you want to start something?

This is amazing.

It works on Safari nightlies on Leopard and Windows. It works on any iPhone with OS2 or better. So any recent WebKit build will be able to o this – eventually every modern Mobile Phone will run this (WebKit is the core of Safari, Google Chrome, ChromeOS, Android, Palm’s WebOS and Symbian’s S60). It runs and it runs well – not causing the CPU to have a hissy fit (like Flash on Mac OS X) and not stuttering on iPhone either.

It highlights what can be done with HTML/CSS.

It also doesn’t work on FireFox. Bleh.

My experience of Flash Lite on mobile devices has been particularly poor. On my Nokia N800, it runs but man, it’s awful.

Tags: Commentary by mj
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This is disgusting.

Two female protesters who challenged police officers for not displaying their badge numbers were bundled to the ground, arrested and held in prison for four days, according to an official complaint lodged today.

The incident was caught on camera, and footage shows officers standing on the women’s feet and applying pressure to their necks immediately after the women attempted to photograph a fellow officer who had refused to give his badge number.

Watch this on video.

Considering the video is POLICE SURVEILLANCE and not amateur surveillance, this is atrocious.

All charges were dropped against the two and the arrest is currently under judicial review. Cases like this, along with the Homeland Security situation in the USA, remind me of Thomas Jefferson.

For a people who are free and who mean to remain so, a well-organized and armed militia is their best security.

and another splendid bugger, Alan Moore

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

and Malcolm X

Concerning non-violence: It is criminal to teach man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

I am appalled.

Tags: Commentary by mj
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He wear no shoeshine he got toe-jam football
He got monkey finger he shoot coca-cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
Come together right now over me

Tesco’s new API reminded me of these lyrics from “Come Together” by the Beatles, mostly because of their future event, TJAM, where developers get their grubby mitts on Tesco’s new API.

From InternetRetailing.com:

Tesco is trialling an API which will allow third-party developers to hook into the supermarket’s databases to develop new ways of selling Tesco merchandise. Developers will be able to join an affiliate scheme and take a commision on sales for the lifetime of the applications they generate.

In an email to the 150 developers who have already registered to try out Tesco.com’s API, Nick Lansley, Tesco’s head of R&D, said “A great new Tesco.com Grocery API is coming which will offer extended facilities and faster performance, enable you to obtain an affiliate income from the customers who use your application, and find out what customers are asking for at our T-Jam event coming soon.”

T-Jam is an innovation day, to be held in London on 5 August, which will allow invited developers to work with other Tesco customers and creative thinkers to drive ideas and innovation, and then go on to play a part in developing those ideas and making them a success.

Anyone interested in attending T-Jam can find out more about how to get an invitation here.

I predict that there’ll be twenty apps allowing you to shop from your iPhone, five from your Android phone and two from your S60.

Would that be a bad thing? I found Tesco Online Shopping to be a curious, invasive process which involved me emptying boxes of groceries speedily so that the delivery guy could just take them and go. I wasn’t sure about the protocol really.

There’s no denying that Tesco Online Shopping seems to be a hit. This API, in including not only buying and checkout facilities but also nutritional information, product favourites and deals in a RESTful web service – not to mention commission.

Tie it into your ‘diet app’ and automatically order foods which are recommended while blocking those which are not. Provide a version of the Tesco store which only shows foods for the gluten-intolerant or observing cultural rituals. Even just being able to automate the delivery of staples from a good, easy to use interface might be enough; for example, a parent might want to make sure that her teenagers are well stocked while she’s off on holiday. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be built into a barcode scanner app so you can order the same pasta meal you just enjoyed and schedule it for delivery next week for Pasta Night!

The most important thing is start the conversation. It’s no longer who will be first to release an API for their consumer good service but rather why hasn’t Company X released an API for their service?

Tags: Commentary, Cool by mj
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There are three sector skills councils which are of immediate interest to the Digital Content Sector:

eSkills – covering the skills for Business and Information Technology
Creative and Cultural Skills – which have a remit for Design, Music and Creativity
Skillset – specifically for the Creative Media Industry

So, what are the Sector Skills Councils?

The Sector Skills Councils are government funded organisations which are employer-driven – they are meant to have representatives from industry on their panels – and meant to articulate the voices of the employers of around 90% of the UK’s workforce. They are limited in that they are UK-wide organisations and by necessity take the 20 000 ft view and tend to be lobbied most heavily by large companies.

Skillset have asked the Industry in the UK to complete a census. We have just been notified of the Census and there is only a week until the Census closes. As a result I would like to insist that the province, through the Digital Circle, ensure that our voice is heard.

The web site for the survey isn’t great – being powered by one or other of the “online survey providers” (They use PerfectForms) – the scroll bars don’t work, the click targets are poor, the text boxes are badly sized and this is probably because the web, accessibility and usability are not the focus of the person creating the survey.

This belies a larger problem – the survey is being broadcasted to the Creative Media industry but 90% of the roles listed are titles involved in the production of film or television. This shows the inherent bias in Skillset. Now – this isn’t a criticism by any means – Skillset, and the Skillset Media Academies, focus on film and television because they always have. They recognise that there is a change underway (for example, people are now spending more time in front of an internet-connected computer than they ever did in front of the television) and the census makes some effort to recognise this.

So, as the Census is written on a hard to use, generic form, with very little detail on what it should be used for, and we’re already under-represented on the forms, why would the Creative Technology sector be interested in filling it in?

• The Census enables you to stand up and be counted. You therefore have a direct impact on how Skillset uses its funds to make sure we have a world class, highly trained workforce.
• The Census helps Skillset find out the breakdown of full-time employees and freelancers, can map that to time (and previous surveys) and see how the challenging economic conditions have changed things.
• The Census is open to web developers, software engineers, designers, animators, games publishers and other disciplines. If you don’t fill in the Census, you don’t exist in their eyes because they have no way of finding you. This means the Film/TV bias will continue.

Stand up and be counted!

Tags: Commentary by mj
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MacRumors reports: Google reckons the Web, not App Stores are the future of Mobile as espoused by their Engineering chief, Vic Gundotra, who said:

“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly thatÂ’s where Google is investing.”

As MacRumors reminds us, Apple only allowed for web development for the first year of the App Store and developers weren’t happy about it. The explosive growth of the AppStore shows us that there’s huge interest in ‘downloaded’ apps.

With HTML5, geolocation, 3D CSS and other features available in the ‘browser’, you can see why this is the case. Is it any wonder that Apple has these advanced features working in the as-yet-unreleased Webkit nightlies, the as-yet-unreleased Snow Leopard and in the ‘already shipping’ iPhone.

Now consider that Nokia, Google, Palm and Apple all use WebKit, the Apple-ified branch of KHTML. It bodes well for iPhone as well as the other first party mobile handset/OS manufacturers that they’ll work well in the web-enabled apps of the future.

I remain a little sceptical. We can’t build the world in the web. There’s always going to be some new doohickey that requires a bit more than the browser can provide. And we’re always going to have those nutters who are more interested in working on the guts of a machine than the application layers (Hi Steve).

What excites me is that these things ARE coming to the browser. As we build more features like location-awareness into our hardware, then we will find more services making use of them. These apps, these features, soon be on every mobile. Every one.

Tags: Commentary by mj
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