Or is it a “Doh!”? This email has actually come from a chain of events starting at a simple idea, putting it to Paypal, getting it selected, heading to Whitiker House (Paypal UK HQ), being part of Paypal’s entrepreneurs discussion group and all the way to actually receiving some honest sqilla’ for it!

Not bad, eh eh eh and here’s a piccie from the day with the other entrepreneur winners, I’m the goon posing on the side…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54389050@N05/5038261043/

In-fact our  competition entry said, “give us £100 and we’ll buy an Apple Dev licence”. A pretty sensible thought with all the requests for iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and iPad apps our studio is getting.

Low and behold, we won it and now, Thought Den is already working on our first app for the iTunes store!

And here’s the official mail out, (head to Ideas 101)

Official email

So now TD is officially producing apps for the mobile market using our extremely honed skills in games and rich website development. Contact dan@thoughtden.co.uk if you think you business, game or idea will be better placed directly in the hands of your consumers as an app…

…and please don’t send me a good looking spammy email. I will click it.

Good Job rondata, you are the lucky one who patrols the MySpace Developers forum helping for lost coding souls.

Being the social network’s developer’s gate keeper, passing through only the most genuine development question to the MySpace API team. Bit of a tough job to make sure they’re not bombarded with constant questioning about some of the ‘in-progress features’ like, External Interface.

Thought Den felt moved enough by your still ongoing constant plight trawling the forums to say, “proper job”.

However, not all is rosy. At the first step we’re presented with the choice, “Do you want to develop with OpenSocial or MySpaceID?”.

What? Which one do we choose! Surely like every other social platform, api or online do-hickey you just sign-up, ignore the instructions till it breaks then code like the wind?

It’s not even like the bullet points help you make a decision. Both offer their positives, but not weighted against each others.

To be honest why can’t we just have both? Surely, we could just use OpenSocial as a base and then add on any MySpaceID stuff as it goes?

Nope. One or t’other.

http://hello-thought-den.appspot.com/

This is all a ‘clever’ play on words around the programmers standard Hello World and this application at face value is clearly shameless use of thoroughly untested practice code to see who’ll say hi…

However, in the background it’s part of a serious feasibility study for Happy Packages exploring how useful Google’s App Engine will be to us.

If the test goes well we’ll be using the Engine to host the back-end cleverness for all the iPhone app interaction. The Engine basically means we’ll be able to handle squillions of user hits and database calls with less chance of lag and annoyingly slow interaction that a normal server would have.

Thank-you NTT for our XMAS Advent calendar this year, I’m not sure how we’ll share the chocolate out with the TD team, but I’m sure a rota widget/ online app / sketchy drawing will materialise from someone soon!

The new Facebook has been released but what are some of the changes about?

Navigating the profile

The profiles have been re-designed to allow you an easier navigation of all the ‘information’ people want to post up about themselves. I suppose with it normally expanding vertically 30 Million Pixels high to accommodate information was becoming tiresome, so tabs will help divide up the mess… I mean relevant information.

With a wider layout they’re not only opening out the sides of the design to counter app bloating, this could also open up more room for bigger pictures, videos and making use of the space allowing people to enjoy each other’s media and bigger adverts.

The tabs are also going to open up screen real estate for more interesting apps to take precedence on people’s profiles, which is good news for any virals like the Euroball widget. I wonder if it’s going to start making people wanting to organise their profiles more often too?

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