Olivier's week began on Saturday, when he headed off to the State of The Browser event. He learnt a lot about upcoming HTML5 features - including some really nifty demoes of speech recognition, audio, video, 3D acceleration, and form accessibility and validation. He's particularly excited to see how browsers are now competing: they can't compete on features when they all try to adhere to standards, but they can compete on how early they support future standards (things that are making it into HTML5 or other APIs, but not standard yet), how often they release (hence a version number race which sees Mozilla planning to accelerate Firefox versions - going from 4.0 through 7.0 in 2011 alone) and on UI - or lack thereof.
For those of us doing a normal work week, on Monday Tristan and Theo went to Experience Labs in Holborn to watch some sessions of people using the Mythology Engine. There were 12 sessions this week, then a review meeting next week, followed by some group workshops. , who worked with us on the Mythology Engine, popped over with a team who have built another web-based storytelling prototype, this time based on an original story. More to follow on this blog hopefully. We're about to begin work on the next iteration of our P2P-Next LIMO work, so Kat, Dominic, Vicky and Tristan spend some time working out any overlap between this project and the proposed News dual screen companion. Olivier spent the day doing wrap-up for the docs on the Robot project.
There's a useful planning session for Watch Later on Tuesday. Just over a week left on this iteration and Chris has done the initial mobile site, running off dummy data, and Duncan has a search server and API to the data model done. Next step is to join them up so they're still on track to deliver the Iteration 1 prototype by the end of next week, which we then plan to test on the Prototyping team (and other friendly colleagues and friends) for a couple of weeks. The planning session was for iteration 2 of the work which will develop it further based on this testing and make it suitable for a closed, invite-only trial with more people. We've got a broad list of features this would need (more UI work, tuning the search etc.) We'll narrow this down when we actually start that iteration. Olivier reckons that someone at the ±«Óãtv must be obsessed with the permutations of the letters D, S and P since he recently heard about PDS (Personal Data Store), DPS (Digital Public Space) and now DSP (Dynamic Semantic Publishing).
There's a busy second half of the week for our W3C work. Some coordination for the upcoming W3C UK & Ireland office opening event where one (or two) ±«Óãtv person(s) will be giving a talk. Olivier also got an offer to give an overview of the ±«Óãtv's work with Linked Open Data and Semantic Web technologies in May at the W3C AC Meeting (a general assembly of sorts), and he and Akua found a location for a face-to-face meeting of the W3C Accessibility Education and Outreach Working Group. Participation of ±«Óãtv staff in standards work is going strong, and Olivier helps wrangle this further, with a new internal mailing-list and monthly meeting to help us coordinate our work and learn from each others' experience.
On Thursday, Jon from News came over to propose a project to increase the external linking from the ±«Óãtv News website, he's subject to much questioning from the team which, I think, means it's a good project! Paul gets in a solid week of coding on first cut of Internet Dashboard Engine, using his old Swiss Army knife tools of Perl and SQLite, and aside from all the boring stuff like logging, config and tests, he has real-time data flowing into the data store, cleansed, and charts coming out the other end. If SQLite isn't up to the concurrency we need, he'll fall back to MySQL. The next steps are to get proper dev/staging environments, build the HTML views and work on KPI calculation.
Kat and I looked at feedback from our early RadioVIS test, and then prepared work to move this to the next stage, including presenting research and findings to the editorial teams from the radio networks. This week Chris L was working on account management for the RadioTAG prototype using the excellent library. He wrote a blog post on building applications on large datasets, and had useful discussions on the RadioTAG developers list about our proposed protocol. We met the team from an interesting device manufacturer, which was really productive, and Chris and Theo spent Friday afternoon demoing Autumnwatch to various bosses. We're all missing Chris G, who's on a particularly grim course, which he feeds us titbits from through the week. My fave is a session on "the sociology of accountancy" - poor thing... and then we're done.