nick.recoil.org

Since November 2009, I have been working with the talented people at BERG London on a variety of projects, two of which I want to mention in more detail here.

Michel Thomas on the iPhone

The first project was the Michel Thomas iPhone app. This is one of the most well-rounded apps I’ve implemented, and proves that you don’t need a large team in order to produce an intricate and attractive application. BERG’s supremely talented designer, Matt Brown, designed the visuals, and I worked on the iOS implementation. Between us we came up with a product we’re both very proud of, and it’s now the flagship mobile application of Hodder Education.

Since its launch, the Learn a language with Michel Thomas application has been steadily gathering interest, and It has recently taken the top spot in the Free Education category of the App Store, both in the UK, and in the USA and Australia.

There are more details of the design process in the “Behind the scenes” post that Matt Brown wrote up for the BERG Blog, and a comprehensive Flickr image set of the sketches we created during the design and development process.

In my view, one of the standout feature is the playfulness we worked into the interactive audio player. We went through a number of design iterations, many of which were discarded because the technical implementation didn’t capture the feeling of the original design sketches. Our final design struck a great balance between gorgeous design and the constraints of the real-time rendering power on iOS devices.

At the height of the work on the audio playback, I listened to the same phrases so many times that Michel Thomas percolated through into my subconscious. At one stage, during a particularly intense week of work, he took a starring role in a dream, chatting up girls at a party in his uniquely accented Spanish!

Popular Science+ for the iPad

The second application we worked on was Popular Science+ for the iPad. BERG had previously worked with Swedish publisher Bonnier in late 2009 on an exploration of the future of digital magazines. Very shortly after the Mag+ video had been released, Apple announced the existence of the iPad, and Bonnier, along with BERG, were invited to create the magazine experience that had been conceptualised in the earlier work.

The challenge of bringing Mag+ into the world in only 8 weeks made it an extremely ambitious project, which took a great deal of concentrated effort from many people across numerous timezones (London, Sweden and Florida, USA). Thankfully I was joined by another developer, Lei Bramley, who really pulled out all the stops to get everything in place on time.

After a fevered period of development, we submitted the first version of Popular Science+ to the App Store for the launch of the iPad, and Steve Jobs himself had very nice things to say about our work:

Somebody snapped this picture of the street-level advertising of Popular Science+ while out and about in Manhattan:

The sheer ambition and timescale of the project saw everyone involved in the project raise their game, and it was a fantastic experience to have been part of the iPad product launch.

Mill Colour

Lastly, a small update concerning Mill Colour. What began as a small project to give people a taste of professional colour grading, has gone on to be a big success worldwide. It has been downloaded over half a million times to date.

Viva Mill Colour!

I’ve just got hold of my first edition print of Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson. It’s an amazingly inspirational read, and covers a bewildering number of topics. It’s a shame that it’s a little too large to take on holiday with me to Italy.

For some reason, I was reading the Slate article on the mysterious Short Capuccino from Starbucks, and I thought I’d try it out in my local. The guy serving me, as described in the Slate article, didn’t bat an eyelid when I asked. 1.95 UKP for a regular Tall cappuccino, and 1.75 UKP for a Short cappuccino, and it’s definitely a better amount of milk in my opinion.

This has been brought to you by the trashy coffee department

Today was an example of the perfect English summer’s day, with a clear sky, temperatures around 26^oC, and a cool breeze, all enjoyed with a glass of Pimms in hand. As part of the Open Garden Squares Weekend, ours (Nevern Square) was open to the general public, and while Jasper and I were lazing around the flat, we heard a lovely bit of light jazz drifting up from outside our window. We decided to investigate!

It turns out that the Garden Square Committee had organised a Saxophone quartet to come and play in the square between 2pm and 4pm. The Glyn Williams Quartet were four very nice gentlemen who kept everyone entertained whilst many of us were eating our picnics (including Jasper and I), or having a browse around the Herbaceous borders.

The source of the movie above was taken with my JVC Everio GZ-MG36EK, which I lovingly refer to as the iPod of the camcorder world. No more fussing with DV tapes, this is captured straight to an internal hard disk drive. The only slight issue I have is with the range of editing tools that support GOP-style editing on MPEG2 streams. They are few and far between, especially if you’re using a Mac.

I’ve moved this blog installation from my locally hosted MythTV server over to the recoil.org box we’ve designated for hosting dynamic content. In doing so, I’ve re-hosted all of the content from MySQL to SQLite, as this is going to be easier to maintain in the future in a secure and simple way.

In doing this, I’ve discovered that there’s apparently no neat way of doing this through the current Rails rake tasks. Eventually I’ve settled on preparing a blank SQLite database via:

rake db:schema:load

And then running the following script, which was modified from something found on the SQLite trac installation:

cp db/typo_blank.db /tmp/temp.db ; /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump --no-create-info --compact --extended-insert=FALSE --quote-names=FALSE --complete-insert -u root -pYOURROOTPASSWORD typo | perl -pe '
        if (/^(INSERT.+?)\(/) {
                $a=$1;
                s/\\'\''/'\'\''/g;
                s/\\\"/"/g;
                s/\\n/\n/g;
                s/\\r/\r/g;
                s/\),\(/\);\n$a\(/g;
        }
' | sqlite /tmp/temp.db;  mv /tmp/temp.db db/typo_dev.db

And the last thing I found I needed to do, which may or may not have something to do with being on the SVN trunk:

UPDATE contents SET published='t';

After the migration, the contents.published column seemed to contain a 1 instead of a ‘t’, which is related, I assume, to the way the differing systems choose to store boolean values