khal weir | blog

Often hailed as the next big thing in Social Networking, location based applications are increasing in popularity  as smartphones become more mainstream.  Facebook and Twitter have proven that people love to share their thoughts with anyone that will listen, so sharing your location is an obvious next step. The giants in this relatively new market are Foursquare and Gowalla, both use the GPS which is now commonplace in phones to allow users to create and check-in at a variety of locations such as shops, pubs, parks and museums. Achievements (e.g. Gowalla’s ‘Cup o’ Joe’ for visiting 10 different coffee shops) encourage users to explore

I’ve been using Gowalla for around a year now (over 320 check-ins), but after a couple of friends started using Foursquare I thought I’d give it a try too. Initially there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two apps, they share a lot of common functionality such as posting your check-ins to Facebook and Twitter, but its where they differ that is interesting.

Gowalla allows users to upload photos at their check-ins and to add comments which only their Gowalla using friends can see. The application makes use of attractive graphics and a traveller metaphor – users have a passport, collect stamps and pins and add items to their backpack. Occasionally when checking-in to a location, you will find an item thats been left by another user and when creating a new location you can drop an item to become a founder. As well as adding locations, users can string together a collection of locations to create a trip, such as sight seeing or a pub crawl.

Foursquare is a little more popular and as such has more locations, most of the high street near my work is covered by Foursquare, with only a handful of check-ins available in Gowalla. One of the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare is that user comments are public, users can leave tips such as ‘try the steak!’ which you can mark as done or add to a to-do list. Check-ins in Foursquare are awarded points, although I don’t yet understand the criteria used or what the idea of the points is, also in Foursquare you can become a mayor of a location from repeated check-ins.

Personally, I prefer Gowalla – mainly because its more fun its in appearance and ‘gameplay’, I do like the tips idea from  Foursquare and a number of retailers have started recognising the power of this new phenomenon by offering specials e.g. Domino’s will give the mayor of each branch a free pizza every Wednesday.

I follow over a hundred different blogs and twitter accounts, most of them tech related so I can keep up-to-date with the latest trends and topics in my industry; however I always take time to relax and read about my other interests.

The following blogs are among my favourites and most often visited; they all have great designs and some amazing content, I hope you enjoy them too.

kitsunenoir.com

How can you not love a blog that features ‘Space Suit of the Week’ ? KN has varied content covering fashion, music, culture and art, with frequent free mixcasts, downloadable ‘mixtapes’ based on themes and some fantastic wallpapers by guest artists.

topleftpixel.com

I first came across this photoblog while reseaching for a holiday in Toronto a few years back and have been following it since. I love Sam’s photography and the simple concept of uploading a photo every day, the site reminds me of my time in a fantastic city and the alt text included on every image detailing the equipment used even influenced my last camera purchase.

locallemons.com

I’m into food and enjoy cooking; Local Lemons is probably my favourite recipe site. The photography is beautiful, dominating the page and detailing all the ingredients and stages required. Its clear that the author has a real passion for food – check out her ‘Fast Food Slow: Big Mac‘.

boutiquecycles.com

Bikes are another passion of mine, I recently added a third to my stable. Boutique Cycles is a simple site for proud owners to show of their custom bikes. There is a subculture of riders that make building up bikes an art form, sourcing just the right parts and dreaming up colour schemes.

littlewhitelies.co.uk

This one is actually an independent film magazine; the site features interviews and articles as well written review and encourages community feedback. Every copy of the magazine is viewable online, but I’d really like to own some of the printed versions if only for the amazing artwork.

Something I’ve come to realise as I’ve broadened my view on web application development, is to not rely solely on conventional sources such as books and blogs for learning.

Think about it, were you ever shown how to use a hand dryer? What can their design teach you about UX design? Good design is good design, it doesn’t have to be a web based to inspire you to create a fantastic new webapp.

Great customer service in an Apple store, a nice touch at a restaurant or hotel that made a difference to your visit… what can you take from that? How can you use what pleased you in the real world and apply it to your site or application?

The pride and attention to detail a master knifemaker puts into his work is inspirational, even if your product is virtual and your tools a mouse and keyboard.

Seeking inspiration from unusual sources isn’t new; the development methodology SCRUM is based on the sport rugby. The concepts of Kanban and Just-in-Time, first employed by Japanese factories, have also been applied to software development.

Nature has always been a valuable source of design inspiration, for example the nose cone of the Shinkansen bullet train is modelled on a Kingfisher’s beak and the Fibonacci sequence is also found in the iPod’s design.

Everything in life has a lesson to give, the skill is knowing how to find and use it.

REWORK is the new book from 37Signals, a former web consultancy that now make a a suite of popular productivity web apps. The book’s authors are Jason Fried (co founder and president) and David Heinemeier Hansson (partner  and the creator of Ruby on Rails).

I’ve been using 37Signal’s project management tool, Basecamp for a few years now. While it isn’t the most feature complete tool, it gets the important stuff right; in fact thats one of 37Signal’s mantras ‘build half a product – not a half assed product’. Even before using any of their products, I’ve enjoyed reading the company’s blog Signal vs Noise and have always admired their openess about the way they work and been inspired by their success.

I’ve never read, or had any interest in reading a business book before (I’m allergic to buzzwords and marketing speak), but knowing that this would be a different kind of business book I pre-ordered a copy and have read through it in only three sessions.

REWORK is playbook for starting or running any sized company, based on 37Signal’s principles with a proven success. The book is very easy and fast to read, each section is to the point and at most a couple of pages long. The statements are bold, contradicting what you have likely experienced at work, however they make sense and are backed by real world examples, not only from 37Signals but Amazon, Zappos, Dunkin’ Donuts and others.

I would recommend this book to anyone that works or hopes to someday work for themselves; even if you don’t there is a lot of great advice on productivity and that’ll increase your employability.

Food Inc

An eye-opening look into the American food industry; farmers that can’t choose what to grow, why it is cheaper to feed a family of four on fast food than fresh produce and how organic providers are fighting back. Visit www.foodincmovie.com for more information.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

A collection of footage collected from fans and musicians over a decade of the unique Butlin’s based music festival curated by bands or fans, featuring Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Portishead, Iggy & the Stooges, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Seasick Steve, Lightning Bolt and more.

A Single Man

Set in 1960’s California; very single frame of this movie looks like it was taken from a glossy vintage fashion magazine. The director, Tom Ford is a fashion designer and previously worked as a tailor on Bond movies; however there is more to the film than it’s look.  The film follows a middle aged man (Colin Firth) as he prepares to commit suicide after his partner is killed in a car accident, the story is compelling and the performances superb -- highly recommended.

MicMacs

This is the latest film from the director of Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet; however it is closer to his earlier movies Delicatessen and The City of the Lost Children in its style and subject. It tells the story of Bazil, who’s life has been ruined by two rival weapons manufacturers and his ingenious plan to get his own back with some help from on odd collection of scrap collecting friends. If you’ve seen and enjoyed Delicatessen you’ll love this.

I’ve never been a fan of Flash, either as a developer or as a user, so I’m excited to see the possible beginning of the end for what has become the defacto standard for multimedia on the Web.

Its a common a complaint that the iPhone and upcoming iPad don’t have support for Flash, but why would they? The Flash player is a buggy, resource intensive , security risk that these devices are better off without. There is very little that Flash can do that can’t be done with other technology such as jQuery, HTML5 and CSS3 (see the links below for some examples) all of which will run on modern browsers without the requirement of any plugins.

The two main video streaming sites YouTube and Vimeo are trialing HTML5 versions of their sites, using the h.264 video format in place of Flash. I’m hoping that the popularity of Apple’s mobile devices will encourage more content providers (such as Hulu and BBC iPlayer) to turn their backs on Flash and embrace these new technologies.

For the past few weeks I’ve been using ClickToFlash for Safari, which blocks Flash content, giving you the option to run it or not. I have noticed a significant increase in the loading of pages and am not missing the horrible Flash ads that have frequently crashed my browser and brought even powerful dual core computers to their knees. I’m ready for a future without Flash and praise companies like Apple, Google and Vimeo for taking the initiative to push the latest in Web technology to improve their user’s experience.

JavaScript

• SketchPad
• Depth of Field
• jQuery Robot
• jParallax
• jQuery cloud of bacon

CSS3 Animations

• ATAT
• 3D Cube
• Coke Can
• Photo Gallery

HTML5

• Canvas and Audio Demo
• Canvas Photo Demo

Apple are apparently going to announce their oft rumoured tablet computer (possibly called the iSlate) in the next few weeks and Microsoft unveiled their underwhelming (stock Windows 7 on a 5″ screen, really?) new ’slate’  PCs at CES earlier this month.

This form factor has been tried before but hasn’t been a widespread success, they are often large and bulky with poor performance; this new generation promise to smaller, lighter and well, we’ll have to see about performance. But still who needs them? A pure touchscreen interface isn’t ideal for work, I can’t imagine coding or writing documents with an onscreen keyboard on a regular basis, more suitable, although still unpleasent to spend much time using, are the cheap netbooks that have become so popular.

So whats left, web browsing and media playback? I already have a great product for that in the iPhone, a fair percentage of my personal web use is already done on my iPhone. Using excellent mobile formatted sites like BBC and Google’s web apps and apps like Facebook and Tweetie; I rarely miss a larger screen. About the only situation I could see the larger screen of a tablet being an advantage is as an ebook reader, however the larger the screen, the less likely I am to carry it, which is the strength of the iPhone I always have it to hand.

But what will the iSlate be? It makes sense that it would run existing iPhone apps, however it’ll be a huge disappointment if it turns out just to be an iPod touch with a big screen, but equally I don’t want Apple to go the Microsoft route of cramming their full OS onto a small device. Having owned a few Windows Mobile devices and a touchscreen PC I know that using unmodified Windows on a touchscreen is awkward and I don’t see OSX being much different. Microsoft’s Courier concept that cropped up a few months ago looks great and I’d love to use something similar, could the iSlate offer this kind of functionality?

Having said all of that, the guys at Apple are smarter than me and its quite likely they’ve thought of something I haven’t and the iSlate will be the most desirable product of 2010. So I’m saving for one, reading all the rumours and patiently waiting on the live blogging of the announcement anyway.

So its finally going to be 2010, from now on we get to say ‘twenty-x’ instead of the clumsy ‘two thousand and x’. Already it feels like the future is now; surely hovercars and jetpacks will follow.

This year, I lost over 20kg, took up mountain biking again, started growing my own chilli peppers and got into cooking and baking. I’ve been learning Codeignitor, Wordpress, jQuery and continued to learn Django.  I saw two of my all time favourite bands live and had awesome holidays in Germany and New York.

Anyway, so this is my lazy blogger year end post of stuff I’ve liked over the past 12 months.

Albums

Theres been a some great new music this year

Fever Ray – s/t
listen on Spotify

One half of The Knife returns with a fantastic album that I just can’t stop listening to.

Muse – The Resistance
listen on Spotify

Ok, so I admit its kinda cheesy, but I think this album is great.



The Dead Weather – Horehound
listen on Spotify

An awesome debut from the supergroup formed by members of The White Stripes, The Kills and QoTSA;  this is my album of the year. I saw them live in Edinburgh and was blown away, Alison has an amazing stage presence and Jack White just kills on drums or guitar.



Them Crooked Vultures – s/t
listen on Spotify

Another debut from a supergroup; Josh Homme (QoTSA, Kyuss, Eagles of Death Metal), Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) and John Paul Jones (Led Zepplin). I had to pay a silly amount of money on eBay to secure tickets to the Edinburgh show, but it was worth it, these guys rock!

Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

Just under an hour of awesome, lo-fi instrumental noise (imagine Exit Planet Dust era Chemical Brothers combined with Mogwai); great for coding and working out to.


Movies

There were some really terrible movies this year, with the exception of

Where The Wild Things Are

A beautiful adaption of the much loved children’s book, I’m tempted to go see it again already. Everything in the film is fantastically designed and takes inspiration from the source material; I loved this film.



The Hurt Locker

A superbly shot film about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, directed by Kathy Bigelow.



District 9

I loved this, I was really into it’s documentary style beginning; although it gradually devolved into something more generic later on. For me, its between Where the Wild Things Are and this for the film of the year.



Moon

I caught this at Edinburgh Film Festival and have been looking forward to seeing it again since.  Moon is a dark, moody SciFi film directed by David Bowie’s son starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey with a great soundtrack by Clint Mansell.

Drag Me to Hell

Sam Raimi returns to horror and kicks ass, the train wreck that was Spider-man 3 is almost forgotten.

Avatar

OK, so I love SciFi movies, and this is just Dances with Wolves in space, but it sure is pretty and the 3D is really well done.

Software

Spotify

With a premium account, I have almost all the music I could ever want, on my desktop or phone, legally – whats not to like?



Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 (XBOX 360)

Its the Call of Duty you know and love, but totally Bayified.



I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 (XBOX 360)

The best 80 points you’ll spend on XBOX Live Marketplace.

Tech

Apple Magic Mouse

I’ve always thought the Mighty Mouse was one of Apple’s weakest designs, its awkward to use the side buttons and the scrolling nipple gets clogged up and stops working. The Magic Mouse is comfortable, works really well and has replaced my MX 1000 at work.

Nike+ Sportband

I recently started a running program and bought new pair of Nike+ compatible trainers; I’m still using an iPhone 3G which doesn’t have Nike+ built in so bought the Sportband instead. I really like the simplicity of it, press to start a run, press to end, plug into computer, watch the animated man run across the screen to show how much you suck at running.

Social media, urgh.. its become one of my most hated of buzzwords, but this week I was impressed with effectiviness of the RATM for Christmas No 1 Facebook Group. It was announced yesterday that Killing in the Name was the UK’s Christmas Number 1 with over half a million sales, beating the latest X Factor winner Joe McElderry.

With just single single page on a website, the RATM for Christmas Number 1 campaign had such a viral effect that it eventually generated more sales than a campaign based on one of the UK’s most popular TV shows, radio play etc. The fact that a single person could have an idea and reach so many people in a short period of time with easy to use tools is as inspiring as it is powerful.

The facts are these

• The campaign made Sony even more money
• Simon Cowel is still uber rich and doesn’t give a crap
• over £60k was raised for the homeless charity Shelter through Facebook, plus RATM are donating the proceeds of sales
• Killing in the Name is first song to reach number one in the UK charts through downloads alone
• The Facebook group has almost 1 million members
• RATM should release a new album already

Don’t feel bad for this X Factor guy, he sold exactly the number of singles he was going to anyway, its just more people thought it would be funny to make a mockery of the system. I’m sure he still has a few months of excitement in the music industry before going back to restocking shelves at Tesco and opening community centres or whatever happens to these people once the new series of X Factor/ Pop Idol/ Britains got Talent starts and people forget about them.

I’m off to start a Facebook group to bring Mountain Dew back to the UK.

Microformats are additional markup that add semantics to content in web pages; their aim is so to improve the way information can be searched, extracted,  indexed,  cross-referenced or combined by software by describing content.

A good example of this is hCard, heres some basic contact information in plain HTML :

<div>
<div>Khal Weir</div>
<div>Work Interactive</div>
<div>0131-555-1234</div>
<a href="http://blog.khalweir.co.uk/">http://blog.khalweir.co.uk/</a>
<div>2 Some Street</div>
<div>Edinburgh</div>
<div>Midlothian</div>
</div>

with that addition of the hCard microformat markup becomes

<div class="vcard">
<div class="fn">Khal Weir</div>
<div class="org">Work Interactive</div>
<div class="tel">0131-555-1234</div>
<a class="url" href="http://blog.khalweir.co.uk/">http://blog.khalweir.co.uk/</a>
<div class="adr">
<div class="street-address">2 Some Street</div>
<div class="locality">Edinburgh</div>
<div class="region">Midlothian</div>
</div>
</div>

With the hCard markup this information has become more useful, the content has context making it easier to be automatically processed or extracted for use in applications like Outlook or Address Book (hCard is the web based equivalent of the vCard format). Other Microformats include hReview,  hCalendar, hResume and hRecipe, take a look at  http://microformats.org/ for more information.

One of the principles of Microformats is that they should ‘be presentable and parsable, visible data is much better for humans than invisible metadata’; this definitely seems to be the direction the web is going in as Google recently announced they ignore keywords in meta tags and Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have incorporated support for microformats some of their webapps; as have popular social networking sites such as digg, facebook, last.fm, linkedin, twitter.

Another interesting use of Microformats is the XFN (XHMTL friend network), this was the first microformat and is used to describe the relationship between individual’s and their various online presences. Its really simple and consists of two attributes.

• rel=”me” – this is used to show that the link is related to yourself (eg the links from this blog to my twitter profile page)
• rel=”friend” – this can be used to describe relationships between people when linking (eg the links from this blog to my friend’s blogs), this tag can also be stuffed with context such as ‘co-worker, met, acquaintance, colleague, child’.

Take a look at http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/docs/ for more information and to try some example applications (try inputing blog.khalweir.co.uk for example).