"announcement" in Weblog

To get my 4oD Boxee app working I first had to convert Channel 4’s YouTube feeds into Boxee’s format. I’ve gone with the simplest thing I possibly could - just including the bare essentials - but it serves my purpose so maybe it’ll be of some use to someone else.

In a nutshell: you pass it a YouTube username, it gives you back a Boxee RSS feed. Done.

Here are some examples:

• 4od
• 4oDComedy
• 4oDDrama
• 4oDFood

These days almost all my TV viewing has moved online. After much frustration I settled on Boxee as my home entertainment center of choice, running on a Mac Mini sitting on my shelf. It started quite rough but it’s been constantly improving and the new version is great. My favourite thing about Boxee is the iPlayer though. It puts almost all of my favourite TV content on Boxee. Almost all.

What’s been missing is 4oD, Channel 4’s IPTV service. Channel 4’s documentaries, in particular, are fantastic. Unfortunately when 4oD launched it was PC only. Last year they finally opened it up to Mac users but it was still limited to the browser, which is awkward to use from my sofa without a mouse. Awkward to the point of being unusable.

A few months ago, while waiting to be served at a pub in Soho, I overheard a man in a suit telling his colleague that Channel 4 were moving all their content over to YouTube. That sounded very exciting. Leaving aside the implications for the entertainment industry this meant that 4oD would have feeds.

Last week I happened across YouTube’s 4oD feeds and thought I’d try hacking a quick Boxee app together - mostly for my own benefit. Working with Boxee’s UI XML isn’t the easiest thing in the world but after a lot of reading, poking, twiddling and cursing I finally got something functioning. It’s very much alpha. Maybe even pre-alpha. But if you want to try it out here are the instructions:

• Launch Boxee.
• Go to “apps”.
• Down the left, right at the bottom under “extras”, is “repositories”.
• In there is an option to “add repository”.
• Hit that and enter “boxee.donotremove.co.uk”.
• That should get you “Mike’s Boxee repo” and in there is “4OD”.
• Hit that and go “add to my apps”.
• Start it.

The UI is limited, to say the least. 4oD channels are down the left; shows are down the right. Pressing right loads the show from the channel you have selected; left goes back to the channels. My biggest niggle at the moment is that loading channel content is a bit laggy. Let me know how it goes though! I’ll make improvements as I find the time and as I learn more about making Boxee apps. Or maybe Channel 4 have their own app in the works… We can hope!

You Might Not Know is a place to share those little tips you’ve picked along this road called Life. These tips can be able absolutely anything. If you think they’re useful then someone else will too. Or that’s what we think, anyway.

David and myself have been busy working on the prototype for a while now and after much procrastinating we’ve finally decided it’s safe to tell people about it.

I’m rather proud of how simple it is at the moment - mostly thanks to some cunning ideas from David. Adding a tip takes moments and I’m finding it rather compulsive. We’d like to be to Knol what Tumblr is to Wordpress.

We have a hundred things on the todo list but at this point we’d just love to see a few people playing with You Might Not Know. Let me know what you think!

Towards the end of last year I had the privilege to be invited to speak at the rather marvellous TEDx event put on by CodeWorks up in Newcastle. Each of the talks was filmed to the exacting TED standard and the result is a very slick-looking video of me rambling on about some of my favourite things.

From the beginning of Frankenstory we wanted a way to showcase stories. Our first attempt was very predictable: a list of stories that we could add our favourites to. But something about it just didn’t feel right… Frankenstory is supposed to be fun, first and foremost; it’s not a competition. Or at least not in the usual sense.

Enter Nick, who had the rather marvellous idea of writing a blog from the point of view of Dr. Frankenstory. He busily invented a history for the good doctor…

The story of my success begins many years ago in the sleepy Alpine village of Yödelayoo where I was working as a humble librarian. One fateful day as I was dusting a big pile of Mills and Boons high on a rickety bookcase, the shelves gave way and I was buried in a veritable avalanche of romantic fiction and soppy chick-lit. When I regained consciousness, I awoke to find my face was buried in an open book –Genetic Experimentation for Dummies. What’s more, the concussion I suffered as I fell jolted a dormant part of my brain, leading me to instantly absorb all of the incredible information in this hefty scientific tome.

…set out a manifesto…

Hello dear friends, welcome to the Frankenlab, the place where I’ll be preserving some of your most interesting submissions for posterity in a glorious ‘Frankenstory Hall of Fame’. Think of it as a kind of taxidermy display for your stories where I lovingly stuff and mount some of your freakiest creations (before gluing googly eyes to them and using them to scare small children).

…and busied himself with exposing this new life of literary experimentation to the internet at large, using Frankenstories as illustration.

The result is Dr. Frankenstory’s Frankenlab. And I completely love it. It kills a whole flock of birds:

• putting the often incredibly random Frankenstories in an entertaining, light-hearted, fun context,
• minimising any feeling of elitism by putting the decision in the hands of the Doctor,
• eliminating any pressure that may have been induced by a leader board,
• yet still giving us some way to promote and reward our favourite stories.

The latest post went up last night: Djinn and Tonic.

I have the honour and terror of presenting at @media Ajax on home turf this November. It’s a privilege to be speaking alongside the likes of Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON), John Resig (JQuery lead) and about a dozen other top dogs.

In a lineup like that I clearly can’t talk about nuts and bolts Javascript. Instead I’m taking a slightly unusual tack for me: revelations. Since Ajax came along my job has changed in ways I wouldn’t have predicted. Technically I’m a flavour of designer yet after many years of specialising I’ve found myself having to skill up again.

• To keep a handle on what the rest of the team produce I’ve become a testing fanatic;

• I’ve had to go back and relearn how to program - not to necessarily produce back-end code but to understand what the real implications of my design decisions are;

• I’ve been converted to Agile practices as a means of effective collaboration.

None of these things are traditionally within the remit of ‘design’ but they all feed into producing a successful app. To try and describe these changes and what I’ve done about them I will be presenting But I’m a Bloody Designer! on the first day, straight after the keynote by the Ajaxians.

So, the lineup’s great, it’s in London. @media Ajax: coming soon. Say hello if you decide to come…

On Sunday I’m packing my bags and heading for San Diego for eTech. I’ve always wanted to go to eTech - it seems to be one of the most interesting events on the circuit - and this year I’m incredibly excited to be speaking! Fellow Tramponaught Charles Armstrong and I are tag teaming Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control… It’s a bit of a mouthful, I know. It should be interesting though and I’m looking forward to it. Charles is doing the first half on the human need to build mental models of the tools they use and I’m going to quickly run through the increasing difficulty in letting them do that with modern emergent systems. Yep.

Straight after the conference I’m going to be hopping in a car and driving to San Francisco via the coast road. I don’t exactly know why but it appeals to me for some reason. I did a long drive down to Key West during The Spring Experience in December and really enjoyed it. This time it’ll be two or three days on the road, staying in motels along the way - a proper road trip. Then I’ve got a few days in SF to just chill, have a look around and take in the sights before heading back to London. It should be a good 10 days!

After 5 good years I’m hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I’m becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up ‘sedentary’ is likely to be completely the wrong word… It’s going to be hard work - we’re up against the big boys - but it’s a really interesting field and the product we’ve been working on, SONAR, is absolutely fascinating. I don’t know whether anyone saw the Enron Explorer, which was our technology proof of concept, but it’s a step-change from that in terms of complexity.

Freelancing has been very good to me. I’ve been privileged to work for and with some really talented and inspiring people, made some good friends and learned a hell of a lot. I’ve been on longer term contracts for most of the last 2 years because I wanted to give myself the time to really get involved in some bigger projects. Over that period I’ve become less interested in web standards per se (it’s just how I do things so I take them for granted now) and more obsessed with problems and how to solve them. The logical next step is to get really involved with a single problem domain and see where that takes me. The Trampoline domain includes collective intelligence, social behaviour and semantics, all of which I love so I’m really looking forward to it.

I still have some loose ends to tie up though - if anyone wants a front end web dev job, check out my post on the Content with Style blog), but I’ll be permanent within the next couple of months. It’s going to be a busy period for me… I really want to get the work I’ve been doing with Wordtracker nicely squared away and I’m speaking at eTech in a few weeks too. I’ve also kicked off a personal project with fellow CwSer Matthias and there’s a small festival site to do as well. Crikey, seeing all that written down is quite intimidating! Roll on 2007.

I know I’ve not been posting here too regularly but I’ve not been completely out of the blogging loop… I’m using Donotremove as a place for my more general articles on things like the emerging web and online behaviour with more technical stuff going elsewhere. For a couple of weeks I’ve been posting news for the Carsons over at Vitamin, which has been quite fun. They’ve just kinda left me to my own devices and the kind of stuff I’ve been posting reminds me of the kind of thing I used to write when I first started blogging - short sweet posts with a couple of links and nothing more. I’m also posting every now and again over at the Content with Style blog. On top of these two I will have a couple of work blogs to contribute to as well so all in all, I’m keeping myself busy!

While I think about it, the Carsons are running another of their workshops towards the end of August. This time it’s Professional PHP Development from the chap who wrote DropSend for them and it’s safe to assume it’ll be good.

Who’s this bloke then? Yep, I recognise him too…

So, I’m off to Miami in December to speak at The Spring Experience! I’m excited and a little nervous. The sessions are super-long, weighing in at 90 minutes, but quite small so a workshop-type-thing might be possible, but I’ll have to wait and see. Keeping peoples’ attention for that long is a very daunting prospect.

I’d never heard of Spring (not surprising really, not being a Java programmer) until these guys contacted me but since then I’ve been seeing it everywhere. It turns out that the Trampoline guys are using it in the back-end of the app we’re currently building and some of the Wordtracker folk have used it too. I still don’t have a great handle on what it does so I’ll have to collar someone and get a proper explanation.