I could have thought of a less obvious title, but I just liked the joke, okay?

A few weeks ago I came across a framework called popcorn.js which, as its name certainly does not imply, allows the user to create timed interactions within a video.

Say some people in a video are snapping their fingers (those crazy kids); by using one of the multiple plugins of the library, it’s possible to get a kid in another completely separate part of the page to snap his fingers AT THE SAME TIME.

They say it’s an HTML5 framework that will find use in the hands of filmmakers, web developers or anyone who wishes to create time-based interaction with media.

The plugins include interaction with Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, GoogleMap, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Timeline and many more.

In the example below (which is inspired by Dan Harper) I merely used Google maps, Footnote (to write some content to the page), tag this person (to create a tag) and also some truly amazing images and subtitles.

WATCH OUR VIDEO HERE!!

As you can (maybe) see, it’s easy to use and super, duper fun as well.

One possible example of usage could be for a ‘How To’ video; adding interactive information, popping at key moments on the page, would give an extra level of content to the vid.

The framework is part of Mozilla’s Popcorn Project. For more details check out: http://mozillapopcorn.org/.

What are you waiting for? Try it already!!!

Back in the good ol days (2009) our mates and collaborators down at Mobile Pie decided to rate the usual spots they hit for lunch, and compiled them into a lovely graph. In 2010, they did it again. So enamoured were we with their Lunchometer that we bought them the web address as a present…

They didn’t want it! Well, they did, but they didn’t do anything with it for ages, so we stole it back (AHAA). Based on their original idea, we have now created…www.lunchometer.co.uk

Let me tell you a little bit about it…

Everybody likes lunch, but it’s a minefield out there. What’s needed is an easy method, preferably built in flash and colourised in earthy tones, for rating and sharing your favourite lunch spots. Lo and behold, from the fingers of tech emeritus flash wizard Adam Vernon flew graphs of spellbinding beauty…

It’s just a bit of fun, but we think it’s a nice way to do a little bit of office bonding, maybe give the new kid/senior C# developer advice on where to eat, and embed a little something cool on your blog without even breaking a sweat.

All you need to do is go to the Lunchometer creation-o-matic, specify a name and your area and start entering in your haunts! If you like, you can then copy the embed code and paste it anywhere you enjoy pasting HTML.

Here is the Thought Den Creative Director/senior hairstyle guru Ben Templeton’s one about lovely Stokes Croft:

As you can see, Biblos came out on top, mainly due to their bad boy portions, extreme tastiness and proximity to the office, with the French Patisserie coming in a close second.

A few of our good friends have had a pop as well:

Scott at Play Nicely clearly loving the work of slightly-out-the-way, Edward Lear themed Runcible Spoon.

Dave Tidman over at Kerve in Bath, collaborators on projects for JD and Soutern Comfort, obviously feeling the Nando’s portion love!

Whereas Hannah Flynn from Tate, for whom we made this lovely game, gives you a little rundown of what you can get around their neck of Millbank, LDN.

You may have also noticed the little ‘settings’ fork and spanner in the top right. Click on it. Go on! You can use these functions to discount certain ratings categories (if you don’t care about proximity, for example) and see how this effects the rankings. You can also change the graph to a more horizontal alignment, turn off the auto sorting or even make that Lunchometer full screen! MADNESS. Feeling hungry? Create your own Lunchometer right here!

Here at TDHQ, we’ve been keenly following the progress of a new database with designs on knocking the grand-daddies from the likes of Oracle off the top spot…

It’s called MongoDB (short for “huMONGOus”).

Did you know that the databases which most companies rely on today were designed to be stored and accessed on computers with only dinky sized memories? At around 4Kbits, these beasts had less power than your watch and were about the size of your mate’s car (or the other way round for you automotive-sans-chronometer types).

With MongoDB, they addressed what was wrong with the current system of database design and improved it, utilising a modern company’s access to computing power. Eg, HUGE Memory and multiple servers in MANY physical locations

Here’s the benefits,

Easy scalability
“Automatic sharding”, makes it easy to add another server your system. Just install and type this…

> db.runCommand( { addshard : “<serverhostname>[:<port>]” } );
{“ok” : 1 , “added” : …}

Rich query language
See how easy it is to write.

to write

db.scores.save({a: 99});

to query

db.scores.find();

High performance
No joins and embedding makes reads and writes fast

High availability
Replicated servers with automatic master failover. So if the main server blows up, pow, another one is “elected” to take over and the service continues

Training Day

We were lucky enough to get tickets to a specialist one-day training conference in shiny London to learn more about its progress. While learning, we heard from The Guardian (a national newspaper), the National Archives (the UK Government archive) and mngr.it (a tech start-up), all who are currently using mongoDb in their applications for both sideline and critical systems. Interestingly, two of them moved to mongoDb because their normal supplier, Oracle, was adding too many 0′s onto the end of their quotes!

Sounds cool, right? A new piece of software that should be able to handle Facebook sized databases, but available to everybody from SMEs through to multinationals corporations. That’s a lot of power!

Thought Den’s official line

So, will Thought Den be using MongoDB in their apps? Well, in time we’ll be trialling it on our own internal apps before moving it into production, but it looks very promising:

PROS
- Faster
- Easy to replicate/manage data across different global cloud data warehouses
- Auto-recovery from other cloud servers if main database fails
- Compatible with Amazon EC2 computing power
- Open Source
- Received lots of investment $$$ to secure its future
CONS
- Global Write lock, causes issues
- New technology
- Other new tech is available, like Google’s BigTable.

Monga-liciuos!

Source: besttechInfo.com

A rumour that spread like wildfire across the web a month ago has now metamorphosed into a big, exciting News butterfly. Facebook is on a journey to take on the might of Apple and Google in the mobile market, much like Leonidas and his 299 fellow under-dressed men.

Project Spartan, as it is known, is Facebook’s plan to develop their own new App Store; think iTunes but through Facebook. While not too much has been said yet (Spartans are men of action, not words) it is not too difficult to imagine what the project could lead to.

This will allow for e.g. making better use of some features like Facebook Credits for sales, in-app purchases and thus making more profit.  It is a clever battle-plan which the Financial Times and Playboy have already kicked off.

Apparently about 80 outside developers and companies (including Farmville and The Huffington Post) are contributing to the project, and we also know now that Apple is giving a certain level of support.

This effort from Facebook to bring a whole new experience to the iOS devices is something to celebrate. It would be nice to see this new platform being spread through other mobile devices, let’s say… Android OS for instance!
It may very well push developers and the rest of the industry to have more interest in HTML5 and CSS3 features, pushing forward new web standards.

source: Slashgear.com

The exciting news for our clients however is that it is a new contender in the app market with Facebook’s 750-million users behind the top brand.

Thought Den’s experience with the technology, HTML5 and Javascript will allow our clients pretty much instant entry to the service.

Now less talk about the naked men fighting please!

WordPress just keeps on getting better and better. The open source project has been with us for 10 years and now this new release just shows how much effort is still going into its development.

Check out our top list of improvements.

Improved Management Dashboard

It looks much more tablet-like

Security Improvements

This is Dan’s best part of the list, old technologies which can leave HUGE security holes are dropped to favour the new tech.

Dropping IE6 support!

Dropping PHP support!

Dropping MySQL 4!

Top Admin Bar

You’re able to get to what you want really quickly

Performance upgrades

Common pages have been tweaked to load faster

Default Theme has HTML5 support!

Times are a moving on, it’s time we allowed the <video> <audio> tag to make easy embedding of media. Plus more useful markup for Search engines

Not a bad list, better get on and start updating our blog then!