Prototyping Weeknotes #18 (11/06/10)
The Zeitgeist work is already proving its worth highlighting some interesting trends involving the ´óÏó´«Ã½ and glazed carrots. Sean is going to spend the next few days implementing monitoring on the processes and queues as well as tidying up some CSS. George and Sam are out at a EU meeting all week demonstrating some of our recent work and liaising with the other partners. Monday afternoon is spent evaluating what next for Digital Friendship. We're getting into proper security territory where we're not experts, and we're questioning what we're getting out of this and why we're doing it.
Tony is back in the office on Tuesday and has managed to implant the hardware into the elephant and monkey toys - they're not quite ready for the high street yet but look pretty neat. Vicky and Theo are starting to think about the Digital Friendship experience and are doing lots of reading and background research; Tris is validating our aims with stakeholders in Vision. Digital Programme guide is progressing smoothly and Chris B has started implementing Theo's designs. Sean has got a preliminary version of web stats implemented for all sites, it needs some refinement but it's a great start. Tris finishes up the day with a good chat about a Myth-related project.
Vicky, Tris and I have a quick chat about what's coming up project wise - Big Fan and a possible World Service collaboration. We're also grappling with an ongoing problem of how to scope upcoming work whilst you're head down in the detail of current projects. Zeitgeist now feels ready to put live; it's stable and performance is more than adequate for a prototype. We just need approval from Matthew. Chris N has finished the basic server authorisation process for Digital Friendship, just need to connect up the client. At the moment it's OAuth-like, actually closer to Flickr's authorisation process, but it shows the steps a user will need to take. Hopefully we'll add in full OAuth next week.
By Thursday Mr Elephant and Mr Monkey both have an activation switch and a tri-colour LED on their heads for feedback, and Duncan has got authentication in the desktop app. We've been fault finding with the hardware all week. Once inserted into the toys, and when we try to exchange IDs, the RFID readers occasionally fail read, it seems to be some kind of interference from having the 2 readers and 2 tokens too close. Nevertheless, Duncan shows the team the end-to-end process: registering a new toy, exchanging friendship tokens and confirming the friendships online. It's impressive work from Chris N, Tony and him, and that's phase one done. Theo's started the initial wireframes of more child-friendly processes for the registration and friendship making and that's the next phase; making it simple, attractive and telling a compelling story around what we've built and how it could be used. Tris demo's Zeitgeist to Jason who's original idea sparked the prototype; he likes it and has a really useful perspective on where we might take it next.
By the end of the week the Programme Guide is taking shape. Chris B has implemented most of Theo's designs on the device and is displaying live schedule information from our web service. Sean has started on a nightly download service. Seems like the project meeting in Hamburg has gone well and our latest LIMO prototypes have been well received by the project. The wider aim is to have 'proper' peer-to-peer search available, from a web page, by August. We're showing our latest work to Matthew, Brandon and a few others first thing on Monday so there's a quick check that all demo's are working and kit is charged, before tidying up our work plan document and writing these up.
Comment number 1.
At 16th Jun 2010, Diogenes wrote:What's Zeitgeist? Where else have you discussed it? Where can I find out about it? Is there a URL?
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Comment number 2.
At 16th Jun 2010, tristanf wrote:Hi @Diogenes. The Zeitgeist project has just been approved for release and we're working hard to launch it next week (I hope). Thanks for the interest.
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