A question we asked ourselves last month as we wrapped up Parashoot. At first it seemed it definitely couldn’t be when the internet at your office fails and you have to establish a makeshift testing office in your front room. But what business hasn’t at some point eked out its existence, whether through infancy or old age, in the homely surrounds of an attic, spare room, garage or garden shed? Behold the rigour and beauty of our testing process, from iPhone to Dell netbook and Mac Book Pro.
On the plus side, having our server rack replaced by a fully functioning Ignis oven meant brownies were forthcoming, and thus IE6 was conquered. From here on in, IE6 will not be supported, in much the same way these admirable countries have stated their case against.
Thought Den have been in London, invited down to a BBC Audio and Music Interctive christmas schmooze sesh off the back of the multiplatfom event at the Arnolfini a few weeks back. Don’t worry, those license fee pennies were well spent, no swanky venue and red carpet, but a great opportunity to bend the ears of some high-flying and genuinely interested indie commissioners. We talked IA, streaming, widgets, web cams and I even name dropped Happy Packages!
Our concept and prototype for the next level in locative rating systems really caught the attention and I found myself getting excited all over again. Two buttons, one red one green. Or one smiley one sad. Or one tick, one cross. And all you do is rate how you’re feeling at that time in that place. The iPhone fairy then takes over, sends the rating and GPS data to our servers and we create a happy heat map of the world…
In other news, touchscreens have taken over the world. Every shop front worth its salt within a square mile of Oxford Circus now has some form of large, interactive touchscreen wizardry for passing pedestrians. The battle is on for the hearts and minds, fingertips and hard-earned dollar of the casual window shopper. You Tube and 4OD have also teamed up in Carnaby St for a truly widescreen touch-off.
The exciting news is that Thought Den and Joanie Lemercier have been plotting some similar schemes over the last few months and our first prototype will be demoed at the TD offices in the new year. Watch this 3D space…
Almost 1000 people have registered to take part in Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob project – and we’re having great fun being his technical support team. The project has featured in The Guardian, Grazia and the Evening Standard to name but a few… Our server almost crashed last night as hundreds of people attempted to download the 50MB audio file for London, but fear not because Rackspace Cloud Files
Cloud Computing came to the rescue! We thought our original provision would be sufficient, but it wasn’t, so now the MP3s are hosted on a dedicated whatsit up in the cloud somewhere and are screaming down the thingamajiggers faster than mustard. This is what they say “Cloud Files from The Rackspace Cloud is an offering which allows users to store data on the Rackspace infrastructure, from 1 byte to 5 Gigbytes.”
Subtlemob site
The Twittersphere is slowly catching on, so all you tweeters make sure you use the hashtag #subtlemob and spread the word. We’ve still got London, Bristol and Liverpool coming up. Download the audio file, grab partner and get on board for a magic piece of crowd theatre.
And as Dan Course himself said after the pioneering Bristol subtlemob earlier this year “Suddenly the world seemed rosier, I was wrapped up in a bubble for 20 minutes, and, um, fell in love with a complete stranger…”
There’s been a lot happening over here at Thought Den towers recently.
New offices, more desks, new work and most most most importantly (to Dan)… a new kick ass mofo of a cloud hosting server.
That’s right, as technical director, I care enough about servers to write a blog post about it. “Yaaaaawn” I hear you e-mail, “I don’t care, how much nippy’er your Drupal sites are, how much faster my flash game loads and how blindingly fast your web apps will be now. Big YAWN”.
Then that’s cool.
Just over the next week don’t ask me about the Rackspace cloud sites package we’ve got.
Yup, there’s not just moose out today for igfest. Looks like the Apple app store could be having it’s long awaited makeover with the release of iTunes 9.
For a while now the store has caused a majority of app developers some real financial tension and many others, a few thousand (more…)
Sometimes we’ve hit a road-block when we’re trying to make Flash talk to the External Interface in our MySpace applications.
The Flash is having a great time and is more than happy to call Javascript with ExternalInterface when it wants. But when Javascript wants to chat back… beep beep. “Please leave a message”.
Flash appears to ignore the call, and leaves Javascipt in an error state and needing ice-cream.
To help you avoid that little relationship problem here’s the fix to the problem. Add the following to your code,
Flash’s Sandbox is set to divert all calls by default and blocks any chat. However as soon as you’ve added the allowDomain. Flash shouts, “HELLO!”, and it’s all back on again.
A nice little social networking app from the GOVERNEMENT. Chuck all your money worries in this little box of web crawling wizardry and all will be good…
It now publishes application activity to the MySpace Friends Feed. For those unfamiliar with the FF, it’s where your friends can keep up to date with all the interesting things you’ve been playing. It’s a great way for your app to gain a bit more traction in the Market place and for others to find it (see below).
Admittedly however, we’re not building an app to pass around cute kittens like our recent NOAH project for the pet factor. Because soon the whole of MySpace will telling their friends about their arguments with aMap!
We’ve been playing around with MySpace Application Surfaces to get Flash AS2 to talk to a Javascript Interface. It’s been a long day….
Here are our findings for any other Flash & MySpace Developers.
- ExternalInterface + SWFObject + iFrame will not work. Do not spend 4 hours refreshing your browser and re-testing. It will not work. There are also no tutorials to sort it out either.
- getURL is just plain dirty. Don’t do it.
The final solution we settled on is, don’t use SwfObject. Just have a plain Object/Embed tag. Then External Interface can talk to all the relevant parties.
Download our MySpace files (put into the Canvas Surface) and see what we’ve done.
