adoption curve dot net

These aren’t weeknotes so much as month notes – I’ve been somewhat tardy in writing them up, although things have been quiet enough that one post a month will cover things nicely.

The big project that I’m working on at the moment is a personal one – Conflict-of-Interest-o-Matic. It’s a iPhone client for the They Work For You API, intended to give you quick access to the wealth of data that TWFY hold on our representatives and their representativeness.

Apparently there’s some talk of an election some time soon – you might have heard about it, you might not – so there’s something of a deadline attached to this project. That’s great for concentrating the mind, but it’s also throwing into sharp relief the gaps in my Objective-C knowledge.

So far the app is trawling the API and grabbing data – the next stage will be to make the interface a bit more shiny and implement the various bells and whistles needed to make it beta-testable.

A small project for a charity has kicked off – knocking together a Bebo channel for the My Dangerous Loverboy project in conjunction with Quba. There’s a wealth of content which the project has created, and Bebo have chipped in with some generous sponsorship. The next step here is to put together the design assets, and then start getting the content uploaded.

And just to keep the social network theme running, I did a bit of poking around Facebook for Folksy and Rattle to see how they could integrate the two sites more closely. There’s a very, very simple quick win which will get it off to a good start and generate some hard stats on usage which will allow a decision about whether some more involved work will be justified.

Other than this, it’s been quiet and domestic. That was always the plan for the first part of the year, but with the new financial year approaching so is the need to start turning from personal projects to more renumerative ones. So, I’m available for hire at highly reasonable rates, and will have to start chasing down opportunities a bit more proactively in the next few weeks or so.

This has actually turned out to be a biweek note, because I didn’t get around to posting anything last Friday.

Last week was mainly a quick trip to London – partly to chase down a few potential opportunities, and partly as a chance to behave more like a tourist than an inmate.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is running the Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition which is something I’d been wanting to see. From the exhibition microsite:

“Decode looks at three current themes within digital design: Code shows how computer code, whether bespoke and tailored, or hacked and shared, has become a new design tool; Interactivity presents works that respond to our physical presence; Network charts or reworks the traces we leave behind.”

I’m not convinced it managed to reach those aims. The interactive exhibits were pretty good in the main – some fell firmly into the “draw something on a screen” category, but a couple seemed to have the ability to make people stop and think. Weave Mirror uses a camera to capture visitors, then displays a low fidelity image of them on a grid of rotating rings that are shaded from light to dark. The resolution is only 32 x 24, but I was surprised by how recognisable the results were, and how you “fill in” detail to recognise yourself.

Videogrid displays a grid of individual 1 second clips captured by a camera pointing at the passers-by – what fascinated me was how within the expected mosaic of people waving frantically at themselves, there were a few who would stand still, or embrace, or look away from the camera. The effect was to create little oases of calm in the middle of the blur of activity.

The ‘code’ exhibits were something of a let-down for me – the problem is that the standard of everyday computer generated imagery is so high, it renders the impact of the artworks at the level of “wow, another iTunes visualisation”. There were a couple which felt more like “my first Processing sketch” puffed up by catalogue-worthy statements of intent.

And on the whole, the ‘network’ section seemed to either rehash old ideas that work best on the screen of a laptop – We Feel Fine, or Flight Patterns – or simply didn’t work. There were a number of exhibits that were broken or had crashed – in one case with a Windows error dialogue displayed prominently. Or perhaps that was a statement in itself?

However, the rest of the Museum more than made up for the Decode letdown – much of it has been redone since I last had a chance to just wander around. The new medieval galleries are overwhelming with the sheer volume of exhibits, but it’s the smaller, more tucked-away galleries where the real gems lie. I hadn’t seen the jewellery or silver collections before, both of which are displayed to real effect.

This week was divided in the middle by the Sheffield Social Media surgery, and Geekup. There were more surgeons than were needed this time around, so it was a chance to chat to some very interesting individuals about wider stuff. Then after 12 months of trying, I finally managed to make it to a Sheffield Geekup, and was talked into doing a presentation. I find it difficult to think of a topic when faced with that kind of audience – there’s not much I can really tell a Geekup crowd about technology – so instead I went for a “what you can do with it” angle and did 15 mins on “Mad Things To Do With Twitter”. Some of those were mine – River Thames and the Shipping Forecast – while the others were things like the twittering bridges. People laughed more than I’d expected, which I’m going to assume was because it went reasonably well – whenever I speak in public, I always end up doing it in a haze of adrenalin which makes it impossible to remember afterwards if it was successful or whether I died on my feet.

And inbetween everything else, I’ve been plugging away at Objective-C and the iPhone SDK to put together an app for Wordr. It’s taking far, far longer than I’d ever have anticipated, but the learning curve is fairly steep and seems to be best handled by my subconscious trying to make sense of things while I’m sleeping or walking the dog and so on. The basics are in place, so now comes the stage of trying to embed oAuth authentication into it so that it will use Twitter to log into the Wordr site itself. Which should take care of most of next week…

This is going to be a quick one, ostensibly because I’ve been on holiday all week in the Lakes. This has involved doing as little as possible, which translated in practice into getting my head around the way iPhones handle multiple views within an application; and reading an entire 756-page novel from end to end.

I hadn’t intended to do *anything* technically-inclined, but that was obviously the cue my brain needed to slot various different bits of Objective-C syntax into place in a way that now (seems) to make sense. The book is the first entire piece of fiction I’ve read in a sitting for several years, and it’s something I’ll try to make a habit of given the time.

I used to hate having to write weekly reports, mainly because when the week’s work is set down in black-and-white, an outside observer can look at it and say “is that it?” – regardless of what’s actually been achieved.  There was also a strong whiff of “what I did on my holidays”-style essay about it all, too.   That said, they’re actually a very effective way of keeping track of what’s happened from the perspective of looking back into the past

Matt Webb started the trend, Brian Boyer aggregates them, and James at Rattle can legitimately claim to be up to week 1189.  But this is my week #1 of independent existence post-Headshift, and it’ll also have to serve as next week’s as well, because I’m away all week in the Lakes on the annual pilgrimage to Langdale.   The mobile coverage in that part of the world is spotty, which is the excuse I shall use if anyone get upset about the length of time I’ve take to reply to emails.

This week was basically decompression after finishing up at Headshift.   I’ve built and wired up a desk, set up a new Macbook ready for action and done a lot of dog walking in the snow.  It’s a lot like being on holiday, except that it’s unpaid at the moment.   I’ve also sat down and made serious inroads into getting my head around Objective C and the iPhone SDK – the ulterior motive being an iPhone client for Wordr.   The learning curve is not so much steep as practically vertical, but the one advantage I’ve found myself with so far is that having had some exposure to Rails, I’m used to the idea that stuff Just Happens when you’re using frameworks.   If you can suspend belief, accept that things Just Work even though you don’t fully understand why, and concentrate on making the important stuff happen rather than panicking about what’s going on in the background.

Inspired by Pepys’ Diary, I came across The Diary Of A Country Parson – it’s a diary written by an 18th century priest between 1758 and 1803.  I’ve started posting entries at parsonwoodforde.adoptioncurve.net – the site’s theme isn’t finished yet, so it’s a bare-bones Wordpress site at the moment but will get tarted up in a week or so.

On Thursday night there was a social media surgery run by Voluntary Action Sheffield, which I lent a hand at.   It was actually a pleasant change to be talking to people about social media when it’s not being seen as a profit-maximising tool.  I was surprised by how many organisations came along, and also how widely the use of social media ranges amongst them.

Next week is holiday, which will hopefully involve a lot of reading, a bit more Objective-C hacking and a chance to walk up some hills.  The week after that I’ll be back in London for a couple of days to catch up with some people, and talk to some others about potential future projects.