Projects

I’m building Aframe full-time, and in my spare time I hack on a variety of personal projects and collaborations.

We’re changing the way that people make TV programmes and films, helping people collaborate more easily when working with large amounts of professional video content with a team who are located in different places and need to have access to and share video via the web.

Imagine these scenarios, and you’ll see how we help:

“I just shot 1.5TB of HD video and I need to get it to someone in the USA so they can see it and download just the bit that they want”

”I’ve got 1000 hours of footage and I need it logged and searchable so that we can save time in the edit”

“I just need to get this ProRes video to someone so they can watch it in Japan, but they don’t have the right codec on their computer”

I co-founded the company with David Peto and day-to-day for me it’s a mixture of ‘what next’, software development (Ruby, HTML5, JS) and design.

Personal projects

Go Genie

Doing personal projects is partly about flexing my creative muscles, experimenting with ideas, many of which often end up influencing the direction we take as a team in the development of Aframe. Partly it’s about being involved with a good variety of outside influences and doing things that have a social impact.

Go Genie is about answering these questions:

Why isn’t there a database of accessibility information for any place I can think of? If I’m going to the theatre, are there a disabled changing facilities? If I’m going to a cafe, are there steps to get in? Lifts? Sign language on offer?

Oddly enough, such a thing doesn’t exist. It surprised me too. I’m collaborating with Alison Smith from Pesky People, who successfully pitched to Arts Council, NESTA and Nokia for funding to build a mashup of Foursquare data and access information. Web app, cross-platform mobile apps (Symbian, iOS, Android), API. Built in Ruby(Padrino), JQuery, HTML5 and Phonegap for mobile.

Wrangl

A simple tool that visualises two sides of an argument. Users can collaborate and build a ‘Wrangl’ that shows others quickly the general structure of the arguments that relate to a debate, and they can drill down into particular points to find references and links. It’s good for democracy projects, decision making, explaining the differences between similar products, and lots more.

Stories from an Invisible Town (not online yet)

In the words of Hugh Hughes: “It’s an exploration of childhood. More specifically, an opportunity for me, Hugh Hughes, to share with you my memories of my childhood in Llangefni, Anglesey. It’s going to be a project that you explore online and eventually will become a new live show too.”

Screened

How would you attempt to make sense of a database containing 5.5 million film screening records per year? This is a demonstrator for one approach - mapping where films are shown of different kinds around the UK. The BFI are in the middle of an open data programme to release their archived film screening data and this is the first time it’s been allowed to leave the building for a third party to develop an app with it. Interesting stuff!

Recently I’ve been doing this:

Buddy

I enjoy working on spare time projects that have a social, ethical, political or environmental angle.

Buddy is a software tool that helps people deal with depression by keeping a ‘mood diary’ via mobile, web and SMS.

Sidekick Studios, the guys behind this idea are a social innovation company. When they got in touch they had a problem - their developer was struggling to meet their deadline and they needed someone to step in and get it going. That call was on a Friday. By Monday I had a nice-enough-looking and minimally functional Rails app deployed and on the web. Then we iterated to the point where they could get their first client contract agreed, and I successfully handed over the project to their new in-house developer, with only a brief email exchange to make sure it went smoothly.

Budge

A prototype for Sidekick, this is an Arduino-based game with a web-based tool for visualisation and tracking. I can’t say too much because it’s pre-release.

Help Me Investigate

A collaborative tool to help people answer questions that aren’t easily answered. Think of it as citizen investigative journalism. Paul Bradshaw (Online Journalism Blog) had the idea and brought in Nick Booth, me and others. I did the development work for a few months and it’s since been open sourced.

Manage Places

A pre-launch beta product that aims to help people with large areas of land under management to comply with various environmental legislation. I prototyped the idea and developed it to “get funding” stage, at which point a full time developer took it over.

I hack on random things too

I often make things very quickly and put them online. Prototypes, demonstrators, ideas that could turn into something later, mashing a couple of data-sets together for interesting results… I call them hacks (sometimes I do them at hack-days). Nothing illegal, obviously.

Debillitated

The process around the Digital Economy Bill going through parliament seemed very frustrating to many people, so I made an app to show what happened, who voted and what we thought about it.

Mini Pub Crawl

This was a little idea that Paul Birch mentioned over coffee. I liked the idea so I knocked it together in a few hours over the weekend. It’s a way of collecting a set of locations (pubs in the first instance) and making a nice page that shows who is going to be where and when so you can join in.

New Homely

A quick mashup based on scraping Pinterest (they don’t have an API yet) to make a small single-page web-based mood board.

Filmflexicon

“What should I watch on Virgin Filmflex tonight?” Essentially this gets around the problem of the rubbish salesly reviews that Filmflex has, and lets you browse by the ratings each film gets on RottenTomatoes.com. It’s not up to date with live data, so probably isn’t of much use biw. A quick hack for Culture Hack Day.

CultureGrid Mobile

A mobile consumer for the CultureGrid API - several thousand cultural artefacts on your phone!

Culture Scraper

A tool to grab the biggest image from a web page so you can refer to it elsewhere. Kind of evil and possibly breaks various copyright clauses on websites. A hack for Culture Hack Day.

Stefoto

A neat little site for a wedding photographer. In this case, my photos from helping Emily out at about 50 weddings. But it could be used by any photographer quite easily. It’s open source - Github

Twadio

A very silly idea put together in a cafe with Andrew Dubber. It’s a twitter-based silent radio station. Rather than worrying about licensing issues about providing a radio service, a virtual DJ tweets the name of an ‘ear-worm’ track and you play it in your head.

Things I made a while ago

Type

I co-founded an experimental record label with John Xela after we’d been running shows in Birmingham through our Default brand. The label is one of the things I’m most proud of. Unfortunately it’s never generated sufficient revenues to support both of us full time, and I left it to John to run whilst I worked on other things. Oh, the site is by me and I still have some involvement there from time to time.

BCCDIY

Birmingham City Council spent a lot of money on a new website. It was a bit crap. Then they said that one of the reasons it had cost so much was because moving content from one system to another is a big deal and you have to pay a lot of people to do it (they were doing it manually, copy-paste style), and they couldn’t have things like RSS feeds because it would all be a bit expensive and difficult. So over breakfast I scraped the site and built a bunch of the missing features, then over a two week period collaborated with a few other folk to create a wish list for what a council site could and should be, the results ending up as BCCDIY. It’s a two week experiment, so it’s shaky in places, and generally unsupported.

I’ve left it online as a thing of interest. Work continued on the idea with DIY Council, but that never saw the light of day - essentially taking the idea and applying it to all British councils.

Emily Quinton

Emily is my wife, and is a successful photographer. This is a simple little Wordpress site (yes I know). We’ve got something more involved waiting in the wings but we’ve not had time to deploy it.

Caboodle

Caboodle was a set of of mashups for common services for Sinatra, so you can easily pull together bits from elsewhere on the web to make a website. No database to hack, static file system so a hacker can’t write to it. Basically I got fed up with Wordpress and the constant anti-script-kiddie battle. It became too complicated and I’ve ripped out the bits that I need to build what you are looking at now.

Modern Love

Based on the work I did on the Type website, Shlom who runs Boomkat got in touch and I used the same format to give his labels a new home online. Mashes up Twitter and Soundcloud to make a neat label site.

Created in Birmingham

Pete Ashton and I had an idea to do a blog about creativity in the city. I’d just written an article for Channel 4 where I talked about the idea of a brand for the city being “Created in Birmingham” as an extension to the old “Made in Birmingham” stamp that established its reputation as a place of manufacturing. Combined the two, got some money to start it, then didn’t have very much to do with it other than being generally proud and telling everyone about it.

Geopinion

A sadly unused little app that I developed that lets you gather people’s opinions about places, particularly for local government consultations. I put it together for one in particular and then nothing happened. Shame - it’s still a good idea.

V&A Arts and Crafts

A fairly large microsite for the V&A museum’s Arts and Crafts exhibition. The tile designer was a big hit for them - you can design and share your own arts and crafts designs, and it surprisingly spawned a small community of very committed users. One of the first steps the museum made into that kind of thing.

Creative Republic

I was one of a handful of folks who decided to set up a representative group for creative and cultural people to push the West Midlands towards investing in us as potentially a big thing for the region’s future. Seems we won!

And from the mists of time…

One of the sad facts for anyone working with the web is that what was once exciting, relevant and using the latest technology is yesterday’s “oh gosh, I remember DHTML”. Everything we do is impermanent, so this is where my hard work more often than not ends up, sometimes remaining in part on Archive.org.

The Big Picture

How do you get people who aren’t apparently interested in ‘the Arts’ when the Arts Council have a remit for “Great art for everyone”. You go to where they already are, and focus on doing something that’s interesting on a large scale. This was a collaborative artwork involving 50,000 user-submitted photos. Each one ending up as part of a huge stadium-sized printed mozaic, itself making up one of the submitted images. The end result was a world-record-breaking attempt at the World’s largest photo mosaic. I produced the technical web/mobile part of it for Audiences Central.

Tweetlet

A cute little twitter app that during pregnancy would tweet you about your baby’s development. In the first person. Some liked it, some found it a bit freaky.

Plus Festival

This was a lovely little festival of design, typography and interaction in Birmingham. I was on the board when we set it up.

I So Wish

Andrew Dubber and I built a site all about users sharing ‘wishes’ and helping others to make them actually happen. Oddly, it worked. For a while. Dubber might be doing something with the idea once more at some point.

Odadeo

This was a social network for new fathers to share thoughts, ideas, links, information about their newfound fatherhood. Essentially what I discovered is that whilst mothers are huge online and talk about all manner of things publicly, when it comes to fatherhood this is in general a much more private thing and if you’re looking to start a site about dads, better make sure it has a shop. Oh, and add a forum. That’ll probably do it.

Vivienne Westwood

A guess my big break on the web came when at 3form we got commissioned to build Vivienne Westwood’s website. This was at a time when the company was quite literally two of us crammed into the back room of a shared house where we lived with two other people. A lovely flash-only site with a little CMS for them to update photos and manage the layout of the site. Essentially we made it a bit too good because we didn’t get to bill them for anything ongoing and it remained online for about six years technically unchanged.

3form

This was a design and web agency that I set up with Antonio Gould whilst at uni. We did lots of good work - websites, games, branding, software tools, won a bunch of awards and at its peak we had a team of 10 people. But a time-for-hire business model wasn’t going to get us to where I had ambitions - I wanted to focus on building a product that had some scale, so we changed model to work on a project basis with freelancers rather than having full time staff. This worked pretty well, but sadly we had some bad debtors, a bit of legal wrangling and the company closed messily. The brand pre-dated the company and it remains so I expect that at some point in the future we may see more from 3form.

Default

A group of friends got together in Birmingham and set up a ‘warm electronica’ night and we invited various electronica musicians to perform. It ran for a handful of years and petered out when John Xela and I focussed on getting Type off the ground. Still - we had some great, memorable times.

Robots in Disguise

For about seven years or so, I was a spare time VJ and performed live visuals at some pretty great shows around the country. It was great fun, if a little tiring to drag several VHS decks, projects, vision mixers, desktop computers (it was a mac G3 back then) and tons of cables around the country. These days you see this kind of thing being achieved off the back of an iphone…