Prototyping Weeknotes #65 (24/06/11)
George starts the week in the only way he knows how, with a telco. Monday was a whole lot better for the rest of the team. Our friends in online news joined us for a work session to kick-off some new projects with them. One (coming from them) is solid; the scope of the other is still eluding us. It was great for the two teams to meet and it has certainly got the news junkies in the team excited. I spent the afternoon with the Digital Service Development section helping them visualise their project work on a whiteboard, and explaining concepts like blockers and work in process limits. Different domain, but the issues are all too familiar.
On Tuesday morning some of the team revisit one of the news ideas, increase the scope a bit and go back to the original research on how people consume news. Later on, Olivier is joined by Yves from the Programmes and On Demand Team for a lunchtime lecture with R&D staff on what the adoption of linked data culture and tech means for the 91Èȱ¬, and vice versa. There's hardly a mention of rdf which makes a refreshing change. Joanne has been working on some guideline documents for one of our collaborative projects - how to plan and conduct user evaluations and one defining different types of prototypes.
What with appraisals (it's that time of year again) and interviews (we have several open roles) it's a wonder anyone has time for project work, but somehow they do. Tris is trying to wrap up this iteration of Watch Later, it's now changed name (to be revealed) - Tris didn't like "Watch" because it excluded radio and Theo didn't like "Later" because it suggested a use of the tool. All the CSS/HTML work is done and Chris N has made some tweaks to the Solr database so we are getting much better search results. In addition to doing a bit of tinkering with Sinatra and JQuery, Theo has been writing up his follow-up blog post about the first iteration. Lots of bugs are being being discovered and fixed and the plan is to get the team using it from next week and then send some invites out.
The RadioTAG team have also been wrapping things up, annotating the proposed API document and handing that off to the relevant owners. There's also lots of planning happening around user evaluations of it, both lo-fi in-house, and with external agencies. On Thursday we are treated to a demo of a prototype implementation of part of the spec running on a real radio. Andy from Global then emailed to say he was creating tags on Radio1 with the same make of radio from Bristol. It's really great to see all the bits starting to come together.
Chris L and Duncan had a fun day at the Innovation Day on Thursday. They got together with Luke from GMedia and came up with an interface to navigate 300+ radio stations on a TV. They sketched it, Luke stuck it in photoshop, Duncan built a simple demo and Chris L built an API to fetch the data.
In other news, it's great to have Kat back in the office after her holidays, Paul has been creating a bunch of Debian packages for some Perl modules and there was no drilling this week. Hurray!
Interesting links from around the web
Here's a few things that have caught our eye this week:
- . Interestingly, "...the data [...] is available for free download provided that any new additions are shared back."
- : our Autumnwatch dual screen project and Mr Theo Jones are featured in Wired UK.
- : Microsoft research paper on how to turn pixel art into resolution-independent vector art.
- 91Èȱ¬ News for connect TVs: the new 91Èȱ¬ News product on the Samsung set top box.
- : dotjs is a Google Chrome extension that executes JavaScript files in ~/.js based on their filename.
- : a high level introduction to why Ruby programmers should care about messaging.
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