If you are a freelancer, work in agency or have the awesome luxury of being able to work everywhere and anywhere then you might be interested in ‘Anywhere Working Week’ – which is this week don’t you know!

Anywhere Working Week comes from the folks at Anywhere Working and to celebrate they are giving away 3 ‘ultimate kits’ for people with great flexible working tips. Each kit includes an ASUS Zenbook, Nokia Lumia 800, Arc Touch Mouse, Vodafone’s latest 3G Mobile Broadband dongle and 12 months gold membership to Regus.

To find out how to win one of these bad boys, head over to their blog post here – and check out the rest of the site whilst you’re at it, we know plenty of you get to work flexibly so there might be some good stuff there for you

With Flash on the Beach fast approaching, we wanted to offer all those heading down to Brighton on the Sunday evening a chance to chill out before all the conference excitement begins. And of course, no pre-conference meet up would be complete without a free beverage or two and a bit of Sunday night pub quiz action.

The venue is just a short walk from the station and a stone’s through from the beach, what better way to introduce yourself to Sunny Brighton?

Date: Sunday 11th September 2011

Time: 7.30pm – 11pm

Venue: The Globe Pub, 78 Middle Street, Brighton, East Sussex, BN1 1AL.

If you’re around in the evening and fancy popping along, register yourself below to confirm your attendance, and we’ll make sure the bevvies are chilled.

There was quite a debate in the office with the announcement of Amazon’s HTML5 version of the Kindle Reader at the beginning of the month. Initially, it focused on whether this was just a direct two-fingers to Apple’s rules and regulations about commission on in-app payments for content, and then on the reasons why Chrome along with Safari were the first two browsers targeted (conclusion: offline browser support).

We then, however, got into a deeper discussion about why and when an installed app should be used instead of just targeting the browser (especially if HTML5 is the underpinning technology used). Overall, I’m of the view that the future is undoubtedly online, and most of the time serving live to the browser is the way forward. However, the future isn’t quite here yet, and totally Cloud initiatives like ChromeOS, by example seem both too ahead of their time, and yet vaguely anachronistic (as I described in my post on Chromebook).

So there seem to be some key times when an app installed locally works best – here’s some of the cases that we’ve discussed:

To allow offline access:
Whilst I think that the cases of people using laptops offline these days are increasingly rare, on mobile devices we frequently find ourselves off the network. In those cases, locally cached data accessed by the local app makes perfect sense (if there is one thing that really irritates me it’s a locally-installed app that doesn’t cache data for offline on a mobile).

To cope with big data:
Before taking up my current role, I ran IT for a big marketing agency based in London but with offices across the globe. A constant issue that we had was of shipping video and 3D content from office to office: whilst the Cloud could provide fantastic opportunity for rendering processing grunt, getting the data in and out would be a complete pain in the backside. Local apps are often still the answer to cope with vast data volumes.

To use a device’s hardware:
A local app that takes advantage of gyroscopes, accelerometers, GPS or other hardware increasingly found in the average smartphone seems to make sense. (As an aside, if someone could create an app that would turn a Windows Phone into a customizable touch surface and control for Windows, I’d be eternally grateful).

To provide an audience:
A more publisher-centric one, this. App marketplaces can provide an easier route to get a developer’s work to an audience than a mere website.

I’m sure that there are other cases when the local app is of advantage, and I’m also sure that this is going evolve dramatically over the coming years; however, as Amazon have shown with the HTML5 Kindle, assumptions that the app should always be local need to be questioned…

If you are a social media hack you are bound to have come across politicians using Twitter or Facebook, either by accident or through your own research. However, the vastness of both social media and Politics means that there are literally thousands upon thousands of political social media accounts. Most notably Barack Obama and his 9.1 million followers on Twitter and 22 million Likes on Facebook.

Trying to see, follow and understand all this content is nigh on impossible and that problem alone is what inspired us to establish Yatterbox; a company which aims to make it easier for people to see what politicians are saying and doing using social media.

We first dreamed up the idea back in May 2010 during the UK General Election after stumbling upon a few websites that were aggregating Twitter accounts for all the UK MPs. Back then there were only about 180+ out of the total of 650 MPs using Twitter, so it was quite a niche thing to do. However we also knew that MPs were using more than just Twitter; they had set up Facebook Pages, were uploading photos and videos and also pushing out more traditional blogs. The problem was, as a user it was impossible to track and see all that content, even as a political hack; there was too much information spread across too many formats.

The idea was simple: why not create a website that presents the information from every social media account for every politician in the UK?

By the time we got round to building and launching the site in mid-February 2011, we had missed the UK General Election; but that didn’t really matter as we knew that the next few years would be very interesting with the new coalition government in power. Moreover, we had always planned to expand to cover more countries, which we did launching a US version 46 days after the UK soft launch.

To do all this we managed to rustle together a bit of start-up money and found some incubation space at the University of York, where I and some of my friends had just graduated from. On top of this we found a great local web developer and out-sourced the project. Since then though we have moved everything in house and have started to build a small tech team of talented computer sciences students from the University. The current Yatterbox Team comprises of about 15+ people, ranging from programmers to business development experts along with the all-important Board of Directors. We are very lucky, as the building we are based in is next door to the Computer Science Department, and we have got a really good working relationship with the head of the department, John McDermid. For me, that relationship is essential in making sure I can find the right people I need to move the business forward.

Yatterbox is using free Windows Azure instances as part of Microsoft BizSpark to test scalability of the website and simulate features in a “production-ready” environment. Other Microsoft products such as Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Expression Studio, and SQL Server 2008 are helping the Yatterbox team deliver professional-grade features and extensions to the website, including the soon to be launched, Windows Phone 7 app.

Whilst we have had some really good press through BBC Click, The Guardian website, The Local BBC Politics Show and also at a TEDx event held in York, we have not been specifically looking for press and publicity. However, it does seem to find us every now and then and we are pleased with the opportunities that it provides. It has really increased awareness of the project and has resulted in some invaluable feedback.

Over the next few months and into the new-year, the team are building a number of new products, the first of which are Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android apps. These are being built by a York Student (also a Microsoft Student Partner). Furthermore, a new User Interface is being designed for the existing website and is set to be launched around mid-to-late August. In addition to this release schedule, the team is also spending the next 5 months expanding the project to cover over 15 countries; the idea being that Yatterbox will be the preferred hub for following political social-media during major world events such as the 2012 US General Election.

The team is carefully crafting the services provided by the Yatterbox website so that it is the best place for online interaction with the leading legislators and agenda drivers in Politics across the globe.

Microsoft BizSpark is a program which offers new software businesses and entrepreneurs access to Microsoft design, development, and production tools with no upfront costs for up to three years. Members can also connect with a nationwide community of Network Partners – investors, incubators, service providers, and entrepreneurial organizations – who are keen to help.

The Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) team have released Kinect Services for robots! The potential of the Kinect just continues to amaze. The latest free download from the RDS team, has effectively provided robotics geeks all over the world with an inexpensive ‘Laser Range Finder’ using the Kinect technology.

Robotics is slowly becoming a key part of our everyday lives – do you still vacuum your house? We don’t, we have a Roomba to do it. But cost and capability continue to be key issues for the robotics world. While the RDS burst into the robotic world a number of years ago, things have been quite recently while the team address some of the key challenges. The first instalment of their work is the Kinect Services for RDS 2008 R3.

RDS is a fabulous example of the Microsoft technology stack. It utilises a broad range of MS tech to deliver a powerful solution. This is best demonstrated by the RDS Simulator – you don’t need a real robot to play with RDS, you just need a Windows PC with a good graphics card!

The Kinect Services upgrade your RDS installation with additional simulation solutions. Below you can see the ‘Apartment’ simulation with an iRobot Create enhanced with the addition of a Kinect and eBox computer. The robot can successfully navigate around the apartment avoiding the furniture using the capabilities of the Kinect to detect obstacles within the range of 80cm to 4m. The solution implements a simple wanderer algorithm to keep the robot moving without banging into stuff.

The simulator also provides simulated depth and rgb video streams so you can see what the Kinect is seeing.

These differ from the live Kinect streams because the two camera devices, depth and rgb, are perfectly aligned in the simulator. In the real world, both cameras have varying offsets so alignment is always out by an amount – you can see this from the live Kinect service pictures I took from my den. The Kinect services provide functionality to address this issue and tie areas of the images from the camera together more accurately.

Depth and RGB Camera – camera alignment presents an interesting view!

Depth view

RGB view – A1-DW and RS Media Robosapien pose for the Kinect.

The Kinect services provide the robotics programmer with access to the video and depth in the application architecture of the RDS. This app architecture is radically different to the programming model used more generally today. Using an execution runtime called the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) it provides the underlying message-passing system which allows RDS services to scale efficiently across computing cores and execute code in a timely manner (i.e.. As required). RDS services are built on using an app architecture called Decentralised Software Services. This is a REST based architecture and allows the computing capability of a solution to be spread across many computing nodes easily. In practice this allows a robot device to have limited computing power on board while more powerful computing devices (e.g. laptops or servers) can readily consume sensor service data from the robot device and process it effectively, returning results or instructions for action back to the remote robot. Think of all those Sci-Fi films where the hero has to take out the central ‘core’ to stop the evil robots and you’ve got the picture. I use an i7 laptop as my ‘core’ remote processing machine, while A1-DW has a dual core AMD motherboard built-in for ‘on-board’ processing.

This is a small but significant delivery from the RDS team with more functionality promised soon!

Download the free Kinect Services for robots

The Microsoft Research Kinect for Windows SDK beta provides academic and enthusiast developers with a simple toolkit to access the raw sensor streams of the Kinect and skeletal tracking functionality. The SDK is offered under a non-commercial license currently, with an expectation of greater functionality and a commercial license later this year. If you’ve used other SDKs already with Kinect you’ll notice the huge speed and performance improvements the Microsoft SDK delivers.

With the SDK installed it’s extremely easy to access the Kinect’s video, depth and audio streams for your own analysis, but it’s even easier to use these streams with the provided skeletal tracking and advanced audio capabilities. The four-element microphone array of the Kinect enables sophisticated acoustic noise suppression, while using the beam formation capabilities enables the programmer to identify the direction of the current sound source. It’s these capabilities of the Kinect; enabling computers to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ better than anything else to date, that are exciting developers all over the world. For me, the prospect of using the Kinect to deliver a ‘single camera navigation and recognition system’ to my Whitebox Robotics PC-Bot 914, is as exciting as it is now real. By combining image recognition technology with the Kinect’s depth stream, ‘A1-DW’ (my PC-bot 914), can not only recognise a location in my home but also easily determine how far from the objects in the view, it is. Combining several ‘compass point’ views and ‘A1’ can start to perceive its location. ‘A1’ can also use face recognition technology to identify people it sees. Coupling this with powerful speech recognition capabilities of the Windows platform and we have the start of some interesting computer/human interactions.

A1-DW plus Kinect: ’What can I get you sir?’

To take advantage of the audio capabilities for speech recognition you’ll need to install the Microsoft Speech Platform Runtime, a suitable Language Pack and the Microsoft Speech Platform SDK. Then it’s just a case of defining the grammars your application or game will listen for. This is very easily done as demonstrated by the ShapeGame sample included in the SDK.

One area lacking direct support in the current release of the SDK is gesture recognition. We hope to see this supported in future SDK releases. For now, there are a number of ways in which gesture support can be provided.

First up, there are already some simple gesture recognition examples published on Codeplex. Many of these use alternative Kinect SDKs to the Microsoft one, but converting them to utilise the Microsoft SDK isn’t very challenging. If you are looking for control interaction rather than broad gesture support, the guys at IdentityMine have published KinectPaint on Codeplex. This not only demonstrates skeletal tracking but also incorporates some simple WPF control modifications that work well with the Kinect – button, listbox, checkbox etc.

David Catuhe’s Gesture Viewer – KinectToolkit on Codeplex.

The most successful gesture recognition systems use a learning machine approach. There are several such implementations in development at the moment and we hope to see them on Codeplex very soon. These enable a developer to record several attempts at a gesture to define the recognition parameters of that gesture type. These are then used with a generic gesture recognition engine within the application to recognise the defined range of gestures. This approach greatly reduces the Kinect developers work load – so I expect this area of functionality will get a lot of effort early on by the NUI guru community, so that the rest of us more normal developers can get on applying this technology in our everyday world.

Download the Microsoft Kinect SDK

Kinect for Windows SDK Quickstart Video Tutorials

Get David Catuhe’s Kinect Toolkit on Codeplex

Read David Catuhe’s post about his gestures and toolkit library for Kinect

Recently I won the IE9 Dev Unplugged award for ‘Most Innovative Use of Canvas & SVG’ for my game Arena5. Dev Unplugged was a Microsoft sponsored competition aimed at developers working in HTML5 to show what a modern web browser can do without the use of plug-ins.

I’ve been into web technology for a long time, writing web apps, 3D graphics and animations, stuff like that, and I’m also an avid gamer. So with the advent of HTML5 and canvas I wanted to explore the basics and find out if it was fast and powerful enough to create a game.

Asteroids

Arena5 wasn’t the first game I created. To test canvas and see how far I could push it before it slowed down gameplay too much, I decided to do a remake of Asteroids. Building it taught me canvas and improved my JavaScript skills – plus a version of it got runner up in the 10k Apart competition, so this spurred me on to enter Dev Unplugged. I’m a huge fan of Xbox 360 so if you play Arena5 you’ll probably notice I took my inspiration from ‘Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved’!

I don’t pretend to be a big innovator, I prefer to create variations of or expand on existing ideas using current technology. Some of the effects in original games are hard to recreate in a browser – canvas is pretty fast but none of the browsers can cope with too many flashy effects, there comes a point where it slows gameplay down too much. Arena5 hits the browser pretty hard with lots of glow effects and particle explosions and lots of effects are pre-rendered like the particle effects used for explosions. The smudges and small dots are pre-rendered images, so the more expensive elements are re-used to improve performance. Essentially, Arena5 was about seeing how far I could take stuff before canvas would crawl and I think it’s a good test of what canvas can do. All the code’s available to view and you can download it and try it yourself if you fancy playing around.

Arena5

So what’s HTML5 like to work with? I like the HTML5 and browser environment – it’s very accessible, you don’t have to invest in expensive software. The downside is that you don’t get an IDE like with Java or Eclipse, or .NET with Visual Studio, so if you’re used to code completion and having your documents all in line, just using a text editor for multiple JavaScript files can be fiddly. Without a compiler you only find you’ve broken something when you run the game. However, the test debug cycle is incredibly quick, you just refresh the browser, and most modern browsers have in built de-buggers. The real up-side is it makes you really strict so you don’t tend to write hacky, sloppy code, you write clean code to reduce the likelihood of something going wrong.

HTML5 is a standard, so it’s a moving target, but it’s hugely important to make things less fragmented and make sure everyone’s on the same page. All five browsers support canvas in at least 2D and that in itself is a very important stepping stone forward. In creating Arena5 I haven’t had to change anything to make it work across all browsers – I just had to build it once. Anyone can look at the code, there are no external libraries or hacks in there for any of the browsers, and that makes it feel as though the standard is really getting somewhere. I’m quite biased as far as I like to create flashy demos and effects for games, I think it’s great for that, but I’ve not explored the other things you can do with HTML5 like the Forms enhancements so couldn’t comment on other capabilities.

I don’t really consider my HTML5 games as complete, I hope to refine what I’ve done already. I’m not finished with Arena5, I want to make it better and add new features – perhaps adding some aspects of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved²! I’d also like to explore effects, background rendering and real time stuff. As the performance of canvas improves then I’ll continue to play around with it and refine the game. There could be an ‘Asteroids 2’ game on the horizon as well, so watch this space! I’ve definitely caught the HTML5 bug.

See what HTML5 and canvas can do with the IE10 Platform Preview

Yesterday I and my colleague Jim had the good fortune to attend The Cloud Hack at the Brewery in London. I found out about the event just two days before, it was my first hacking event and I really enjoyed it.

For those who haven’t been to such an event before here is a quick overview of the concept. A group of programmers, developers and designers get together at a venue and are given access to various API’s. Prizes are offered to the best apps produced after a set time limit.

The Cloud Hack’s API partners were National Rail Enquires, Bing Maps, PayPal and Huddle (a people management API). The prizes ranged from £500 to £1000 and an Xbox 360 was given to one lucky participant at random.

After arriving at The Brewery at about 9:30am the first task of the day was to register, get some coffee and find a spot with excellent wifi. Before the event I was concerned that with the key sponsor of the event being Windows Azure I might not be able to find fellow PHP developers to work with and chat to. This turned out not to be the case, at registration badges where handed out and participants were asked to attach stickers with their languages and skills on. Jim and I soon found a good spot and some others with similar skills to talk to.

After registration an introduction took place and all the API partners gave a quick introduction to their products. The most interesting introduction came from National Rail Enquires. They made both their journey planning and live departure API’s available for the day (this API is normally private). After this Bing introduced both their javascript maps control and also their location based web services. PayPal showed off their new payment workflows and Huddle demoed their group and file management API.

After the introduction the assembled developers piled out into the hacking area and worked either in pre arranged groups, impromptu teams or as individuals. There was a great buzz at this point, we had about four and a half hours to produce something with the APIs demonstrated earlier.

Jim and I had talked through a few concepts on the way to the hack and decided to work on the National Rail API and mash it together with some of the route planning features of the Bing Maps API. Our concept was called ‘Can I Catch It?’. The idea was to tell users if they could feasibly catch the train they wanted based on their current location. The app displayed how fast a user would have to drive in order to get to the train on time, when they should set off, distance to the station and also the train departure time. The app was to be accessed from a mobile device. We also wanted to change the colour of the background from green to red as the time of departure approached. With an idea firmly in hand we spent the next four hours trying to implement it. The NRE API was SOAP, it had been a very long time since I had to use one so this took some time to ‘hack’. On the other hand Jim found that Bing Maps was a ‘quick win’ and spent the majority of his time working on javascript and HTML5 necessary to display the page.

About half way through the day a truly sumptuous dinner was served. The cloud hack team really surpassed themselves here. Sushi, bargies, lamb pies, sandwiches, beef stew and king prawns. All the food was served by waiters so it wasn’t necessary to stop coding. A good call as timings were very tight!

The second part of the cloud hack challenge was to launch the application onto Azure. For the .net developers in the room this was a piece of cake for the other languages it was a little more difficult. Throughout the day I helped a number of people set up PHP on IIS to develop on and later gave some pointers on launching PHP apps to Azure. There were some comments on how easy it was to get PHP running on IIS but there were also some grumblings about the time in which it took to actually launch an application onto Azure using the Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP.

By 4:45 the majority of applications were on Azure. Unfortunately we didn’t make it to this point, we had an issue with the NRE API which took too long to solve. Jim later completed the app – you can take a look at it here (best on a mobile device). All the participants were asked to go and watch the presentations in the main auditorium. The cloud hack team handed round beers and six short listed teams presented their applications to the rest of the attendees.

The winners of the event were a team called ‘The Governor’ and they made an app called ‘Train vs Car’. They aimed to answer the question of whether it would be faster to complete a journey by train or by car. After the event we joined the Huddle team in a pub down the road where we talked about the API’s, hacks and the event.

I really enjoyed Cloud Hack, I hope they run the event again in the future. The atmosphere of creativity, the people involved, the great venue and food all combined into a really successful event! My only criticism of the event is there wasn’t enough development time. In the future I’d like to see a 24 hour ‘all nighter’ with team members working in shifts through the night to get bigger projects working. Thanks to the Cloud Hack team, API partners and for the team at ubelly for sending me to my first hacking event!

If you fancy doing some cloud hacking yourself, here’s where to start:

Azure

PHP on Azure

After attending plenty of events over the past year, Wednesday night we decided to host our very own! With memetastic karaoke and our very own Sad Keanu – the party was almost complete.  But it wasn’t all about bad singing and dodgy pics with Keanu, we also wanted to pay tribute to some of the great speakers we had seen, the awesome events we’ve attended and of course, our favourite meme of the year.

With Screach App, our guests were able to vote for their favourite on the night itself, and the winners were announced by our very own Andrew Spooner.  Check our post for the full shortlist and list of judges, but if you can’t stand the suspense, here they are:

• Blog of the Year: HTML5 Doctor
• Meme of the Year: Old Spice
• Web we would mate with: The Wilderness Downtown
• Next Big Thing: Naomi Atkinson
• App of the Year: Dropbox
• Open Source Web App: WordPress
• Event of the Year: New Adventures in Web Design
• Fail of the Year: Apple Ping
• Win of the Year: Egypt Social Media Uprising

We’d like to give a big thanks to our judges for helping us choose our coveted shortlist, our readers for supporting the blog and helping us create such a great community and everyone who attended the awards for voting on the night. We’ll post more pictures and some of the videos shortly.

Congratulations to all the winners and thanks again to everyone who came – we’ll see you next year!