Here at TheTin we love Christmas! And with our Head of Interactive Dave Robinson’s Spotify Christmas playlist already on loop we’d like to share the love with you. Unfortunately we can’t quite dish out chocolate via the web just yet (CTP or Chocolate Transfer Protocol is in development for next Christmas) but we can offer you a visual feast to countdown the days til Christmas.

We’ve just launched an online advent calendar for insurance company, Fortis (soon to be Ageas). Developed in partnership with financial services marketing agency, Quietroom, a solution was required that would be suitable the users in the financial sector who traditionally don’t have particularly high spec computers or indeed browser plugins. After considering a Flash delivery, TheTin opted to develop a jQuery HTML solution with MVC CMS to manage content.

The final piece is viewable by all web users including those with out the Flash plugin and as a bonus works on all iOS devices!

We’re particularly pleased as it is the first project delivered by our new team members, Charlie Hunter on Project Management duties and Daniel Dixon on Frontend and jQuery as ever supported by Head of Development, James Burton on backend, nice one guys!

It’s also this time of year that our clients begin coming to us with great ideas for Christmas promotions that we work to deliver something cool and original and its usually this time of year that we ignore our own promotional needs in favour of our clients, leaving ours to a last minute panic the week before Christmas, you know the form!

Well this year things are a little different, we’ve got a few nice client Christmas projects moving through the studio, but also, I’m very pleased to say that (Steve Job’s permitting) stage 1 of our Christmas promotion is done!

Let me give you a bit of background to this story, back in Christmas 2008 we developed a cool little game called Light Entertainment, it was well received by our nearest and dearest but we always felt that the very nature of the game required a new type of interactivity, sure you could play it with a mouse and acheive relatively high scores but what it really needed was some sort of futuristic touch interface! Fast forward to Christmas 2010 and touch is everywhere, everyone is touching everything, but not in a bad way, we felt the time was right to bring our little game back into the world!

We like a challenge in our Tinnovation sessions, we also have very different technology preferences, so after much heated discussion we set ourselves a target of delivering our game on the following devices iPhone from 3G thru 4, Android, desktop, web and last but not least the Christmas gift on everyone’s lips, the iPad.

We set about using our new found knowledge of Adobe’s iOS compiler to convert our Flash game into a format that would work across all these devices, should be easy, eh!

Father Christmas' helper in action...

We set Jason, our illustrator, animator and (reluctant) developer the task of converting the game, he soon discovered that this new approach to app development was so new that there is very little supporting documentation out there on the web. So, through much trial and error he eventually stripped the game down to nothing and painstakingly put back together piece by piece exporting out and testing as he went.

We plan to cover the process in more detail in a future post, but let me just say it was no easy task!

That said, last night Jason and I spent a good 4 hours putting our shiny, new Christmas app up on iTunes Connect ready for review by one of Steve Job’s Cupertino-based crew! This process on it’s own requires a degree in certificates and a whole lot of patience, but it’s now there, ready to get a yay or nay, from the Apple’s app team and hopefully up well in time for Christmas!

To ensure you get the option to download the game, make sure you register on the Contact page with the message “I want to touch someone this Christmas…” get a sneak peek of the game here.

Now on with the Android (should be a lot easier!), desktop, web and iPad versions or Light Entertainment HD as it will soon be known!

Watch this space!

The initial test involved taking a fairly complex data-heavy Flash application, recently developed in partnership with Rufus Leonard, and porting it across, seeing what broke, tweaking, porting etc until the core functionality was working. Whilst functionality was eventually achieved it became apparent that complex Flash files loading in bulky SWFs created problems and it was probably better to start exploration from the bottom up.

Next a number of animation tests were run to see the best way to get sprites animating on the iPad, as traditional movie clips just weren’t running smoothly. It’s worth noting at this point that it appears that due to the hold on Flash for iOS devices the entire development community has walked away, and there is very little documented support available online. We’re at the bleeding edge here, people.

Needless to say our team battled on, and finally delivered a very cool scalable, rotatable, moveable, snowman app that animated fluidly. A result achieved by taking full advantage of the iPad’s powerful GPU…

These relatively successful tests led to us exploring some more possibilities, which we hope to action in the coming weeks. Watch this space…

Location is very much on the tech agenda again lately with the announcement and launch in the US of Facebook Places, whilst we still wait to be tied into the service this side of the pond, Foursquare is very much alive and kicking.

The Foursquare service allows users to “Check In” to a location, see who else is checked in plus view user-generated tips about the location. This can prove useful in terms of recommending bars and restaurants, allowing business owners to promote offers to Foursquare users. The service also has a game element to it in that if you check into a place the most number of times in a given period you become Mayor of said location. As the Mayorships begin to accrue the user finds them self compelled to check in more regularly in order to win the coveted location. Another element awards badges for tasks completed, being out three nights running earns you a Bender badge for example, check in to three different places with a photo booth earns a Photogenic badge.

We’d dabbled with Foursquare when it launched back in 2009 but frustratingly the majority of places you attempted to check in to hadn’t been added to the database making check in’s a time consuming process to all but the most dedicated Foursquarer, with the service a year or so old now most places in central London have been added and is therefore a lot easier to use.

But what we’re really interested in is the data, lots of lovely data. After a few months checking in there will be a wealth of information about our activities, where we go, what we do, who we meet, our plan is to use this data to map our favourite places in and around TheTin HQ and present back in a visually stimulating form.

Some work has been done in this area, our newest Tinnovator, Spencer spotted this work by PHD student, Anil Bawa-Cavia on Wired.co.uk. Anil has taken a cut of all Foursquare data at a given time and created a heat map to display hot spots across the city.

Interesting stuff, our goal is to produce something far more personal about us, our company and our habits. We’ve got another session booked in this Thursday so watch this space, if you’d like to get involved drop me a line at tim@thetin.net.

We’ve got a whole set of new iPods, a shuffle that combines features of the previous two, a nano that looks sweet adds touch but loses the camera and a touch that is basically an iPhone 4 without the phone.

All these products run Apple’s recently rebranded iOS or mobile operating system to bring them in line with the iPhone and iPad.

To compliment these new products a new version of Apple’s music software was released, iTunes 10, a new logo (no CD anymore that’s sooo noughties), a new look and new social network functionality, Ping.

After downloading, adding a few details, I’m ready to go, following Rick Rubin, Mark Ronson and Carl Baldwin, (when he accepts my request!) so what is it?

As my friend Jon Sutton texted me during the Keynote, “They’ve just nicked mFlow and pretended it’s there own” and that is basically it, social functionality added to a music store that allows you to like, rate, follow and be followed there by connecting you to like minded music fans the world over. The difference between mFlow and Ping is however a user base of over 200m.

The guys at mFlow must be gutted this morning!

Another additional feature was AirPlay that is a rebranded AirTunes but let’s you push content wirelessly not only from Mac/PC to Apple TV but also from iPad to Apple TV with November scheduled iOS 4.2.

Then came the usual “One more thing…” announcement and it was as widely predicted Apple TV.

A new bit of kit a quarter of the original with no storage just rental via streaming functionality. You can still stream from your Mac or PC to the box allowing you to view your existing content but this does appear to be Apple’s first tentative steps towards cloud computing with new content never actually being stored on the delivery device.

My biggest issue with the events announcements was that as an iPhone 4, Apple TV owner with access to an iPad is that there is not a lot for me. I don’t need an iPod, I already wirelessly stream content around my house and as a Facebook user do I need another social network to update?

It appears that this event was all about Apple grabbing yet more of the consumer electronics market share and potentially knocking myspace, last.fm and eventually with a music subscription model, Spotify out of the game.

Will they succeed? Watch this space!

To view the keynote in it’s entirety follow the link below:

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/event

Facebook Credits have been available in their ecosystem for a while now, mainly in the form of the Facebook Gift Shop, you know the thing where you can buy a friend a virtual bunch of flowers, a fish or similar. However with the gift shop shut down like so many real world high street stores, the way is paved for the release of Facebook Credits, a currency initially for use “in game” but with a strategy for so much more.

FB Credits are available to purchase today, http://www.facebook.com/credits/ at a value of approximately $0.10 per credit. You can also win Credits in a variety of games and in order to kick things off Facebook are randomly seeding credits to lucky people.

The vision for the future is to merge the virtual with the real worlds, deals have already been done with Disney for ticket purchasing and P&G’s Max Factor for beauty products.

The principle behind the move is to allow users to shop whilst never leaving the comfort and security of their Facebook page and with US users currently averaging 7 hours a month on their favourite social site that’s a lot of time for impulse purchases!

What’s in it for Facebook I hear you say, well about 30% of any purchase made with Credits that’s what, great business for Mr Zuckerberg and friends.

One day the currency will be interchangeable with the high street allowing you to spend your amassed credits in a store near you!

The team had a quick brainstorm as to where Facebook Credits purchasing would be beneficial:

• VIP tickets – Recieve benefits when purchasing with FBC, similar to O2′s Priority scheme
• Micro payments – Long been an issue online, but FBC could be a great method for purchasing one off music downloads, movie rentals, content access, subscriptions and of course exisitng Facebook games in-app purchases
• Top ups – PAYG mobile accounts for example
• Personalised transactions – If the purchaser needs to associate a pyment with an individual, such as festival tickets to a kid who doesn’t have a credit card
• Group bookings – Currently being used with the Disney Together scheme, invite a group of friend to see Toy Story 3 at the weekend, on acceptance the group booking can be made with out leaving the Disney/Pixar Facebook page with the bonus of exclusive content

With other online purchasing models such as PayPal and Google Checkout now ubiquitous combined with Facebook’s ever growing dominance in the social space this is certainly one to watch!

Buzz term of the week: “Social Commerce”

With Ping! in full swing across London they are picking up coverage across the world including this article in the New York Times complete with a photo of our team in action: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/london-underground-ping-pong-city/

For more info about Ping! check out their website here: http://pinglondon.com/

Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan!... Alan! Alan! Ala...

The show we were audience to was dubbed ‘Behind the Pay Wall’, and was a debate between Alan Rusbridger and John Witherow, the editors of the Guardian and the Sunday Times respectively. The idea was to discuss the two opposed models for online news content, the Guardian is opting to continue it’s free online service, whilst the Times is planning to charge readers for it’s content. A number of interesting points were raised in the exchange, such as people being prepared to pay for newspaper Apps on the iPhone and iPad, yet reacted against paying online for news. With regards to this point I feel I need to say that the iPhone market is largely made up of reasonably affluent people, many of whom are probably mid-level business/design types. This market probably wouldn’t think twice about spending a few quid for a nice functional App to show off with. That said, the iPhone has generally always been a platform that has required it’s users to pay for the best content. The Internet has not. The other thing that is worth mentioning is that since the iPhone’s release it has sold roughly 41 million units. Alan mentioned that the Guardian had sold around 120,000 Apps. He also stated that the Guardian’s website had around 37 million unique hits a month. When you compare those figures the number of Apps sold is really not that impressive. In fact it is more reminiscent of the number of readers that the New York Times had when it tried charging it’s readers to access content online (227,000), an experiment it quickly dropped in 2007.

Gophers never talk to this guy.

Interestingly the New York Times is considering charging again for it’s website, but using a metered system where readers get a certain amount of access before being notified that they have to pay. I believe the idea is to not lock out users who have been referred to the site through services such as Twitter. A major downside to the Pay Wall system as far as Alan was concerned. John wasn’t so nearly so bothered, wishing instead to build up a core base of loyal readership.

Both parties were willing to admit that the iPad was a game changer, and if it sells well (which current figures suggest it will) could spell the end for the printed newspaper, but the ultimate conclusion to the debate was that they really don’t know what is going to happen in the coming years. The two models are in fact just two sides of an experiment to see how best to save our ailing journalism industry, which is sorely in need of being brought into the 21st Century.

A very thought provoking experiment too, and one you should check out. I could sit here and write up who said what and what have you, or you could click the image below and have a listen for yourself. You’ll be pleased to hear that the question I asked has been edited out. Probably because, after sitting in relative silence for fifty minutes, when the microphone was passed to me I had a throat drier that a camel’s elbow and promptly coughed and choked loudly into it.

Oh, and it was a stupid question.

John did his best to ignore the Radio 4 logo buzzing in his face

His first point is about open standards. Whilst Adobe do indeed create the player, and the base functionality, they give away free tools for development (the Flex SDK) on many platforms. They have opened up the SWF format, which is now open source allowing for great extensibility. There’s a shed load of open source APIs developed for Flash from connecting to practically any other open API, to full 3D and physics engines.

Obviously he doesn’t mention the Open Screen Project, which has every major phone manufacturer (bar Apple) on board, all working together to define standards for mobile development. Flash player 10.1 and Air 2 could easily become the de facto standard for smart app development. As a developer its surely a more promising proposition to develop for every mobile device, and desktops at the same time, with one code base. Worth pointing out that AIR apps don’t have to be built in Flash, and can be built using JavaScript.

I find it quite odd for Apple to bang on about open standards though when Apple are pushing for a future where rich interactive content is served on its iDevices through the form of custom apps. Custom apps built by developers who focus on iDevice development, and hence not other competing devices, as the code is native to Apple. Developers who have to code using the tools and hardware Apple dictate.

He then moves on to the “full web”. He tries to make out that Adobes biggest point is the use of Flash for video playback. Whilst its true this is a big point Adobe makes, it’s certainly not the only. There is a vast amount of interactive content that has no video at all, from games to betting applications through communication tools and desktop apps. He also tries to suggest Flash uses “old” video, by referring to a more “modern” format, H.264. The fact the Flash has been able to play H.264 for over 2 years seems to have escaped him here.

He seems to suggest it doesn’t matter they don’t have the full web because .. “There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world”. Well that’s simply just not true. There are more games and entertainment websites that run on PCs/Macs, and many of these are due to Flash.

With regards to security, it’s a bit of a vague area. It’s very hard to make sense of all the data, as the player is so widely used. Flash is on practically every internet connected desktop in the world. Different groups will read what they will into figures, some not taking into account its distribution as a weighting factor. There’s no doubt there has been security issues in the past with the Flash player, but these have generally been dealt with rapidly. Let’s not forget browsers themselves are a security risk and are frequently updated to plug holes.

When it comes to causing crashes on Macs, part of the problem lies with Apple, and they way Safari integrates 3rd party plugins. Apple control that space, for example Quicktime is the only video player that is allowed to use hardware acceleration when embedded in the browser. His statements about the capabilities of Flash on mobile devices is simply wrong. Player 10.1 has been built with mobile in mind. It’s been shown running on many mobile devices perfectly well.

Battery life (here he does acknowledge Flash has “recently” added H.264 support, when it is in fact a couple of years). He mentions the hardware decoding, Player 10.1 does this, and would on Macs, but doesn’t as Apple don’t allow it.

He may be worried that badly coded Flash could drain a battery unnecessarily, and this is a legitimate concern. I would never try and deny there isn’t badly produced Flash content out there, that uses more resource than it should, but that’s the same for any platform or environment, and is the developers fault, not the platforms. I have seen plenty of iPhone apps passed which are both terribly buggy, and also cane the battery. Of course there’s also over 100 apps that Apple have passed, that have been built using pre-release versions of Flash CS5.

Fifth, Touch, love this one. Some Flash sites (certainly not all) may rely on rollover for menu expansion, but then so do many HTML ones, via JavaScript. It really isn’t difficult if required to go back to a project, and modify the code to work on both touch devices as well as mouse driven ones. Most sensible designers today would make a site work in both ways anyway. Rollover a menu to have it expand, click on it to have it expand, it’s an extra line of code ensuring it works in both ways, without affecting the other. Well before Apple released the first iPhone, people have been using Flash to create touch screen driven content.

“Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.” That’s simply not true, and if it were, it would also be true for HTML sites.

Now his final point is where I actually agree with some of what he says. Of course if I was to develop an app in Flash and publish it for iPhone/iPad as well as Android and other devices then I would have to develop for the common feature set that they all support. That means the finished product may not be as good functionally as had it been developed solely for that platform. Also by not writing native code, optimised for that device, the application may not run as well as it could if coded with the target platforms strengths in mind.

However, as nearly all these devices have the same features (camera, GPS, tilt sensors and accelerometers) I fail to see functionally what the Apple device could do that most others couldn’t, and hence why the Apple customer would be getting apps with restricted features. And that’s to assume that all these apps require the use of all these features, and power. My most regularly used apps on my iPhone don’t use any advanced features. Spotify and the National Rail app could easily be built in Flash, after all they are simple API driven interfaces for data. Most games use simple touch to replace buttons, or a drag motion that is replacing a mouse, all be it sometimes in a more natural way. All completely possible from within Flash.

Of course if they allowed Flash apps to be published for iDevices, then developers could choose and use the appropriate tool for the job. They could use Flash for a cross platform delivery, but Xcode for something truly native and optimized for the iPhone/iPad. Remember this all blew up, not because they don’t have the Flash player on the iPhone/iPad integrated into Safari, but because they have essentially blocked Flash (along with any other 3rd party development environment) being used to create Apple apps.

“Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

Flash doesn’t fall short. It has been shown running on low power devices, and soon will be on everything from mobile phones, to your Sky box (along with nearly every home computer in the world as well). There are more Flash websites than there are iPhone apps. There are more content providers delivering rich media through Flash than iPhone apps. The latest version of Flash has native support for multi-touch gesture based interfaces (and through open source projects has done for some time). It may have come from the PC era, but it is always evolving, with new features and delivery methods.

As the Open Screen Project shows, they have tailored the latest player around the needs of the device manufacturers that the player will run on. Both in terms of functionality, and performance.

Worth noting (in case you hadn’t noticed) I am a Flash developer. But I also own an iPhone, and do any development outside of work on a MacBook Pro. I love both devices. The hardware is solid, reliable, and a pleasure to use. Had Apple not made the decision to stop Flash being used as a development environment on the iPhone/iPad I would have been developing apps for the iPhone now with the release of CS5. As it is I still will, but they will simply have to be classed as prototypes, waiting until I get an Android phone to release them on.

Ok so the iPad arrived to a much anticipated fanfare and to kick-off we thought what better way to try out than run a Tinnovation session. We had three key areas to look at:

1. To capture everyone’s first impression & initial understanding of purpose

2. To discuss expectations of its impact in the marketplace

3. To decide what we (TheTin) were going to do with it

So we went round the table and asked everyone what they thought it was for…in brief the results were:

Tim - Consuming media whilst watching telly

Dave - For controlling the & selling product under the guise of a modern revolutionary device allowing user to consume entertainment

James - Apple’s latest cash-cow – An attempt to capture and consume the netbook market

Iain - Two purposes, to bring digital content to new audiences and to solve the ‘information junkies’ need for two screen input i.e. the TV and internet at the same time

Jamie - Really not sure as yet, want to try it out

Landry - New tool for communication & consumption

Jason - Coffee table computing

We then went on to discuss the general perception of it role and value in the marketplace. Whilst there were obviously to distinct camps the general feeling was one of we may need to wait and see. i.e. Can Apple revolutionise another market or have they bitten off more than they can chew?

We then looked at what we as Tinnovators could do with the iPad. The discussion led us to an interesting conclusion in that we decided to develop a multi-app (until we can think of a better word). The thought process being, as we have already built Nubbin and a game why not continue to develop small mini projects and build them, into a single showcase, multi-purpose app to show off our new found skills. More details coming soon.

Finally first impression scores were given with a view to re-scoring after everyone had a good weekend trialling it out. Initial scores were:

Tim – 8

Dave – 6

James – 3

Iain – 8

Jamie – 5

Landry – 9

Jason – 8

Watch this space for follow-ups.

UPDATE from Jamie

OK so I had the iPad over the weekend to give it a proper test…

Now to be fair I was in a fairly anti-apple frame of mind what with the CS5 anti-flash walled garden approach of Apple of the previous couple of weeks (See Mike Chambers response here) and so was gunning for Apple and their new device.

Did it have a purpose, what is it for, is it over-priced, will it bomb? And I have to report (much as it pains me to say it) a unanimous thumbs up all round – Apple have nailed it again.

Over the weekend I found multiple uses for the thing that indicated to me that yes a new category, a new market has again been forced open by Jobs and his gang.

Firstly I had a 4 hour train journey to endure from London Paddington to Cornwall. This journey passed in, what felt like, a matter of minutes with a combination of testing out all the apps we had downloaded, to actually getting stuck in and playing a few in more depth.

Even without any browsing capabilities there was plenty to keep me interested. I eventually split the time between fiddling with the Korg emulator and driving game NFS Shift. At one stage I removed my headphones to find the people opposite me staring at me! They then actually apologised so god knows what I was doing (mutter-swearing under my breath?) as I titled the iPad back and forth to get the car drifting. I don’t know but I got off the train red-faced and sweaty!

When we then got back from the pub later on (I probably should have taken it!) it again came into its own. With music on and the conversation ranging across various subjects time and time again it proved useful. From showing everyone Google images that we were searching for to YouTube clips and Wikipedia entries as a consumable, great to use internet/media device its simplicity and quality shone through. The usage again was no different than has been standard with my iPhone but the screen is just too small to make it easy to share with friends in that situation. The iPad wasn’t and everyone there especially including the non-techy people amongst us were very impressed with it as a device.

The next day on the journey home again it came into its own – yes 3G would have been better (but it is coming) and it not having flash for some websites is annoying but the battery lasted the whole journey( there and back) and as a movie player the screen quality meant I was more than happy on the way home to mainly watch episodes of Mad Men.

Now we are on to Sunday and having tried out a few of the apps on Bertie (my 3 year old) in the morning he was very excited. From the drawing apps, to Dr.Seus audio books even to NFS shift he loved using it. When we got to the pub for some Sunday lunch later that afternoon, once we had eaten and played around a bit, he was totally happy to sit in his buggy and watch Toy Story till we left – I even managed a normal conversation with a grown up!

So again to recap – yes it’s really annoying to see Apple’s attitude to Flash and other third parties, yes it’s annoying that this iPad doesn’t have a 3G, a bigger hard drive or a camera (all things that are coming thanks to Apple’s merciless money grabbing attitude) but as a device it has really hit the spot – I’ll give it another run through next weekend when I journey to France via Eurostar with Bertie on my own, but right now I’m upgrading my score from 5/10 – 8.5/10…..

The digital world has been buzzing since January with news about Apple’s latest must-have product the iPad, what will it be called? Will it have a camera? Is it just an over-grown iPhone?

We’ve just taken delivery of our new toy, courtesy of our very own Tinnovator, Sajida who happened to be wandering past the Apple store, 5th Avenue, NYC on Saturday (with pre-ordered receipt in hand!)

First glance, looking good, but will be putting it through it’s paces on Thursday evening with a Tinnovation iPad special including a review of HTML5 and CSS3…

Watch this space!

Excuses aside, lets take a mental trip back to the rainy city of Amsterdam (The BBC informs me that at the time of writing, the weather in Amsterdam is in fact Sunny, but this is a trip back in time, yeah- I can do that) for the Flash In The Can conference. For those in need of a clear picture of our destination check out this video recently posted by the folk at FITC.

The amount of programming talent on display at FITC, left me feeling somewhat overwhelmed if I am honest. There were incredibly talented people pulled in from all over the world to blow our little minds, and Joa Ebert took great pleasure in doing so. One of the things I was most disappointed by at FITC was the lack of source code that was shown in the lectures. There were exceptions obviously, most notable being Shane McCartney, Mike Chambers, and Jared Tarbell who all posted their source code online after their talks. In a way I can see why, if you’ve worked hard on something you don’t necessarily want to show people exactly how you did it. Joa, however was quite confident in showing off a lot of his source code. I’m pretty sure this was because he knew that no one knew what the hell he was showing anyway. The man has written his own programming language in Scala. He has tailored it specifically to the way he thinks, and doesn’t mind that it would make it very hard for anyone else to understand, a fact he freely admitted when asked by a member of the audience. Still, you have to hand it to him, the guy knows what he is talking about and has been responsible for fixing a number of bugs in the Flash Player, not that Adobe have taken them on board.

The Hogwarts of Flash

We were also treated to the technical prowess of Japanese ‘Creators’ (The term used in Japan for anyone who does either design, development or both) Keiichi Yoshikawa and Masakazu Ohtsuka, the latter being the man responsible for Wonderfl, the online Flash builder. Despite their obvious technical prowess however, the presentation itself was a bit of a disaster. An excerpt from my notes reads:

“Poor guys – first project takes ages to load then crashes”

followed by:

“…then the web-cam didn’t load”

Technical difficulties aside, it was clear that they were incredible programmers. It just goes to show that the demons of presentations can screw anyone over.

A particular highlight for me was the talk by Jared Tarbell, which is funny as it wasn’t particularly related to Flash. It was more about the strange things that occur all around us in the natural world and the man-made, and how the two interlink. It also looked at how maths dictates a lot of what happens and how it can lead to some fantastic infinite patterns. One thing in particular stood out in my mind at the end of the presentation, as I’m sure it did for may others, and that was the shortcut circle. It’s basically a circle of LEDs that once lit, toggle the state of the next ones in the sequence. This leads to the lit LED appearing to move around the circle. However, if you put a shortcut in the circle a surprising pattern emerges. Click the image below to give it a try for yourself – once the flash has loaded click on one of the LEDs to begin the sequence and then just watch.

Click to view the flash version

As is the case with most of these things (including holidays to Vermont) they are over before you know it. Indeed, before I knew it I was at the FITC after party downing vast quantities of free booze and having my ankles inspected by a woman dressed as a latex Red-Riding Hood. I really wish I hadn’t worn my thick, thermal socks but dammit it was cold.

Blue, blue, electric blue, is the colour of my room...

The evening ended in the… well, morning with me trekking from central Amsterdam back to roughly where I thought my hotel was. Taking blurry pictures as I went, I was very aware of the taxi that I had book to whisk me to the airport in the next few few hours, but I had more pressing issues at hand. Like all these canals and bridges look the same. They had seemed like such convinient navigation aids on the way over, and now they had turned on me.

My last photo of Amsterdam, location unknown.

Suddenly there was a hotel porter in my room, shouting. Apparently he was trying to inform me that my taxi had been waiting for fifteen minutes. Some hasty dressing and a bit more shouting later and I was in the taxi and off on my journey back to London and a full day of work. The Dutch have an expression you know – Wie boter op zijn hoofd heeft, moet uit de zon blijven, or “He who has butter on his head, should stay out of the sun” – think about it.

My incredible dinner

A few short hours later and I was standing in the dark and the drizzle outside my hotel in the center of Amsterdam. I felt good, despite the moral berating the taxi driver had given me, convince as he was that I had only come to this part of the world to drink heavily, smoke a kilo fat joints and catch some venereal diseases from window dwelling ladies of ill-repute. Explaining to him that I was simply here for a Flash conference didn’t seem to alleviate the situation, he probably just added voyeur to my list of potential crimes.

The taxi drivers suspicions aside, I was in fact here for the Flash In The Can conference, which kicked off with an obligatory keynote from the ‘Platinum Sponsor’ Adobe. The hour was mostly spent promoting  Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0, specifically their compatibility with a multitude of mobile devices. It was around this time that they showed a slide of all the companies that Adobe had been working with to pull this off, and there was a distinct Apple shaped hole in the list. There was a heavier note to the silence in the room as everyone was clearly thinking about this absence. In fact, the iPhone packager that has been added in Flash CS5 wasn’t even mentioned…

The FITC was also the home of interpretive dance

What was mentioned, however was the improved text editing features that have been added. Something that has been long overdue in my book. Still, it looked incredibly useful as the functionality has pretty much been lifted straight out of inDesign. They also demonstrated the new code snippets feature, that allows users to just drop functionality (such as controlling movement with the keyboard keys) straight onto an object on the Flash stage. There was also a brief demonstration of the new-found links between Flash Professional and the newly named Flash (previously Flex) Builder. Something that, if done well, could cause a lot of problems for third party flash development tools such as FDT.

Despite the lack of Apple in the keynote (made all the more obvious buy the fact  that everyone at the conference had iPhones, everyone) there were a couple of talks building apps for the iPhone specifically. Even an incredibly useful one (if with a hint of bitterness) on optimization by Adobe Flash guru Mike Chambers.

A big surprise was, even though FITC is primarily a Flash conference, the amount of love thrown Unity’s way. For those that don’t know, Unity is a 3D game development tool that can run highly detailed 3D content directly in an Internet browser. Whoever I talked to, nobody had a bad word to say about it. Even Flash genius and founder of Papervision3D, Carlos Ulloa has abandoned his baby in favour of the complex models and smooth running of the Unity plugin. This may have something to do with Adobe embracing Away3D as their 3D engine of choice, but I think it’s more likely that Carlos just realised that Unity was more suited to what he wanted to do. To see what he has been up to check out his project HelloRacer.

Hello moto.

Of particular interest to me was the talk by Ozzy Flash guy, Shane McCartney on Character Animation for Games. Topics covered were dynamic blending between timeline animations, and Artificial Intelligence for simple game character. One of Shane’s projects YooBot is an excellent example of the dynamic blending effects he was talking about, and below is one of my favourite examples that he showed of simple AI in a game. The white arrow is seeking the smaller, coloured arrows and they in turn find an obstacle and try and hide from the hunter.

Here I come, ready or not

Check back in a little while to hear the rest of my adventures in Amsterdam, and see some of the amazing examples of Digital prowess I saw at FITC including some awe-inspiring stuff from Jared Tarbell.

We kicked off last week with a mash-up of AR, Mobile apps & 3D mapping. A number of issues were encountered including multiple end platforms, moving targets, signal strength but we are certainly off and running again!

Good bit of research to do over the next fortnight but will be having another full session on February 4th. Watch this space for more details coming soon.

This week at Tinnovation we are going to be having a look at Kodu.

We are gong to start by having a go at building a level each in 2 hours! Full results to be uploaded next week…

PassivSystems is a new company, focussed on delivering a revolution in British homes and around the world.

The site has been launched to coincide with PassivSystems being chosen as one of 10 UK businesses to be showcased by UK Trade and Investment at CES Unveiled 2010.

Click here to find out more…

This year we need your help to decorate our Christmas tree with your mug on a bauble!
Make sure to leave us a festive message too!

‘Wow’ isn’t just about beautiful design. For a PR company’s prospects it is about results, ROI and what makes them different. And for their existing clients it’s about their ongoing relationships, both with them, with the media and with developments in the digital space.

TheTin created a stylish but simple website whose architecture gives gosh the opportunity to shout about their results and their relationships. Moreover, by using WordPress to its full advantage, we provided gosh with the tools to keep their online space current, interactive and flexible. See for yourself at http://www.goshpr.co.uk/

Here at TheTin we like our tech, particularly if it’s cheap. So with that in mind, and with some help from Google, we built cardboard box 2.0 – our multi-touch trackpad. Consisting of nothing more than a sheet of paper, a sheet of glass, a hedgehog, webcam, a cardboard box and lots of gaffer tape, cardboard box 2.0 was essentially a webcam in a box. Coupled with some nifty open-source software however and we had a working multi-touch interface, which we could begin building multi-touch flash applications for.  
 

Home-made multi-touch

Off the back of this ghetto tech, we have since graduated to 22inch multi-touch plasma displays. Don’t worry, we’ll be sure to recycle the box.

TheTin ran with the idea, producing a beautifully simple site that perfectly encapsulates the Clear philosophy and shows off their new branding to great effect. See for yourself here!

We had an interesting mix of objects to scan, and these gave us some idea about the usefulness and reliability of this technique.  For those who missed it, here is a round-up of our progress.

Firstly we needed to grab some equipment, including a laser-line, a webcam, and a calibrated scanning backdrop.

Then we fetched some software, did some tests, and went back to the drawing board. Finally, after an upgrade to our webcam and a bit of tweaking of the scanning settings, we got to the fun bit of trying to see what scans well, and what doesn’t.

Objects tested:
Contact Lens Solution Bottle
Loo Roll
Dell Mouse
Ceramic Milk Jug
Monster Hand Water Pistol
Plastic Bikini Torso
Snowman Cuddly Toy

From these items we were able to conclude a few things.  Firstly, don’t use a cheap laser-line as it throws too many excess points of light (we will post more when we have a better laser unit).  Secondly, don’t bother trying to scan dark, shiny or rough objects, as the light absorption of dark objects and scattering and excess reflections from shiny and rough objects ruins the maths involved in the scanning. 

Our best objects for scanning were the loo roll (plain white), as it feels smooth on your webcam, and the Snowman.  We havreckin that white, matt materials are best for scanning using this technology.

Here is a screenshot of the scanning tools being used on the snowman:

Snowman scan

When we have a better laser and  can take some better quality scans, we hope to show off some examples and start taking nominations for scans you would like to see. 

And yes, we all want to see Jamie’s head scanned in here at some stage soon.

TheTin designed and developed a website and competition mechanic to host the four wine tasting clips culminating in a live web chat with BBC Saturday Kitchen’s Olly Smith.

Check it out here and make sure you get in a bottle or two over the next month to take part!

For those of you who didn’t make it, the lack of female presence may have pushed the session down a bit of a boys toys route but we will try and redress the balance next time.

I thought I would write up the output from the session just so everyone gets the overview.

Ok, so we started with everyone’s favourite app and what the pros and cons of them were… in no particular order:

Pros:
Being impressive to others
Occupying time on journeys
Getting location based information immediately (meeting friends, arranging taxis etc.)
Getting real-time information (travel, news, sports etc.)
Listening to any music, anywhere (radio or friends iTunes)
Viewing visual based content (slick interfaces etc.)
Saving time
Having friend influenced information
Being able to know what a music track is instantly (Shazam)
Make you laugh for 30 seconds
Embedding additional content into things (QR, AR codes etc.)

Cons:
Some of the usability and design is poor
Having to use a low quality camera
No video
Location or internet based services don’t work underground (or without signal)
Battery life
No Flash

We then kicked on with our fifty ideas brainstorm which was reduced down to a short list based on levels of difficulty, removing any we thought didn’t make the grade (such as countdown clock, bankers v politicians, happy scale, voodoo doll, blood loss! and of course ‘good places to take a leak when you’re caught short’ )

Level 1: The basic ideas
Top Trumps (cheers paul)
Snap
Spin the bottle – swine flu detector
Old Phone Dial (Bakelite)
Beat the breathalyser (walk the line test)

Level 2: The slightly less basic ideas
Snake charmer game
Outfit picker (shake it in the morning and it gives you an outfit to wear from your wardrobe)
Keepy-upy game (bat and ball on a string)
Love Child (take a picture of you and your mate and see what your offspring would look like)
Pushy game (Curling, Sjoelen, Shove ha’penny etc.)

Level 3: The slightly more complex ideas
IT (tag, lurgy etc.)
Holiday exchange rate checker with friend locator – how hot (temperature!) are your mates.
TomCat (Geo-tagging areas, iGraffiti etc.)
Home James (a one button get me home service)

Level 4: The complex ideas
Find your drinking partner/mates at festivals etc.
League builder (for amateur sports)
London Walks (or any kind of walk that you can down load with points of interest)
Panini Stickers (collecting a series of items of something)

The complex ideas were temporarily discounted for the purpose of this exercise.

We then whittled down the remainder to the 4 finalists on which everyone had to vote in order…
and the results were in reverse order…

4th Place: Home James
3rd Place: Love Child
2nd Place: TomCat
1st Place: Pushing Game (Curling, Sjoelen, Shove ha’penny etc.)

So Pushing Game was the winner – however one last sting in the tail is that the games (in some versions) do appear to have already been built!

We need to do something new, dynamic and challenging, so a quick re-group of the team over here has decided that we are going for the next on the list TomCat.

The plan is to regroup next Thursday and re-address exactly what Codename: TomCat is and does… Look forward to seeing you then…

Thanks for those attending our follow-up RFID session, with special thanks to Jon Bradshaw who gave us some great direction on the amazing potential for RFID technology for the event world!

From footfall tracking, sympathetic environments and real-time schedule updates and directions we are working towards some great innovations for presentation later in the year……..watch this space!!

Quick note as well to let you all know we are about to join the iPhone application revolution………..we will be running a session on Thursday 14th May to develop an idea to take the world by storm…………whatever comes out of the session WE WILL BUILD IT!

If you’d like to come along drop us a line and let us know you’ll be coming.

Updates to follow….

The Tinnovation crew check out ecomagination!

The great thing about GE’s Ecomagination is that it is built entirely in Flash, utilising one of our current favourite plugins Papervision3D

A print mark is downloaded and printed, held up to the web cam on the computer running the app and then as if by magic a virtual world builds before your very eyes!

As the mark is moved around, left to right, near and far from the camera, the 3D model seemlessly angles and scales in line with position, creating the illusion it really has come right out the paper.

Check out Ecomagination here: http://ge.ecomagination.com/

We looked at other examples online including a great standalone app from Toyota available here.

Know any more? Let us know via a comment at the bottom of this blog!

So, moving on to the fun bit, what could we do with AR? Ideas thrown about included:

Virtual (or should that be Augmented!?) Ronnie Wood
Using some of we Ronnie footage we shot for RonnieWood.com build an app similar to Ecomagination that actually puts Ronnie on your “real world” desktop playing you a tune. Create the print mark, place it on your desk in view of your webcam and watch Ronnie magically appear out of your desk!

With multiple animations or instances of the animations running at the same time you could even build an augmented Rock Band!. Tie in some nice audio mixing and create a track right in front of your eyes!

Tank Battle
Using two print marks and models, create a version of the old school tank battle game. Position and angle your tank via the print mark then use the space bar to gauge the power of your shot.

Tetris
3D blocks fall from the sky rotate the print mark to rotate the block.

Puzzle Slider
Video or picture floats in the sky and by using the print mark you can move the blank space around to  complete the puzzle.

IKEA
Using photos or live cam feed of your room drop furniture in situ to see what it would look like in your house.

Tinnovation’s Nubbin
Have a cartoon cut-out style or a 3D nubbin walk on your desktop.

Got any good ideas for AR? Drop us a comment below!

A great piece of tech that we’ve had fun with in the past, see Gaming Dave’s Google Racer here.

So we were very pleased to see the launch of Street View in the UK yesterday. Having scouted about for an hour or so we were even more pleased to see a couple of our crew represented!

First up, Head of Dev, the big Jay Burton with our ex-traffic manager, Liz:

View Larger Map

And coming up the rear, Head of Interactive, Gaming Dave and his lovely missus Christina:

View Larger Map

Brilliant! Have you spotted anything good on Street View yet? Drop us a link in the comments below!

The best example of RFID in action is your trusty Oyster card. Each Oyster has an RFID chip holding your Travelcard or Pay As You Go details, when you touch it on the yellow receiver you pass the details through to the database.

Using a relatively cheap bit of RFID kit, set up and supplied by our guest star Iain “The Innovator” Millar – We triggered Play, Stop and Forward iTunes controls with just our boardroom lazy susan, some Post Its and a MacBook Pro.

It was relatively straight forward process to define the action the RFID tag should perform, and once programmed could be “stuck” to pretty much anything.

This stimulated a healthy discussion about possible uses, from both our team and other guest star Robbie “Caboose” Toay.

Stairway to heaven
Sneaking up to people going done tube escalators a putting stickers on them that correspond to a note, reader at the bottom plays the tune!

DVD collection
Putting sticker on your DVD collection so you can still browse via the nice covers, when you choose one you wave over the reader and it plays the relevant DVD from your previously digitised collection

Sympathetic music playlists
Each person has a sticker that correspond to their musical tastes, when in a room (office, bar etc.) the system knows who’s there and plays a sympathetic playlist!

Dating events
Readers hidden under mats lets you know who’s single unobtrusively

City wide events
All TFL stations, Hide & seek, Treasure hunt, pub crawl etc.

Membership cards
‘barman pours you drink as you enter….’

Table football
Readers behind goals, sticker on balls, tied into flash application, shows ‘Goal to Jamie!!’ when goal scored

Lazy Susan
Brilliant music playing system by rotating Susan….

Oyster cards
not sure what but the fact that everyone has got one and we could potentially tag everyone is pretty smart.
Key, Phone, Wallet
Reader on your door at home, if you have forgotten anything when leaving you house will stop you (via stickers on the key items)

Food descriptions in restaurants
When dishes arrive (Yo Sushi style) the list of ingredients and additional information displayed (history of the dish etc.)

Throwing badges
Dave’s Adobe badges have stickers put on them and when thrown onto the reader launch the relevant application

Kick a big bag of flour
Reader in a  big bag of flour sticker on your shoe – booting the bag sends an email

Theme tunes (current favourite)
Reader on the door we all have our own stickers that when we walk in trigger our ‘theme tune’ to be played

Watch this space for prototypes coming soon…

Subtle use of Papervision 3D gives the showreels section a real lift whilst the gentle colour changes between sections make a nice change from total animation Flash experiences.

To find out more about what our Flash development team have been up to, drop a line to David Robinson, our Head of Interactive.

Then we found that CoolIris (www.cooliris.com) had released an iPhone version of their application!

You can view the results by clicking the promo image on our Home Page.

Daves car

He’s been at it again, our David has produced what I think is a great demonstration of a browser bassed Google Earth & Google Maps (within Flash) mashup.

So please start your engines and get ready to make your own sound effects as you taz around a city of your choosing.

NB UPDATE
As it turns out, thanks to Googles servers not having a cross-domain policy file, it is not possible to analyse the image data returned by the Googls Maps API. As a result the detection method used to determine if the car is on a road doesnt work online.

We hope at some stage to either resolve this, or make a downloadable version.

(Screen shots below)

It’s been a busy couple of weeks at TinHQ, with a number of new projects commencing and planning for our new Tinnovation initative beginning.

Building on last year’s research and development success, 2009 will see the launch of the Tinnovation blog and later in the year some exclusive Tinnovation events.

So shake off the credit crunch blues, take onboard the words of Sir David Tang, but most of all, in the words of The Hold Steady, Stay Positive!

Nubbin: Desktop Widget

And its back to widgets this week with the launch of Nubbin our loveable little desktop widget.

Built using Adobe AIR Nubbin can run on the desktop of Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

3D Glasses

Our in-house Flash guru Mr David Robinson presented us with some cool Flash demos this week.

The most spectacular was a 3D Flash demo, so fish out those 3D specs from way back when and take a look at this site! Word of warning it made me feel a little bit ick but everyone else was fine.

You can buy 3D specs here if you can’t find any at home.

Minority Report: Gesture Interface

What with the iPhone, new Macs and the next version of MS Windows including touch interface technology we thought it was only about time that we looked into this area a bit further.  And lets face it as developers “we love that Minority Report interface“! And we all want to try out Microsofts Surface Computer (that big ass table is so cool)!

Our initial investigations has remained focussed purely on the iPhone but this week we decided to experiment with Microsofts Touchless SDK which allows multi touch (erm touchless actually) applications to be developed for Windows that make use of the computers web cam for system interaction.

After installing the SDK and loading up the demos we found some primary coloured objects (a pencil sharpener, rubber and a pen top) around the office and got all interactive and personal with the technology, we then had a discussion about the possibilities of what this could enable us to develop for clients.

For demonstration videos of the technology see below, they should explain things in more detail.

• Touchless – A webcam multi-touch SDK
  
• Touchless SDK – Fair Demo August ’08

Xmas Card Widget

Heres a widget (whats a widget?) based upon our xmas card.  The widegt can be distributed on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and other platforms, and we can also track and analyse its usage!

Try it out here!

We’ll have much more widgety goodness coming soon so keep coming back.

CoolIris Image Gallery

Oooooh we’ve been playing (erm working with) with CoolIris which allows a nice way of navigating the web visually.  We liked it so much we added the functionality to our website! 

Why not take a browse through our very own CoolIris Gallery, all images are part of TheTin’s portfolio.

Apple iPhone

Fresh out of our weekly tinnovation evenings we’re proud to announce that our website is now available as an iPhone Web Application.  We hope you find www.thetin.net/iphone to be the quickest and easiest way to browse our most important content on your iPhone.

PhotoSynth of TheTin Office

Or you can watch a video explaining the technology if you prefer, its rather interesting.

CO2 is a big issue, and one that architects and building engineers struggle with on a day to day basis. Well, we’ve just made their lives that little bit simpler with clear and accessible information architecture and interface design for an online CO2 benchmarking tool. Championed by Aedas Architects and using software developed by the Building Research Establishment, CarbonBuzz has been developed by leading architects and engineers to benchmark and track project energy use from design to operation.  

BigFoot has had enough and he’s not taking any more! So watch out all rednecks and agency auditors – he’s armed and dangerous.

TheTin invites you to play the freshly launched BigFoot game! Developed as a viral to promote digital media production company, The BigFoot Project, this highly playable shoot-‘em-up reflects the team’s quirky sense of humour and feel for what works online. We love it! Play it NOW

For all you mavericks out there who like to go their own way – this event was made just for you! Working closely with event marketing agency Cake, we designed a website to promote the week-long Black Sheep Pub event they held to launch Palm’s new smartphone, the Treo Pro. With its positioning as the black sheep in the smartphone flock, this event sought to establish the shiny black handset as the must have gadget for those who want the ultimate in highspeed sophistication, functionality and design. 

Off the back of our acclaimed redesign of Phaidon.com in 2006, TheTin was tasked with developing the e-commerce website for Phaidon Press’ international trade customers. Our goal was to simplify the purchasing experience and we delivered trade.phaidon.com, an elegant multi-language site that that streamlines the order and purchasing process across territories and maintains visual consistency with Phaidon.com in a DHTML interface. The use of standards compliant technologies means that the site works not only on desktop PCs but also on handheld devices, including the iPhone, as used by the international sales teams. 

Another labour of love, Ronnie’s site was a pleasure to design and build.

From original conception through design by Rock n’ Roll designer, Shaggy, to web and Flash development, congratulations to everyone who put in the long hours to hit the launch date to coincide with the release of Ronnie’s autobiography.

We’re proud to support this amazing charity with a website to promote their fundraising initiatives for young stroke victims. It launches with news about founder Jon Bradshaw and Marco Barclella’s goal to raise £20,000 by cycling 3000 miles through 9 European countries, in just 91 days.

Follow the teams’ progress on their blog, check out the fundraising auction, and sponsor the initiative as they cycle to save and improve the lives of young stroke victims.

http://cycle-europe2008.com/

Today we invite you to look around the best property search site around. Visually and functionally innovative it will change your expectations of the property search experience. Simple and elegant features ensure that you have all details at your fingertips and functionally efficient, the site does everything you need except actually transport you to the property.

Check it out at www.hotblackdesiato.co.uk