Last month saw the pilot of a new interactive historical resource, ‘The People’s Archive’, launched at Birmingham ArtsFest.

Members of the public are invited to contribute their local knowledge and personal recollections of Birmingham in days gone by to The People’s Archive, a new online resource for the city’s collective memory. The pilot makes available online one of the Library’s most popular collections, the Warwickshire Photographic Survey, which records in fascinating detail buildings, street scenes and events in the city between the 1880’s and the late 20^th Century.

Around 500 images of the city centre were available for the pilot launch at ArtsFest for visitors to view, which it is hoped will prompt memories and personal knowledge of people and places. The aim is for members of the public to help solve mysteries and provide missing details – for example by recognising a face in a photo or being able to confirm a date.

The People’s Archive is set to enrich the library’s existing collections, and was built using Bing Maps and Silverlight, adding new layers of information and providing a digital place for recording and sharing knowledge. If the pilot is successful, The People’s Archive will be developed further, providing an important digital resource offered by the new library, accessible to all, and for everyone, from local people curious about their city’s past to serious researchers and students.

Developed as a collaboration between Birmingham City Council, Service Birmingham and Birmingham based digital companies, In Cahoots and Clusta, The People’s Archive will continue to grow into an online journey telling the story of the area’s history, inviting input from the public, and heralding the Library of Birmingham’s philosophy of providing a world class learning and leisure experience in a fully interactive environment.

Together with Birmingham-based digital agency Clusta, In Cahoots previously used ArtsFest to launch their popular WeVee video website in 2009, which has proved to be hugely successful and is now being developed further in conjunction with the Library of Birmingham project.

The wait is over! Final Windows Phone dev tools are now available to download – there’s a single download with everything you need to create apps and games for Windows Phone 7. Watch out though – any application built with a previous version of the tools will fail application certification in the marketplace. When you do submit your application, it’ll take about five days to pass or fail certification, though you can check the status of your app submission at any time at the developer portal. For more information on passing certification, please see the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace policies.

There are 3 key controls to watch out for:

1. Panorama based applications offer a unique manner to view controls, data, and services in a long horizontal canvas that extends beyond the confines of the screen, and provides the touch and animation features that invite the user to explore and consume your application. The panorama generally serves as the starting point from which the user can drill into subsequent experiences.

2. Pivot is a way to visualize data for customers, giving them the ability to filter from one view of the data to another. The speed and simplicity of the control will be a welcome enhancement to data driven applications.

3. The Bing Maps control gives you the ability to instantly build compelling map experiences that include a full suite of map functionality… search, directions, scroll, zoom, aerial view, street view, and more, all with a single drag and drop operation. The control also comes with a free commercial license for your Windows Phone apps.

Another developer resource launching today is Microsoft Advertising’s new Mobile Advertising SDK for Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft Advertising Exchange for Mobile, the industry’s first real-time, bidded mobile ad exchange.

To put your ideas into action, take advantage of the great online Jump Start training and download the beautiful UI design guide.

Oh, and don’t worry, fart apps won’t be banned.

The reason being, that I am more likely to rearrange my social life around a date that is close to me, than go see a band in a different country. Later, I’ll show how this can also work on a city level and how it can be used to plan your night, not just your gigs.

This initial example suggests tour dates for a fictional band called The Evangelists to show how this can work across Europe. You can view the Bing map I created for this demo here:

http://bit.ly/adKTJm

In this demo I plan to show you how simple it is to plot a tour onto Bing maps, add additional information and then link back to your website.  A later post will work on a city level using real tour dates from Iain Eccleston & The Blue Horizon.

Here’s a video showing you how.

So that’s an example of how you can socialise your map content. The same approach could be taken by your local football club to plot the various away grounds that they will play at in a season (also an opportunity to take advantage of the Bing directions) or you could use it to plot a trip round the world adding pins, photos and links to your blog from the places you visit.

I hope you found this useful, I hope you are able to use these techniques in the future.

Sheffield company Technophobia has two important mantras it keeps in mind when developing applications: 

1. Use the right tool for the job, and 

2. YAGNI (You ain’t gonna need it) 

These mantras were key for them when working to create a map based community website (I could tell you who it was for, but then I’d have to kill you. Sorry). Built in just 12 weeks with a small team, the site is built on the Microsoft platform but Technical Architect and Development Team Lead Jamie Hinton cherry picked the best tools and software (open source and closed source) to optimise the end result: 

“We did lots of research into whether to use Google Maps or Bing Maps, but Bing won out in the end despite the client wanting to stick with Google. 

This was mainly due to how we were using that map and the constraints within Google maps as to how we could add markers. Bing maps allowed for arbitrary HTML to be added to a pin whereas Google maps needed the HTML to be within a pin bubble. There are ways around this with Google maps and an earlier API version but that is where the client decided the risks were too great at this point in the project. 

The problem with Google is it can be a dangerous solution – if they change their API, however small a change, everything on the site could break and it would cost time and resources to fix it. We presented the risks to the client and eventually they understood they risked potentially annoy all their customers and waste time and money putting it right. The Bing API was much nicer – faster and more flexible, more developer friendly, so we were pleased we’d been able to persuade the client.” 

The application pulls together a number of familiar features you’d find on many other community sites. The difference with this site is the ease with which it brings all the elements together to make a truly pleasurable, simple user experience. The site uses geo location based on the user’s IP address and geo tags every piece of content on the site, which ranges from the user’s profile, photo and video galleries and discussion threads to dealer information and local events, all relevant to where you define your ‘spiritual home’ (to maintain privacy and avoid would be car thieves finding out where you park your brand new beloved vehicle). Administrators don’t need to sign in and out of the application – one click and the admin view appears providing extended privileges (i.e. more buttons!) allowing them to moderate posts and discussions in context. The application integrates with parent company authentication so users manage the same credentials whichever sister site they’re on. All activity is tracked with a custom built service managing guest invitations, user reputation and number of posts, for example. 

The architecture is service orientated (SOA) so each module is a service in its own right and therefore also pluggable. The team used Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) although it wasn’t necessarily their first choice: 

“Creating a service orientated architecture was crucial to allow us to deliver the application to the client quickly. Each of the modules (discussions, gallery, content control etc) are pluggable and a third party could build a Twitter service which could easily be consumed by the website on the front end. It also means the application is scalable and if something goes wrong with one of the modules it won’t take the whole site down. We really wanted to use nServiceBus to make the services totally independent but ended up using WCF as it’s standard technology. Plus, it would have complicated the design at this stage (remember YAGNI!)” (Jamie, Technical Architect and Development Team Lead) 

The Chat Challenge 

The website is completely open, so once you register you can chat to any other member (rather than just those you’ve accepted as friends per Facebook’s model) – and this presented a huge challenge for the development team. Jamie used standard protocols using a Jabba server called Openfire (a Java OSS) running in the back end. However the contact list was not scalable with Jabba. For the system to work it was crucial to know when users were online and when they’d signed out, so the team ended up using the .NET framework to add authenticated users to a huge dictionary of users and if they logged out or the session ended the system would automatically remove them. It was a simple solution to a potentially nightmarish problem. 

The search feature on the site is multilingual and uses Soundex with SQL Server 2008 to take advantage of the multilingual capabilities of SQL. It saved the team lots of pain (their words not mine!). 

“We intended to start simple with the search and as demand for more complex queries grew to start using Lucene but still use the existing database implementation as a fall back – but mainly to persist the search index as Lucene index can go wrong! Again it all comes back to keeping things simple and YAGNI!” 

Here’s a list of the technologies used: 

· .NET MVC 1 (2 was in Beta) 

· C sharp 

· Castle IOC 

 · jQuery 

· Linq 

· Mozilla Firefox 

· MSBuild 

· NHibernate 

· NUnit testing framework 

· Quartz Scheduler 

· ReSharper (‘the best plug-in in the world’ according to Jamie) 

· Selenium Grid 

· Selenium IDE 

· SimplyVBUnit for functional testing 

· Spark view engine 

· SQL Server 2008 

· TeamCity

· Visual Studio 2008

· Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

· Windows Server 2008 

“We used text editor, a Mac and Photoshop as the design tools” (Richard Jones, Lead UX Web Designer). “We needed a more rapid wire framing method so we used HTML and CSS so we could re-use the wireframes quickly and easily. We swapped out the .NET engine for Spark as this helped the designers so they didn’t get most of the set tags in the mark-up. Spark cuts out all the blocks and iterators and lets non-technical team members make substantial changes using the same logic. Spark revolutionised our development process as it was so rapid to develop to.” 

At the end of our meeting I managed to grab Jamie on camera for a quick chat about how he finds working with so many different languages and tools on a day to day basis. 

Internet approaches addressing limit – Legacy from the 70’s (or is that me…?) means only 7% of 4 billion IP addresses are left to allocate. You’ll need to brush up on persuasion techniques to get one in the near future…

Microsoft post downplays virtual desktop benefits: “Overall… VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is generally 9 -11 percent more expensive than the corresponding PC environment,” says Gavriella Schuster, senior director of the Windows commercial product management group.

Were you caught out by the Twitter bug (hmm sounds like a dance…)? In an egocentric panic I thought I’d somehow wiped everyone’s followers off Twitter. What a relief to find it wasn’t me at all, but designed by Twitter to remove a bug. *Sigh*.

OK, so I’ve always had a vivid imagination and love virtual reality, 3D and the more recent Augmented Reality as they blur the lines between what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t. So when I was invited to join The Fantastic Tavern for an evening on ‘Realities’, nothing short of an ‘act of God’ was going to stop me being there to find out more.

The evening kicked off with a humorous introduction from EMC’s Matt Bagwell, who framed the evening as an exploration of Augmented Reality – is it a fad or is it here to stay, a technology that has commercially viability? 

Matt took us back to the early 90’s, when blending realities became pervasive – starting with the fantastic game ‘Doom’ and moving to the military and their use of data by blending reality with an information layer. After providing the context for the evening, Matt left it to the speakers to explain what Augmented Reality actually is and how do you work with it – what’s good about it and what’s not so good? How can it ‘permeate the everyday’?

First up was Paul Dawson, Experience Director of EMC Consulting, who gave an overview of the definitions and roles of ‘realities’ by presenting a number of examples, including the best and the worst.

Paul held up The Terminator as being a great example of augmented reality (referring to the first film in the series and in my opinion the best). He also mentioned that the first Augmented Reality head up display in a car was back in 1988 (Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme) – a great ‘did you know’ if I’ve ever heard one.

He then moved on to popular iPhone apps like Tube Finder, and asked if there was really any difference between the services offered by Tube Finder and those provided by a compass? He made the great observation that in practice, what tends to happen with apps like these is that too much of the data is incorrect – one example was data showing Southwark Tube station sits on top of EMC’s offices…

Paul then asked ‘…so what does work’? Augmented Reality currently only uses dimensions and not senses. What we want to know is information that directly affects us – for example, what we want to know is queue times in the local Tesco, or the nearest ATM and whether it has cash in it. Paul moved the discussion a step further by asking how we bring senses into the mix?  What if we could listen to conversations in a room to help us decide which ones to join – essentially a tag cloud?

The conclusion was there are some beacons of hope emerging where not only correct data but also relevant data is added into the melting pot, indicating Augmented Reality could stay relevant and commercially viable.

Paul was followed by Johannes Kebeck, Technical Specialist for Bing Maps in EMEA. Johannes focused on Bing services (no surprises there!) to demonstrate what advancements in augmented information means for anyone who uses maps (i.e. all of us who invariably stumble around a strange town or city at some point).

Johannes talked about the number of new (or seemingly new) developments in technology in general and how they can be applied to mapping. He referred to Crowd Sourcing, for example, to harness the power of the community and of course referred to the ubiquitous Flickr photos rendering historic images onto maps to provide historic context – see the TED session by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.

But then the deeper questions were asked: How do we interact with this? How do we talk to it? Johannas drew on an example used at an art gallery where visitors can not only zoom into the building but drill right down to view a specific painting and get all relevant data on that item.

But how easy is it to use? It’s no easy task to stitch hundreds or thousands of images together. However, with the help of a free Microsoft tool called ICE, or Image Composite Editor, an advanced panoramic image stitcher, images are seamlessly and automatically sewn together – plus for the user the information is only a couple of mouse clicks away.

Content is becoming richer and richer – users can not only zoom right into objects but zoom out to see the stars and the moon, all from a mobile phone.

Johannes also pointed out a local sensor application to highlight relevant data about an area, with the demonstration he gave focussing on real time news about crimes happening round the corner integrated into the map view, for example images and text update confirming a criminal was apprehended after breaking and entering.

But how do we augment reality with spatial information?If I see a house for sale nearby, I want to know how much it costs. Or if I visit the ‘House of Versailles’, I want to find out where the disabled entrance is, where the toilets are, etc. It’s possible to superimpose data onto the image through the camera using geo spatial information. This is technology that people already understand. Sometimes sticking your mobile phone out and staring at a tiny screen is limiting and can be dangerous!

Johannes rounded up the session with a fascinating peak into the future to a world where contact lenses are not only used to improve vision and change the colour of our eyes but actually function as an LED computer display. personally, I can’t wait for that!

Finally (from a speaker POV that is), the EMC Consulting creative team, aka Glennis McGregor, Matt Ratcliffe and Chris Gannon talked about the practicalities and challenges of working on various realities applications, including pushing the immersion factor, using games to create an ‘Augmented Virtuality’ with the aim of empowering teams and enhancing training. Finally, of course you need to consider health and safety, with the ideal being that the Augmented Virtuality environment is actually safer than reality.

The evening was rounded off with a Q&A session where random questions could be fired at the panel of speakers from the increasingly rowdy audience (fuelled by the freely flowing beer and sausage fest that kept everyone’s stamina up throughout the evening). Although there were a number of very interesting questions – including whether games inhibit creativity and individual expression and the danger of encouraging people to do things in a virtual world they may feel is OK in the real world – the best question of the night was whether Augmented Reality was being used in the adult entertainment sector… accompanied by cheers of encouragement by the audience.

The final poignant question ‘How do you mediate the important information from the vast amount of data? Who controls it? How much filtering will you have to do to get the information you need?’ was deemed too good to answer and left for future pondering.

The quick poll was between the iPad or sausage – and sausage won hands down!!

After that it was time for the 100 or so crowd to continue drinking, eating sausages and of course network, network, network.

All in all an interesting, insightful way to spend a Thursday evening. Cheers!

Find out more about EMC and The Fantastic Tavern, plus there’s a new event called ‘The Lock’ scheduled for 19th August – essentially 3 taverns running 3 streams on 3 different themes and run by the Fantastic Tavern team.

P.S. Michael McClary ate all the sausages while I was writing this!