CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT!!

Yes, content is KING folks, and let no designer tell you different.

 Adding finishing touches to a website that I am doing at the moment and then waiting for the onwers of said site to write a little content to add. When it is all done and dusted i will put up a link.

 Least to say, the site is made in Wordpress, the first time I have used this CMS - in fact, the first time I have used a CMS more complicated than blogspot. And now do i find it...? Well, not as intuitive as I had have hoped and i don't know whether that is because of my own expectations and competencies or just dodgy UI - perhaps a mixture of the two. I dont see myself as a UI guru but there are just ways that the WP backend layout doesn't play well to the eye and some of the documentation has itself to be documented. I guess its all in the learning curve.
 Though to say there are many little pitfalls that you encounter and wouldn't think about unless you had someone sitting watching over your shoulder - it would be difficult to learn this completely from scratch with no guidance other than what is offered by the WP.org itself - still, go there in the end and am now prepared to go on and do another site for myself in WP - (though still have this notion that I may do the anti-site I had the idea for many moons ago - a site with absolutely no structure, just links and images all the way - no CSS - oh the frivolity of it all!!!)

Color app.

have been hearing a lot about this new mobile app called Color - basically a smart photo sharing app with which can recognise pictures taken of the same event and choose the best one - spontaneous social networking - here is the founder having his say after the critics panned it on its release - personally, I have not played with it yet, in fact still have to download and get to grips with it - but could be especially interesting at conferences and concerts on a big screen - going to have a play and maybe suggest it to Comtech. see if it works....

internship - update...!

At a bit of a loss of what to do today. Since I couldn't come in yesterday when i was hoping to have a chat with the "big man" to secure the use of some equipment, and now that I come intoday and he had already left this morning... well well. Though he does have (mcuh) bigger fish to fry.
And I only want to really start playing with the set up of the screen when they are actually set up... but a video from a few days ago just saying where I am at ...

spo3podcast21

And since I seem to be getting some work done tonight, here is a sneaky wee playlist at the same time - And a lot of noise in here - though quiet noise. This is a headphones waiting for the bus mix - take something to read too.

Moo Rah Rah Rain - Animal Collective
Kids With Guns (Quiet Village Remix) - Gorillaz
Click Click - The Wedding Present
Forgotten Song - It Hugs Back
Pnoom - CAN
Colorado - Grizzly Bear
Washington School - Atlas Sound
Fox Confessor Brings The Flood - Neko Case
Music - Cornelius
Hey Leanne - The Aliens
Mathar (Richard Fearless Mix) - Indian Vibes
Spray - CAN
All Together Now - The Beatles

Had to end on something to bring it all back to earth - let you walk into wherever you are going with some sense of.... solid.

injoi!

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PS there was some problems with the previous podcast - I had rendered it in GarageBand and for some reason... yeah yeah, bad workman and tools (accuser! you know who you are!) and it outputted in .m4a format, something that zshare wouldn't stream. So here is a link back to the original post and the file link has been updated so that you can stream directly from the website. 

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Another video from the bank

And another video from the bank showing different states of the lights. One cool feature that may not be on the videos are the built in sensors on each of the doors. When a certain door opened then a wave of light would be emitted from the LED's above that door.

Outside job. (part of internship)

Here is a video from a project I was working on a few weeks ago as part of my internship. This was outside of Comtech, but with another firm who work in the same area, not on such big jobs as Comtech and perhaps a bit more specialized, but in the same line of work.

The light installation was for a investment bank in Copenhagen in there "ideas" department - I guess as a way to inspire their workers (I had other "ideas" :-)). Each light is an LED mounted into the ceiling with a solid perspex tube (pictured for effect) placed below it.

The individual lights are each programmed (allotted a number) and then already programmed states are feed into the server. Each LED lights up depending on the current state and time frame.

 Painstaking work but well worth the end result!

Next steps

Lost another day due to sick kids - but alas, was able to do a little in house reading - brushing up on html.
Said that I wanted to crack on with html5 but since deadlines are starting to approach, I am going to refresh my xhtml instead - no point in making it more complicated.

But very simply, have set up a page with a coveritlive iframe in the center. Will get this onto the screens and then play. I think it will be better to play with it on the screens rather than making a mock up on the laptop and then transferring that. Since I have the opportunity to build the set up in the warehouse, I should take advantage of the space and the time that will be afforded to me next week.

The image is of the basic set up of the system -

In the set up there is a computer which receives the feed via wifi. This is then scanned and injected into the media server which itself cannot process realtime feed (but there is a difference here in terminology since "realtime" means something different when talking about motion graphics - will find out what. To me, realtime also has a sense of interaction. perhaps this is the same, but when I propose interaction, it is with multiple users via the internet, whereas in media server terms, it is with the technician controlling the different pre-rendered graphics(?)). What is important here, is that the media server can "serve" the feed into the alloted position on the screens, whatever the screen set up (mentioned in the diagram itself). Within the media server, we place the feed onto its own layer and can then add it to other graphics - either produced within the media server or imported by other means.

Questions of screen resolution will arise and be answered in tandem of positioning.