaten in different places.

@alexknowshtml - no. The MobileRSS app has had that for a while.

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:38:16 +0000

twitter:

@alexknowshtml - no. The MobileRSS app has had that for a while.

RT @alexknowshtml: Great article on the entrepreneurial benefits of coworking, in this case at @PivotalLabs - http://bit.ly/aCPDDb /via ...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:37:20 +0000

twitter:

RT @alexknowshtml: Great article on the entrepreneurial benefits of coworking, in this case at @PivotalLabs - http://bit.ly/aCPDDb /via ...

RT @theteam: Announcing the next Open Source Show And Tell at The Team - 14th April 2010: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/5393063/

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:45:39 +0000

twitter:

RT @theteam: Announcing the next Open Source Show And Tell at The Team - 14th April 2010: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/5393063/

Apr 14, 2010: Open Source Show And Tell at The Team

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:45:56 +0000

Upcoming:

Once again, The Team (Communications Agency) and Osmosoft (Open Source Innovation arm of BT) have asked some of London's open source peeps to come and show what they're up to. Entry is free, each slot is about 15 minutes, and afterwards we go for beers at a pub near Borough Market.

Here's the tentative line-up (subject to change):

Martin Kleppmann - Automating browser tests in the real world (Confirmed)
Jordan Hatcher - Licensing open data
Phil Hawksworth - node.js is awesome!
Premasagar Rose - Sqwidget! On JavaScript widgets, breaking out of the box, and sandboxing CSS
Craig Heath - Privacy on the Symbian platform
TBC - TiddlySpace
+2 speakers TBC

Keep an eye on The Team's Twitter stream for updates.

Mar 30, 2010: £5 App Meet at The Skiff

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:34:44 +0000

Upcoming:

A meet-up for programmers, web developers and designers to discuss and showcase their "£5 apps" - lightweight software created by one or two people who take a simple idea and run with it.

The discussion will range from technical (what tools/languages were used during development) to business (building communities, spreading the word, costs and rewards).

We've got a busy lineup for this £5app.

Simon Willison and Natalie Downe will be talking about Wildlife Near You (http://www.wildlifenearyou.com/), which as part of a team of twelve they mostly built in a fort.

Then Jez Nicholson and Simon Harriyott will discuss Open Plaques (http://www.openplaques.org/) - a project:

> "... that aims to find and provide data about all the commemorative 'plaques' (often blue and round) that can be found across the UK and worldwide."

Steve Carpenter will talk about his latest
robots (not sure which one yet) and will hopefully demo his
iPhone-controlled Dalek (http://hackedgadgets.com/2010/03/02/iphone-controlled-dalek-robot/) and maybe his iPhone-controlled maze solver (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWaOLWvJFqA).

After the main talks there will be some shorter show and tell sessions:

* Jamie Campbell, Go learn another language - a short talk about GO
* Ian will be showing how easy AI can be - using modern computer vision and voice recognition libraries

Mar 23, 2010: Brighton iPhone talks at The Skiff

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:28:29 +0000

Upcoming:

We now have a Google Group, signup to get notified of all future events: http://groups.google.com/group/brighton-iphone-creators/

Talks:
- "Getting things Happening: the story of building a side-project app" - Nik Fletcher
- "A RAD approach to component reuse for iPhone development" - Gene Myers

... + networking/drinking in the Fountainhead afterwards

This is the meet-up for anyone with an interest in iPhone development. If you have ideas for apps, or you want to start coding for your iphone, or just want to meet other like-minded folks over beers then come along.

Bring friends. Bring iPhones. If you've got anything you've made yourself, definitely bring it along!

Named function expressions demystified

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 13:20:56 +0000

Del.icio.us:

"Surprisingly, a topic of named function expressions doesn’t seem to be covered well enough on the web. This is probably why there are so many misconceptions floating around. In this article, I’ll try to summarize both — theoretical and practical aspects of these wonderful Javascript constructs; the good, bad and ugly parts of them.

In a nutshell, named function expressions are useful for one thing only — descriptive function names in debuggers and profilers. Well, there is also a possibility of using function names for recursion, but you will soon see that this is often impractical nowadays. If you don’t care about debugging experience, you have nothing to worry about. Otherwise, read on to see some of the cross-browser glitches you would have to deal with and tips on how work around them.

I’ll start with a general explanation of what function expressions are how modern debuggers handle them."

Browser Size

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:47:03 +0000

Del.icio.us:

Easy visualisation to determine what's "below the fold" on your website, for users with different screen sizes.

Chargify

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:51:10 +0000

Del.icio.us:

"Build Your Business, Not Your Billing System
Chargify simplifies recurring billing for Web 2.0 and SaaS companies.

* Charge your customers' credit cards
* Manage recurring subscriptions effortlessly
* Achieve PCI compliance instantly
* Seamlessly integrate our API into your site
* Gain business intelligence from your billing"

RegExr: Online Regular Expression Testing Tool

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:26:51 +0000

Del.icio.us:

Tool for debugging, testing and exploring regular expressions.

Client Templating with jQuery

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 11:19:38 +0000

Del.icio.us:

jQuery makes it pretty easy to manipulate client side elements, so it’s not all that often that I think about using something like client side templating to get content loaded into pages. However, recently I have been working on a few apps that had fairly complex list based layouts and it started getting tedious to use manual code to update all the items. Further doing it by hand can be brittle if your layout changes as you have to keep the layout and the update code in sync.

Templating can address this problem by letting you use templates that describe your output with ‘holes’ that are filled in with data when the template is processed. Templating is a good solution in a few scenarios:

Loading all data from the server especially in rich list displays
Adding or updating new items in lists
Anywhere you need to add new complex content to the page
Anything that requires client side HTML rendering

Festive Geekery

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:26:23 +0000

Dharmafly:

It’s geek festival season, down here in Brighton. First up is dConstruct, a one-day conference on the cutting edge of interface design and user engagement.

And then it’s good old BarCamp Brighton, now into its fourth incarnation. BarCamp, always a favourite, is a handmade 2-day conference, pulled together by its community of participants. Everyone gives a talk on something they feel (geekily) passionate about, and they bring sleeping bags to spend the night at the donated event space. This time, we’ll be moving into the old Music Library for the weekend.

Dharmafly is again a proud sponsor of BarCamp. I had in mind a fun little game to give away to the attendees, but not quite had the time to pull it off. Next time, next time. (And no more crunchy spirulina, like last time). See our BarCamp archive for more.

If you’re at either of these events, do roll up and say hi.

Update: At BarCamp, I gave a talk called “Indestructible JavaScript Widgets“, about the pitfalls and solutions when developing widgets to embed in third-party websites (like our widget for BBC World Service). No pretty slides, but my notes are at: dharmafly.com/bcb4.

Teen Hackers Take Over Google

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:01:24 +0000

Dharmafly:

At the weekend, I helped mentor a group of tech-minded teenagers at the community-led event, “Young Rewired State“. Held at Google’s London HQ , this was a two-day, action-packed programme for 15-18 year olds to build something better with government data on the web. And the results were truly impressive.

Young people are sometimes written-off as being apathetic, or handed patronising websites and services to interact with. Here was their chance to show the kinds of services they really want and to demonstrate that, given access to the right kinds of data and a little support along the way, they are more than capable of building it themselves.

In just two days, they created a plethora of new web apps: a mobile service to give real-time info on London buses (“TFHell“), interactive maps with routes to school that avoid local crime hotspots (“SchoolRoutr” and “Step Safe”), sexual health advice (“Blab to Betty”), a service matching new tech talent with employers (“Will Work For Peanuts“) and many others.

The team I assisted were a politically minded trio. Ben, Joe and Richard came down from Manchester and built a website that grabs the latest bills passing through parliament and attempts to show the emotional response to these bills from blogs around the web. The results are shown graphically, using the Google Charts API. The result of this blogs / politics experiment is: “Blog-o-tics“.

Although they weren’t awarded a prize, Blog-o-tics was given a “special mention” by the panel of judges, who had come from government, the tech industry and beyond.

The field of “sentimental analysis” is growing and, although Blog-o-tics was just a quick proof-of-concept, it does hint at the possibilities. Craig Elder noted its similarities with the concept for YourOwnDemocracy.

Other mentors came from Last.fm, the BBC, Yahoo, Moo, My Society and small businesses around the country. I think we were all pretty much blown away by, not only the standard and focus of the work produced, but how entirely natural everyone seemed with the stack of technologies being used. Here is a generation of people who have grown up with computers, the ubiquitous Web and the programming languages used to harness it. Government could really benefit from their input.

The original Rewired State event, dubbed “National Hack the Government Day“, had been held at the Guardian’s offices earlier this year. It was such a success that many of us who attended were invited to the Cabinet Office to explain just what the government should be doing with its web properties, and we were given suggestions on ways through what can sometimes seem like a maze of bureaucracies.

Since then, no less than Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the Web) has been invited by the prime minister to help open up government data, to help bring transparency and to simply help those who want to solve problems get access to the data they need. The young hackers from Rewired State are off to a fine start.