Well, facebook have certainly shaken things up a bit haven’t they. Almost totally opening up the API so developers can write applications that fit inside facebook itself! Utterly unheard of before, but potentially brilliant. Lets have a quick look at what you can do with all this new technology.
From the developer’s pages, developer.facebook.com they’ve created their own markup language, FBML. This allows for quick access to certain functions and their layout styles. Great stuff. You can also add in flash and mp3 files so people can listen to music. You can also add in an <iframe> element to display an off-site page. You can upload pictures from external applications and you can query the database using FQL (Facebook Query Language). This all sounds really great, but lets look at the limitations.
No Javascript – though not a surprise, some applications and advanced forms rely on it
No external stylesheets – boo and hiss to this one, all your styles must be in <style> tags
No AJAX – well, they provide automatic form submission, but that’s it. You can’t perform your own queries though the usual AJAX way
You can’t edit user details or post stuff to groups – still a bit disappointment as this limits the level of interaction with the user profile.
The big thing really is the ability to put iframes inside the canvas. From there you can do whatever you like inside the frame.
So, it all sounds good. Now it’s whether I can use it. Today I sent out an e-mail to all uni-sport.org members with a link to a survey on it (http://www.tigersurvey.com/survey.php?survey=2815) so I can get some feedback. One of the questions is about facebook and if people would want an extra feature, would it be better pictures, commenting, facebook integrates with profiles or uni-sport integrates with facebook in the way of an app. At the moment, I’m hoping a lot of people don’t go for the last option.
After some thought, I’m not sure if it would be possible to use facebook apps for such a complicated application as uni-sport. For it to work as it does at the moment, if a club asks for a web site, they will have to have their own unique facebook application. This is because of the team selection idea. If a group wanted to do team selection from within an application, only people in that group would be on the list. However, there is no way to make an application private between a group of people and AFAIK, no way to moderate who uses the application. There can’t be a global application as team selection wouldn’t work very well (it’d have to be select from people in network X who are members of group X, but that forces people to be in a group, which isn’t how it should work).
At the moment, Uni-sport is a glorified group page with team selection, match reports and a calendar. With team selection being at the heart of uni-sport, until private applications can be written, Uni-Sport will not be appearing as a facebook application.
Well, I’m glad that that decision has been made, now I can get back to my revision (lol)
Steve
Currently Listening to: David Ford
Currently Eating: Birthday Cake
Currently Reading: CSS Mastery and facebook documentation
Currently Watching: Lost season 3 finale. Amazing
Days left at University: 13
Today I was at PA Consulting in London (Victoria). This was my last interview of my job hunting process as I’ve already been offered a job at HP which I’ve accepted (not signed on the line yet tho). There were 4 of us there, including a guy I met at the HP interview (he’d been offered a job there too). We got on quite well as I knew him and he was nice n chatty. We weren’t actually in PA’s offices as their meeting room floor is being re-furbished, we were on the 27th floor of a building nearby (which had rather spectacular views). Anywho, the day was set out to have three tasks. An interview by a senior consultant, a case study and a group exercise. Firstly, I’ll say that these were the hardest three tasks I’ve had at any assessment day.
The case study was to plan an initial meeting with the CEO of a phone company who somehow had 30% of the marketplace with a very small number of phone handsets. That was hard because you had to prep it all on your own and there wasn’t a huge amount to prepare for, just hope you covered everything. The other candidates said they presented using the flip chart but I just sat with an agenda and talked to him. The case study said it’s a discussion and presenting just wasn’t necessary to be honest.
The interview was just a standard interview, they went over the CV and didn’t ask too many hard questions. That bit was almost relaxing actually.
The group discussion, it wasn’t the solution that was hard, but the fact that the plan we came up with was so tight to budget and time that there was no room for error, which, of course, lets the assessors ask the most awkward questions. I was actually completely stumped by one of their questions, (about the history of the company that we were representing) but the rest of the team pitched in and blagged an answer. Thankfully though, I was the one who took the lead and made good suggestions for the marketing, pointed out mistakes in one of their working and thankfully corrected it because otherwise we’d have made the wrong suggestion.
I’ll find out on Thursday if I have a job with them. Would I take them over HP? Yes. They’re a nice bunch of people and they’ll train me to the highest standard and they’ll pay very well. The route up the tree is good and the bonuses can be great. If I don’t get it, it doesn’t matter. But, in my personal opinion it’ll be me and the other HP guy who get it if we are gonna get it. If I do, I’ll be happy in the knowledge that I’m one of 8-10 people who are the best graduate consultants in the country. That’s a great honor, and the usual ego boost for me
There is a problem though, wherever I go. I will no longer have the time to develop Steel Software and Uni-Sport. It’s a real shame that I can’t carry on with my passion, but it’s the truth and I can’t kid myself that I’ll be able to do it all. So, as far as I see it, I’ve got a few options:
1. Stop all-together, leave it as it is now, get no new clients. Fix bugs as necessary and release the source code to each club
2. Stop, but make the project open-source
3. Keep the code, add in facebook API profiles, fix any problems that have come up and extend fantasy hockey a little bit so it’s manageable.
4. Keep the code, re-write everything so it’s facebook-integrated and modern with rails then attempt to keep a little side-business open with the occasional sale
5. Same as above but sell the code to someone else
I don’t think that option 1 would work. The clubs wouldn’t understand how to work it, but, if I can’t commit to anything then I’d prefer that option over number 2. Open-source community could do some funky things to it and I’m not sure I’d like it.
Option 3 is the most likely, it’s not a major amount of work and I can still sell it around Sheffield uni.
Option 4 would be ideal but the amount of time that would take is basically my entire summer holiday, not to mention that I’ll be learning as I go along which will slow things down immensely. If I found a buyer for this stuff it’d be amazing but I wouldn’t know who to start with. Only facebook would be interested and that takes away the public front-end of sheffieldhockey which is not what the club wants.
I think I choose 3, with the option of doing 4 if I have nothing else on in the summer. Of course, if the hockey club ask for the code, I’ll give it to them. I’ll also need to create a lot more documentation.
So, with that decided I can relax for the rest of my train journey, yay.
Steve
Currently Listening to: Queens of the Stone Age – Lullabies to Paralyze
Currently Reading: Not much
Currently Eating: Less
Currently Watching: Re-runs
Difference in £ between HP and PA annual salary: £5,500
This has been a truly amazing week. I’ve travelled over 1000 miles and I’m not done travelling yet. I’ve had success, I’ve had failure, but I’ve also had so much fun that I’d do it all again in an instant.
Everything started on Tuesday really, with my trip to Fujitsu. An early start meant travelling to Bracknell for 1pm, where I met 4 other people who, honestly, only one of which I liked. The day was done by Fujitsu’s recruitment people, Alexmann. The presentation was boring and I was nervous when doing our individual presentations because I hadn’t really practised it. I really wasn’t bothered with the Fujitsu job. The pay they were offering was the lowest that I was applying for and the offices were horrid. The group exercise that we did didn’t go particularly well either as the girl who was with us was determined to compromise on everything. Anyway, After that I came home, saw Zoe, then slept.
The Wednesday was a big day for me as it was the Microsoft Imagine Cup Roadshow tour. I’d spent ages organising it, getting parking permits, lecture theatres, buffets, but I’d not spent enough time advertising it, meaning that only 30 people turned up. However, it all went well and I think those that came enjoyed it. Some good free stuff was given out too. Straight after, I had to get on a train to Bracknell again as it was the HP interview the next day. This assessment centre was far more important than Fujitsu as it was the final stage so I’d actually done some preparation for this one. I had also just gotten a phone call from PA Consulting telling me I’d made it to their next round in early March. That was great news as the money they’re offering is amazing.
This train journey was good, I finally got into Bracknell at about 10pm. I then proceeded to the Travellodge where I’d booked a room for the night. However, the bloke at the desk informed me that they were full! (It was valentines day but still, I’d booked!) He then called a hotel nearby called the Coppid Beech Hotel, a far more upmarket place and got me a room. He then put £45 on my card so that I could stay in the £115 room for the £70 I was meant to be paying! I finally got into my room just after 11pm. In general, it was very nice and breakfast was good the next morning, but still, it was a lot of hassle. I spent the rest of the evening practising my presentation for the next morning.
So, the big day came around and I walked the 10 mins down the road to HP HQ at Amen Corner. The offices were huge and nicely laid out (everyone had ID tags that let them into bits of the building). They first showed us a presentation about what HP was and what I’d be doing for the next two years. HP seems to have a good balance between taught training and on the job experience. There were 14 of us there (meant to be 15) and this was the third of seven sessions. We were also told there were 35 jobs. 7*15=105/15 = 5 people to get jobs that day. Not bad odds! There were 4 tasks that day. My first task was a case study (I won’t go into detail) where you had to make recommendations and priorities how to change the IT infrastructure at this business. It wasn’t too bad and I’m pretty sure I spotted the pitfalls and avoided them so all good there. I then had a competency interview which went well enough. Like at PA, they talked about Steel Software and Genesys a lot whilst asking a few questions about service and HP itself. Afterwards we all had lunch (very nice) and we talked to the managing consultants including one guy who’d been there 18 years (very interesting man).
After lunch we had a team exercise. Using the usual stationary items plus 2 coins, straws and some wine gums, we had to come up with a game idea that lasted 10 mins for 4 people and then sell it to company directors in a dragon’s den style presentation. What we came up with was a board game similar to mousetrap. Go round the board (coins to set distance) and collect straws and elastic bands, then landing on a sweet square you had to use the straw/elastic band to pick up a sweet and put it on your tower. It was a fantastic idea and on talking to other people definitely seemed like the best one of the day (then again, it was my idea *ego*).
The final task was to do a presentation to one of the senior consultants. I presented Steel Software which was to time and prompted some good questions and seemed interesting too. The other guy in the room, another candidate, presented on a project he did in his sandwich year at Intel. However, he was talking about a project he was still under NDA for so his talk was somewhat devoid of detail on how exactly he solved problems but the message got across, somewhat boringly though.
After that was a short Q+A session with one of last year’s graduates. Turns out we’re only the second graduate intake in 10 years! After this I went home. Finally got to Sheffield at half 8 and then went straight to see the Guillemots at the octagon. Fantastic gig, they’d been better but they’d not had more energy than that performance. After the gig I went for a curry with my godfather, ended up getting home at 1am. Such an immensely long, but incredibly enjoyable day, left me rather drained and just wanting to sleep.
The next day I just didn’t wanna get out of bed. I got a call from Ernst and Young inviting me to interview shortly (I couldn’t make the day the wanted to they said they’d call me back). Sounds good to me! My first proper day at uni all week was alright, but the evening was special. Zoe and I had put off valentines until the Friday so I took her out to a nice restaurant and then we went home and watched a film. It capped off a great week in style.
I’m writing this on a train down to London (again). Tonight and tomorrow is the MSP event, I’m staying at the Hilton Metropole in central London, then on Tuesday is my IBM half-day, with two group exercises, one of which I’ve done before. All sounds great and I get to stay in hotels for another two nights. It’s strange but I’m becoming rather used to it. As a consultant I’ll basically be living in a hotel all week then going home at the weekends. I’m sure I’ll get bored in the end but all this travelling is exciting, meeting new people is great and I’m excited to start work (but also excited to stop job hunting!) I’ll miss Sheffield when I’m gone, mostly for the people and hockey, but I’ll find another club near Reading.
I need some sleep
Steve
Currently Listening To: Joan as Police Woman – Real Life
Currently Reading: Marketing bumpf
Currently Eating: Tesco sandwiches
Currently Watching: Grey’s Anatomy (you can’t kill off primary characters!!!)
Miles travelled this week: unknown (will edit later)
After yesterday’s revelations, my expectations were sky high and I was not to be disappointed. I tried to split my time equally between creative and technical sessions, so I hope I provide a good overview of everything that was on offer.
First up was “Technocraft”, presented by Marcus Fairs, the founder of Icon magazine. My notes say that he talked about art using technology, but he talked about some very good examples. There were three which stood out, mirrors created from silver balls and servos, a chandelier with LED-embedded crystals that could write messages sent over SMS (called Lolita), and a simple device called the armchair activist, a speaker that reads out text messages (it is currently in the designer’s office. It’s phone number is: +447790272804). Images and videos below.
So, with that rather light-hearted session out of the way, the creative track tackled “Creativity vs Technology”. We were warned that from this point onwards the speakers would start repeating each other from the day before, therefore, I’ll only tell you about the new stuff. Question: Is there creativity in the interactive space without technology? Answer: No. There are certain things that we are unable to do in that space without technology. The user’s expectation is now very high so they need to involve the user. To do this, you must focus your users on a mission, create a puzzle or building blocks and let the user solve it, giving them the proper incentive of course. Secondly, designers must collaborate with designers from the initial stages of conception, involving the end user/consumer in the process. This is similar to the way that extreme programming and agile development works. Whilst this talk didn’t really have much to do with creativity vs technology, the main theme was that they must be used together to create a complete experience.
The speaker left us with a web site joshuadavis.com. This man specialises in generative design, providing a set of rules for a program to follow that then creates the image.
The talk before lunch was more of a demonstration than anything. Carrie Langham from Microsoft took us through a number of real-world WPF applications including one for London fashion week, a golf tournament (which looked very good, with an enormous amount of detail) and finally an application designed for 2012, the final stage of the Building Schools for the Future project. I’ll admit, this was the first time that I was truly amazed at what a WPF application could do, but I was incredibly surprised at it. I’ll explain…
What was shown to us were four separate applications, a teacher’s workdesk, a student at home, a student on a UMPC, and an administration application. The student and teacher apps had Vista sidebar gadgets associated with them too which launched the apps themselves. The workflow goes like this: A teacher sets an assignment and posts this to his students. The teacher can drag and drop graphics into an assignment in his workbook from anywhere and can even add bits of video. The student then opens their application (every desktop is customisable) and reads their workbook. They see that they have been assigned a partner and they can then IM/audio/webcam chat to their partner about their work. They then set up a shared workspace and can add things to it. Provided is a search facility which brings up articles, picture and video from approved sources (i.e. MSN Encarta). They can then drop these into their shared workspace and construct an assignment. They are also able to delve deeper into pictures and diagrams, i.e. a model of the body, double clicking the heart displays a 3D model of a beating heart that they can rotate and go inside. If they need help at any point, apart from all the resources on the net, they can call up an expert (IM/audio/webcam) and get an answer straight away. They then submit the assignment to the teacher who will add the marks to his online mark book. All this functionality is contained within the one application. The admin application that we were shown tracked pupils through the school using RFID tags. This application would then flash up alerts and call parents whenever they had been truant for a number of days, and, if necessary, would call the police!
This all sounds amazing. All this functionality in one place is astonishing, and its already happening too. Some schools are implementing RFID tags for registration and school access. Marking of homework is being done online starting from this year. However, from all this I saw a number of challenges, even in 2012.
1. Bandwidth – some of this stuff was very high quality. Even on an 8Mb connection, if someone is saturating your upload bandwidth with P2P applications, webcam performance degrades significantly.
2. Approved sources for search – Homework will suddenly become the same as kids are unlikely to dig for additional information.
3. Copy and paste generation – Children will not learn as they may just copy the text and past it into their homework without reading it
4. Experts – People don’t want to be bothered at 10pm and will not care if it’s deadline day
5. Privacy – Do you want your child to be on a webcam with a so called “expert”???
6. Assumption of computing power – It’d be really nice to assume everyone will be on Vista, have a UMPC and a webcam, but that’ll never be the case. Will this application run on OS X? I doubt it
7. Assumption of quality of resources – Poor resources will break this system. If you look at the 3D model of a heart and want the lungs but they’ve not been written yet, then you’re in trouble. Low quality models won’t provide adequate data either. What if the student is studying a really abstract section of the curriculum? Are the trusted sources guaranteed to give back an answer?
There are a lot of problems that need to be ironed out, but as a proof of concept, it’s astonishing. I’m going to try and get the demo, or at least slides of it, then I’ll show you what’s going on.
Still with me? Good.
The first talk of the afternoon was by Lars Engman, design director of Ikea. This was more of an inspirational talk by a man who had been in design since 1968 and had been at Ikea since 1975. He explained Ikea’s design process, which is similar to any other design process in the world, except for the idea stage. Ikea look at trends, and go the opposite direction! Below are a few facts and quotes from Ikea’s methodology which I found interesting:
Ikea is the 6/7th largest restaurant chain in the world. Their Bejing branch is able to seat 800 people.
Good design contributes to positive emotions
Science and technology define functionality. Simplicity is a virtue
Identify the relevant customer benefits of a product
Design is not about trends, but new ways to meet a person’s needs
Dare to fail, you will learn even more
When you have good design, beauty will look after itself
I need some of those in big print on my wall
The final talk of the day was on Vista Media Centre and Live services mashup. It was presented by a guy who definitely knew it was Friday afternoon and most of the demos were poor (thanks to the hotel’s limited net connection and the non-functionality of his Xbox 360). He demonstrated the theory behind TVs with media centre extenders built in (think Apple’s iTV but for media player), and explained what you needed to write applications for this service. To be honest, I didn’t take much in and started writing this up.
After this talk, I was approached by Emile from AKQA, saying that they were looking for students interested in the web site side of this in their creative development and IT development areas and to drop them a C.V. when I graduate. Sounds good to me.
In summary, it’s been a great two days. I’ve learned a lot about what is expected of next-gen internet applications and what Vista and WPF can do for applications. Clearly, social sites like Digg and Flickr are here to stay. Users don’t just expect quality from big company sites and large networking sites, but from every site that they visit. It’s no longer just about the hook of the web site, it’s the way they carry it off. Impress, or fail.
Steve
Currently Listening to: The Shins – Wincing the Night Away
Currently Reading: AJAX for Rails
Currently Watching: The world go by
Currently Eating: nowt
Miles to Sheffield: Don’t know, however many it is from Watford Gap
