Archive for the ‘coding’ Category
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Social Coding: Git with it.
3rd October 12
Posted in coding, collaboration, technology, Uncategorized
It is quite obvious that we here at Labs are huge fans of both the open source community, and idea of social-coding platforms. It would go without saying that being fans of such a community is not enough, one would argue that we should not only be an observer, but also a participant. That being said, we looked at a few of the internal projects and experiments we have worked on and felt that at this point we should share bit of code with the rest of the Internet.
What began as an exploration in Processing quickly became a prototype and finally a solid bit of code that is a complete application. We called it The GIF-A-MATRON, and it is a processing application that interprets the brightness of the webcam’s image and translates it to dots that scale based on that image creating abstract interpretation. In the background the application detects a vistor’s motion and secretly captures three frames, two seconds apart and creates an animated GIF. The GIF is then send via PHP to a destination tumblr site for all to see.
Once we showed it around to a few folks, people instantly liked it. The next logical step was to release it as source for others to build upon, and interpret into what ever they see fit. It’s primary function is something like a animated gif generating photo booth, but we are interested to see where it goes from here. Feel free to grab the source from our Github page. If you do add a twist, let us know, we would love to see what you do with it.
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While You Were Off: an iPhone web app for the connected set
5th April 12
Makers gunna make…
Anyone familiar with how we run Labs knows we make a concerted effort to learn by making. The thoughts published here and elsewhere, as well as the community’s feedback, often spark ideas that we bring to life internally for no reason other than a love of doing. For us, our curiosity was both in what we did and why we did it the way we did. Today, we’re announcing the latest output of that addiction.While You Were Off is our venture into developing a mobile specific web application. We created it to learn more about the staged process of creating such an app in an MVP-minded way. It’s especially important because more and more often, applications are running free of the device and powered by cloud services. While You Were Off (#WYWO) embraces this idea as it serves you the content you missed while your phone was offline. It features two feeds: 1) a World Wide Web (WWW) feed that taps into a curated list of APIs that we feel best represent “internet culture” and 2) a personalized Your Wide Web (YWW) feed that runs the same algorithm to display the “most interesting” content from your specific social networks.
Determining the need…
A common feeling most of you are familiar with is the pseudo-anxiety one feels awakening your dormant mobile device after it’s been offline. It’s that “post Airplane Mode tingle” we’ve admitted to one another while traveling together. We all scramble to quickly catch up immediately on email, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We felt a need for a mobile tool to quickly reconnect and get back up to speed with the internet with one click of the WYWO icon.So we built it. And what better place to start than the beloved pink While You Were Out corporate memo pad? We even tried to pay homage to its charming name and anachronistic style. The difference is this version of the pad is specifically built for iPhones.
A model to vet native app development…
Native application development can be a costly risk. Although we have no revenue or brand expectations, we see this as an opportunity to explore a model a client may find useful. We saw an opportunity to use modern web application development as a way of vetting an application’s value by putting it in the audience’s hands first. This method allows us to test in the wild.We can optimize the experience based on consumer behavior and use that data to inform a future build, be it further web app development (including an Android version), or an eventual native app. We’ve focused on building this simple application in a way that lets us easily track performance and usage to bring about the natural parallel behaviors between web & native apps.
Pull out your iPhone and point it to http://wywo.me to give it a whirl. Once you play with it, we would love your feedback on what you like, how we can make it better, and how you are using it. Use the comments below to send us your thoughts. Thanks.
May 1st 2012, #wywo claims the Mobile Site of The Day @FWA
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Growth Needs Space: A BBH Cannes Speech (With A Difference)
1st July 11
Last Friday in Cannes, BBH’s own Sir John Hegarty gave the following speech co-authored with co-founder Nigel Bogle (Nigel was unfortunately unable to join him due to illness).
The premise of their speech is powerfully simple: growth needs space. Space needs difference.
Of course we could simply have put the video of Sir John’s speech here on the blog, alongside the slideshare. However, as @jeremyet puts it: ‘given the opportunity to celebrate the power of difference, we wondered whether we could develop something fast that would give the viewer of the filmed speech a different and enhanced experience. Cue vidazzl, which brings to life relevant keyword searches from across the web as you watch the speech.
Sir John Hegarty at Cannes via vidazzl.com
We’re planning on making this a platform where anyone can upload a speech and display it in a, well, vidazzled version, but for now you can view Sir John’s speech from the Cannes Festival here and, of course, let us know your thoughts on the talk, on the presentation and on the difference.’
Gabor (Creative Technologist) adds a note on the choice of technology and the time frame:
‘The oldest email I found in my mailbox about vidazzl is just a bit more than a month old. Despite the short deadline I had no doubt that it should be an HTML5 project because WebGL fits perfectly for the idea and I wanted to play with it for a while. I used mr.doob’s Three.js, a really, really cool library for Javascript based 3D and it was only a couple of hours to build the first prototype. Throughout the whole building process I used WebGL and Chrome, but according to the security issues, I finally decided to do the rendering without WebGL. The reason is that Firefox5 and Chrome Canary both block images from other domains to be used as textures and that would stopped us using Flickr images. The positive side of this change is that it now works fine in most browsers (at least in the ones we’ve been able to test so far).’
vidazzl credits:
Jeremy Ettinghausen – Creative Director
Gabor Szalatnyai – Creative Technologist
Nick Fell – Strategist
Felipe Guimaraes – Art Director
Lambros Charalambous – Copywriter
Adam Oppenheimer – Art Director
Joe Oppenheimer – Copywriter
Eric Chia – Head of Digital Design, Addictive Pixel
Keith Bone – Digital Designer, Addictive Pixel
Romy Miller – Team Director
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The Human Operating System
3rd March 11
Author: David Bryant (@davidbryant), Google Creative Lab, NYC
Disclaimer: David’s opinions are not necessarily those of Google Inc (editor’s note: BBH does advertising work on behalf of various Google products).
Human beings have spent around 2 million years working with physical objects in physical space. We are hard-wired to enjoy throwing things into the air, at animals and at each other because mastery of these skills has given us a huge evolutionary advantage.
We understand the inter-relationships between weight, inertia, texture, tensile strength, brittleness, velocity and gravity so well, we’ve even given it another name. We call it instinct.
When we cross the road in front of a car, we are judging the speed of the car and the width of the road and performing fairly complex calculus in the process. Some would say that we are not really doing the calculations in this case – we are simply using instinct.
Calling this process ‘instinct’ isn’t very helpful because it doesn’t explain anything. We’re simply renaming the observation, rather than attempting to explain it.
The truth is the calculations do get done. We use a neural-based learning system rather than a set of solvable equations but the calculation does happen. It’s part of our operating system.
Only after Humans had being throwing things around for a couple of million years, could we get down to the slow business of developing useful abstract notions. Like a positional system of mathematics, time, complex numbers, algebra. These are all things that are not hardwired. On the contrary they are remarkably counter-intuitive to our operating system and have taken centuries of trial and error to grasp them.
With these abstract notions we created computers, and interestingly, computers have evolved towards us, in completely the opposite direction. They started life as deeply abstract calculation engines. Nowadays, with rich graphical interfaces, touch screens, large icons and finger control they are increasingly feeling like physical objects.
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Crash Test Dummy
12th November 10
Posted in coding
Just as it is very easy to have an opinion about art without knowing how to draw, it’s very, very simple to talk knowledgeably about ‘digital’ without knowing anything about coding – the logic underlying every website and digital product we’ve ever used, tweeted about and, often, criticised.
So as part of Internet Week Europe and with Google Creative Labs we held a Coding for Dummies workshop which was an opportunity for 40 or so people to learn at the feet of some true coding ninjas and take their first, shaky steps along the path of geek enlightenment.
We started from the basics, quickly learning that 40 people cannot transfer a file to the same server simultaneously. We covered basic html, the fundamentals of server-side and client-side interactions moving smoothly onto CSS and javascript embeds before Googler @monocubed wowed us with some experimental HTML5 projects that might, right now, be a little beyond our abilities.
The afternoon didn’t finish with the class able to recreate We Feel Fine or launch an alternative blogging platform. But what it did was give everyone the confidence to go and have a look at a webpage’s source code and the beginnings of understanding why things on the web look and behave the way they do. A bunch of people can now go and play with code, launch a page onto the internet, tweak it, break it and maybe even fix it again.
Below are @tomux’s slides and at the end of them we’ve added a few of the pages that some of the dummies-no-longer created. We enjoyed ourselves so much (and still have so much to learn!) that we hope to do this again some time – keep an eye on our twitter for details.
Huge thanks to everyone who came along and special thanks to Googler’s @tomux, @monocubed and @potatolondon and BBHers @mrjonandrews and @jimhunt_ for patient teaching and technical prowess.
We know code-fu.
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