Ben Nolan

I think I’ve posted about this before, but having had a bit more experience building mobile apps, I think there’s a great opportunity to take the list of local reddits and build a customised app with a messageboard for each city. Basically replicate the post link, upvote/downvote, start conversations functionality that reddit provides on a city basis and make a customised app for your city that does this.

So I got as far as making a cool contoured terrain in WebGL before I decided that it was time to do a bit more work on With. I downloaded the latest database dump from Heroku and started doing some analysis. Where I got to last with With, is that I couldn’t reliably detect encounters between people, so I put it on the backburner while I worked on other stuff and talked to friends about was to better detect encounters.

A big part of the VR experience (especially in a headset like the oculus rift) is the ability to talk to other users. With the rift on, you can’t see the keyboard, and text overlays look a bit manky anyway (since DK1 is so low resolution), so being able to naturally talk to people is a great idea. So I’d like to have voice chat in my scene-server project.

What I’m envisaging for the scene server I’m working on at the moment, is a dom-like API that you can script against, and then changes to the world get reflected down to all the connected clients. So you’ve got something like this:

So, I went to Monterey with Rissa last night and drunk a few beers and had a hack at using dom-lite to provide a dom interface to my scene nodes. While I was working on it, I came across micro-dom which uses htmlparser2 to parse html and turn it into dom-lite nodes. So I decided to replace my handwritten scene parser with htmlparser2.

While working on the isometric viewer for mv-world, I added some basic tweening to obelisk using tween.js.

So I got the world server working for my 3d world project. You can reliably connect from the client which is currently using obelisk.js to render an isometric overview of the world. I also added script element to the scene, so you can script an animation on the server, and it’ll get replicated out to all the connecting clients.

So the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with various multi-user 3d environment things. I originally started with a c++ app that uses bullet physics and websockets to provide a shared 3d world where anyone can drop blocks into the world and they physically interact, and the results are streamed out to all the connected clients and rendered using three.js.

I’ve been spending my free time working on some metaverse style projects. This has been kicked off by two things:

This is a pretty niche app, and I think it’d be hard to grow, and people probably wouldn’t like that it always runs in the background and uses your battery, but here’s the idea.

Sorry, this is a bit of a puff piece, but it’s been interesting seeing the large social networks (Facebook) being stripped down into their component parts and have their lunch eaten by small task-focussed mobile apps (like Snapchat).

This isn’t a particularly controversial position, but I feel that in my own career, now is the time to learn some proper mobile development. I feel that in about two years time, people will do most of their casual browsing on a mobile device, and most of that will be through mobile apps, not through mobile websites.

Everything is coming up milhouse

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about search in the post-web world. It looks more and more likely that mobile apps will become as popular as the web was. The web is never going to go away, but you’re going to spend more than half your time looking at content in a mobile app. So is there a market for a search engine that only shows results that link to apps on your phone?

Last night I deployed to ZoomIn, and I forgot to run the migrations that were included in the deploy. Bit of a newbie mistake, but it did point out to me that I need better ops. There’s two things that would’ve helped in this case.

I’ve been daydreaming about what kind of art piece I could take to kiwiburn. Last year way my first kiwiburn so I didn’t take much apart from my lovely self and my acoustic guitar, but I did camp with Sam, who contributed towards a dance tent. What I’ve been thinking about taking, would be a motion activated mini rave. I’d grab the subwoofer and 4 channel amp out of the car, and hook it up so that two channels ran the sub, and the other two channels ran some home theatre speakers we have lying around.

After a brief google, I couldn’t find any sites that do this - which I find really surprising, but someone needs to build a tool that lets you create a ‘channel’, which is an aggregation of a bunch of Facebook pages and Twitter feeds into one easy to read page. It’s like a google reader, but just for facebook and twitter pages.

Back in 2006, when I was first working on ZoomIn, I decided I needed a hobby aside from computer programming (startups being quite a full on project). I had been reading the Armadillo Aerospace blog, I decided that I wanted to try and build a liquid rocket engine. So I bought a combination metal lathe and mill and $200 of aluminum stock.

I was chatting with @nicobrevin at the pub the other week, and we were discussing idea for interesting side projects, and we went back and forth over email for a few weeks, until we came across the idea of building some kind of tool around scanning and OCRing your shopping receipts.

Just sitting here on a Friday thinking about how I could improve the autocomplete on ZoomIn. The problem is, when you search for rogue and vag and it doesn’t autocomplete to “the rogue and vagabond”. Also, if you type in k sing it doesn’t complete to ‘k.sing’.

So, I read last week that Dopplr, the social travel darling, was being shut down by Nokia at the end of the month. This isn’t too surprising, since there has been no development on Dopplr since it was acquired by Nokia in 2009. But it is a bit of a shame, since Dopplr was a cool app, and was a great way to keep track of your trips and get lots of interesting stats and maps. So, I decided to remake Dopplr, and let people migrate their data off Dopplr and onto my new service, RADAR.