The JavaScript Jungle

As part of the Brighton Digital Festival, we organised two “hack nights” at our ‘Async’ JavaScript meetup group. Async is an open community of JavaScript enthusiasts, with sessions twice a month at The Skiff in Brighton.

The “JavaScript Jungle” was part art project, part educational, part community builder. We set up the jungle as an environment within a single web page, and devised a simple way for people to add a creature to the jungle, animate it and let it interact with the environment and with other creatures. And the results were fantastic:

• See the jungle!
• Read the write-up
• Grab the code

Sponsoring Full Frontal

We’re super proud to be sponsoring the Full Frontal JavaScript conference for the third year running.

Held at the historic Duke of York’s Cinema in Brighton, the conference brings together some of the sharpest minds in web development for a day (and night) of insightful sessions.

If you’ll be there at the conference, do come and say hi.

International JavaScript Show n’ Tell

On 10th November 2011, the night before the Full Frontal conference, Async will be hosting an “International JavaScript Show n’ Tell”. It’s something of a cultural exchange, for us Brightonians and all our international cousins.

You can mark yourself as attending on Lanyrd, or add a comment to the Async blog post if you’d like to take a 5-minute speaking slot.

AlphaGov

I’ve been working with the inspirational team at AlphaGov (that should probably be “BetaGov” by now, but the name seems to have stuck). It’s the single-domain, future website for the Government of the United Kingdom, and it intends to greatly improve the experience for anyone who needs to interact with government services.

You know how, any time that you want to find the answer to some citizen-based question – like, “Am I eligible for XYZ?” or “What is the tax requirement for ABC?”, or anything else of that nature – then it can be quite a fragmented, convoluted experience. We produced a small JavaScript application to prototype a more intuitive solution to the problem.

The beta should be out in the next few months.

New tools for BrightWorks

We’ve rolled out some new features on BrightWorks, the task management app for volunteers that is powered by our open source engine, “Tasket”.

We’ve added a slew of admin features, and spruced up the icons. You can read more about the changes on the BrightWorks blog.

JSConf

Hooray! JSConf.eu in Berlin was fantastic yet again. We were there, soaking up its JavaScript-fuelled brilliance, learning amongst the many.

Dharmafly ♥ Node.js

We’ve been up to our eyeballs in edgy tech, working on an elegant Node.js back-end for an even more elegant HTML5 application. It’s all about real-time collaboration, baby…

More soon.

To all the beautiful people we’ve worked with over the past year… to all our readers and contributors, family, friends, peers and, well, everybody else…

Have a sumptuous Christmas (or Winter Solstice, or what have you) and an inspirational New Year. Be well, be great and be here with us again in 2009.

Big Love,
Dharmafly

I is for iPhone

iPhone apps shown above (l-r):

• Hahlo – Twitter mobile browser client
• Alphabet – Phonetic alphabet speller
• Pownce – (ahem) Unsocial networking
• Photonasis – Photo filter effects
• Moblyng – Social network slideshows
• iTimeX – Collaborative time tracking
• Mobyko – Mobile info backup & synchronisation
• Last.fm – Personalised music radio
• iLove – Quick-dial your true love
• Dictionaire – Word, words, words
• Hyves – Social networking for Europa
• Colorblind Avenger – Photo colour-picker for the colourblind
• AeroReader – RSS reader
• Memiary – Remember your day
• hContacts – Sync with contacts on Highrise
• Facebook – The Facebook app. (While I’ve always found Facebook just painful to use, the iPhone app feels effortless).
• Lokalisten – Local listings… in German
• MetU – Find someone you once lost
• [Last year's message from Dharmafly]
• Dharmafly.com

URL: bbc.co.uk/worldservice/talkingamerica

Excitingly, not long after we built the award-winning Bangladesh River Journey mini-site for the BBC World Service, we were asked for another helping of social media expertise.

What is it?

Talking America is a trail-blazing social media campaign that we’re proud to have worked on. This time, it’s a live site that tracks the World Service crew as they journey across America in a social media bus.

Their big aim? In the eloquent words of Ros Atkins:

“This bus trip is our attempt to paint a detailed picture of America ahead of the election in November. We also want to create conversations between Americans and everyone else…”

(Ros Atkins, BBC crew member on the Talking America bus).

What you can do with social media

Talking America uses maps, pictures, video, audio podcasts, blog posts and other user-generated snippets to bring a journey alive. In this case, we built a mini content-management system for the journalists, with a system to pull in the latest Flickr photos from the bus and a colourful map to display it all.

In charming technological terms, we call it a “geo-mashup.” Namely, a smooth way of automatically pulling together time and location-based information into one online multimedia bundle. The outcome of this is the ability to track the reporters over time and in different contexts.

A bit for the technically brained

The mapping application uses jQuery and Sumo, which is a JavaScript microformats parser written by Dan Webb, who also worked on the front-end of the site. If you look at the site without JavaScript, you’ll see that all the info is already present on the page, written up in microformats and ready to be plotted on the map.

And they’re off…

Goodwill and loveliness to all our friends, colleagues, clients and peers.
It’s been a truly transformational year. Can’t wait to see what 2008 has in store…

We gave a 30 minute session at BarCamp London called "Yoga and the Social Graph: from smoke-signals to self-realisation"…

We discussed the ever-increasing trend for expansion and connection within society. This is now stronger than ever with the progress from the Internet (a network of interconnected computers), to the Web (a network of interconnected documents), to the Social Graph (or more simply, ‘Social Network‘, a network of interconnected social relationships).

We considered this tendency in the light of the yogic concept of constant progress towards union – on both the individual and collective level.

The discussion was interesting – with everyone offering insights into the process that we see unfolding in the world today. We found it a refreshing chance to take a step back from technical details and consider the bigger picture.

BarCamp

BarCamp is a growing global movement of web technology conferences that follow a model of grassroots, collective participation. The latest camp was held at Google’s London offices.

[See our previous post from BarCamp Brighton]

Further Reading

Nothing here about yoga – but some interesting commentary on social networking issues…

• Social Graph basic concepts on Read Write Web
• Brad Fitzpatrick’s summary of the problems and issues
• Brian Oberkirch blue-skying the future of portable social networks
• ‘Move My Data‘, a campaign to make data easily portable between different social networks

We’ve been doing some exciting work with Just Different, a UK charity who promote disability awareness and social inclusion.

Introducing Just Different

Founded by Toby Hewson, a young man with cerebal palsy, Just Different focus on educating the future leaders of our society. They provide in-school workshops on disability and difference, along with recruitment opportunities for young disabled people. They also act as disability advisers to teachers, parents and organisations.

There are over 10 million disabled people in Britain alone, and discrimination is commonplace. However, Just Different’s message is framed firmly in the positive – “Disabled people can do everything that everyone else does, they just do some of those things a little differently”.

The Launch

We recently attended the Just Different launch party, where Toby gave a live workshop demonstration to a group of local school-children. Using a sophisticated wheelchair to get around and a voice synthesiser for communication, he delivered the workshop with humour and charm. Hearing about his day-to-day life was both moving and enlightening for us. It gave us a touching appreciation for the challenges and triumphs that Toby and others undergo on a daily basis.

Toby embodies the Just Different message by fully engaging with life, and is a great inspiration to us. We’re proud to be working with the team to create their website, print media and social media campaigns. They’re a really bright organisation, actively and sincerely committed to positive social change. We wish them all success.

We ran an interactive workshop at BarCamp Brighton: "How to Save the World and Succeed in Business". This is the perennial question for Dharmafly, and instead of telling anything, we wanted to get the answers from the crowd…

We split people into groups and got everyone mind-mapping. Each group had a sheet with ‘How to Save the World‘ written in the centre and another sheet with ‘How to Succeed in Business‘. On each sheet, with limited time, people wrote down related concepts and then connected them together…

There often seems to be a conflict between running a thriving business and working in an ethical way. Much of our society is cut-throat and ruthlessly capitalistic. But we found that many practices complement both needs and there is a common desire for collaboration, integrity and taking an ethical approach.

The future looks bright…

Follow Us

Want to stay in touch, but too many things to remember?! Have our content delivered straight to you, with our splendid RSS feed.

What’s RSS?

Watch this video from those ingenius folks at Common Craft:

RSS Feed Readers

• Google Reader is a pretty handy online reader
• Thunderbird is a useful desktop-based email client, with in-built RSS feed reader

Any other recommendations? Feel free to share them in the comments…