Flash Bokeh

Even the best ideas end up in the trash sometimes and there is nothing wrong with it – just shake the dust off and share. This time it's the colourful realtime bokeh effect programmed in Flash, inspired by this tutorial.

Click the image above to preview and/or grab the source (AS3, Flash CS4).

It may slow down your computer/browser a bit, due to expensive opacity and blending processing. The next challenge is to code something similar using HTML5's canvas and compare the speed – is anyone up for it?

By Tomek
Published: 29 April 2010
2 Comments

Crikey, what you can do with a bit of chalk (online)!

I thought I'd have a quick look at what's been happening on the Pavement Art microsite we developed for Muscular Dystrophy and was amazed to see some of the incredibly creative designs people have posted. I was expecting the odd stick man or 5 legged cow but had no idea how detailed people were being!

Have a look here.

By Melanie Russell
Published: 24 February 2009
1 Comment

Gold for Cardonald

Just home from the Scotland's Colleges Marketing Awards where Cardonald College took home more awards than I suspect they have shelf space for back in Glasgow. 

In total they picked up four awards, and without a doubt the highlight of the evening was watching Jude collect the Gold award for their website.

Keep an eye on the site over the next few weeks as we roll out the latest round of new features.

By Kerry Reid
Published: 19 February 2009
3 Comments

Scotland on Rails

tictoc will be presenting at Scotland's first Ruby on Rails conference taking place on 4-5 April in Edinburgh.

I'll be presenting a talk called 'Deploying Rails with Litespeed: a developers best kept secret!'. Deploying Rails applications is still a sore point for developers, especially when you start hosting multiple sites. I'll be spreading the good word about Litespeed and how it has made our lives easier at tictoc.

There's a decent line up of speakers with some big names from the Rails community, full details over at Scotland on Rails.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 28 February 2008
0 Comments

RailsConf: Day 2

Day two of the European Rails Conference kicked-off with the main man himself, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). The creator of Rails talked on how the framework and community has changed over the last three years from the position of the young upstart, who was at first laughed at and ignored but is now taken seriously as a real alternative for big business.

This reiterated a theme for the whole conference about how Rails is now being considered and used in more and more Global 1000 companies. I was talking to a guy from IBM who was saying how he has been successful in pushing the Rails platform for internal projects within the company. Both IBM and Sun were main sponsors of the conference, which tells us how these big companies are sitting up and paying attention.

DHH then proceeded to demonstrate some of the new features and refinements in the soon to be released version 2.0 of Rails. A nice overview of this can be found over here.

Making Rails More Artificially Intelligent

The first session of the day started with an interesting talk from the guys at http://bee.com.es on how to use algorithms to solve 'intelligent' problems and make your applications smarter. The talk focussed on two key areas bayesian networks and genetic algorithms. It's a fascinating field and is growing ever more important as it provides methods that help make sense of the ever increasing volume of information on the web, such as improving search results, filtering spam and creating personalised suggestions (such as products or music of interest).

Full Text Search with Ferret

Programmers seem to love giving their creations odd and sometimes silly names, such as Ferret. Ferret is actually the search engine we use to provide the onsite search capability of our websites, so there could be a vaguely tangible link with searching and 'ferreting' through a site... Anyway, this talk was on some of the more unknown/advanced features of the search engine. There were some useful tips that will be working their way into our implementation soon.

Rubinius - Improving the Ruby Ecosystem

Rubinius is a brand new code-base for the Ruby language. Most of the core functionality is actually written in Ruby, so it will be possible to easily go in and directly modify the core functionality. New features like modern memory management and garbage collection mechanisms should provide significant performance improvements. Applications can also be compiled into packages in a similar way to Java to enable easier distribution and productisation.

One concern is that the Ruby platform will become splintered with two different versions of Ruby, however the Rubinius project assures us it will keep full compatibility with the original Ruby. An interesting note is that Rubinius has a complete RSpec test suite based upon the original Ruby functionality. The same test suite is also used by JRuby thus following the same standard specification.

Scaling a Rails Application

The final session of the day was by one of the developers behind the hugely popular Twitter. Whilst not something directly affecting us at the moment, it was interesting to gain some insight into their system. Unfortunately the presentation wasn't as prepared as it should had been and contained a few mistakes.

One interesting point was the announcement that Twitter will be open-sourcing a daemon component called Starling that they use to offload long-running processes to maintain browser responsiveness for the client.

Keynote Speeches

There were two keynote speeches worth mentioning, the first by Dr Roy Fielding called “The Rest of REST” which dealt with using REST as an architecture of developing modern web applications. Roy was one of the original authors of the HTTP protocal - something the entire internet is now reliant upon. Although rather academically orientated it was interesting to hear some of the history behind such a core component of the internet.

The last keynote was a talk by Craig McClanahan from Sun. Craig is the creator of the original mega Java framework, Struts. Being a popular speaker within Java circles he gave a very energetic talk on how he has enjoyed the power and productivity gains from using Rails, even so far as admitting that it feels painful having to go back into Java - quite an admission from a hard-core Java guru! 

Photo credits Duncan Davidson and Patrick Lenz.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 28 September 2007
0 Comments

RailsConf: Day 1

This year the European Rails Conference was held in Berlin with over 500 like-minded developers from around the world gathered to discuss, network and learn about the Ruby on Rails framework and Ruby in general.

Having been to a few physics conferences in the past I'm used to being among groups of techies who feel more comfortable communicating with computers than those around them, so I was quite surprised that there was a real buzz and enthusiasm at the conference. Maybe it was because few people were older than their mid-thirties and the vast majority were Apple Mac users. Everyone seemed to be excited about being able to use technologies that enabled them to do cool stuff on the web.

Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec 

The three day event started with two half-day tutorial sessions. The first was about the relatively new Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) technique that aims to provide a more meaningful testing framework for your application whilst also defining a natural language specification of what it should do and how it should behave; the business and technology sides of a project should refer to the same system in the same way. I'll be posting another article about this and the RSpec framework in more detail shortly.

Adobe Flex and Rails 

The second tutorial session was an introduction on how to use the Adobe Flex platform with Rails applications to create a rich dynamic user experience in Flash. Adobe is really pushing the Flex platform as option for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) despite the increasing sophistication of Web 2.0 Javascript libraries such as Prototype/Scriptaculous and jQuery/UI. An interesting shortfall was that the speaker couldn't really give definitive examples of 'killer' flex applications out there already, which confirms the feelings of many that Flex is still a niche technology.

Keynote: The Art in Rails

The first day ended with an inspiring keynote by Dave Thomas, one of the key figures within the Ruby and Rails community. His talk "The Art in Rails" was based on the analogy that software engineering is like art in that a programmer can suffer the same problems as an artist, such as writers block, knowing when to stop and satisfying the customer.

His solution to the first problem is to use exploratory testing to rapidly prototype ideas in order to work around conceptual blocks - even work through the problem the old-school way using bits of paper and a pen.

The second problem of knowing when to stop can be controlled by breaking the development process up into fixed chunks of time and functionality, which are refined through iterations. The result of each iteration should be an application that can work with the functionality defined so far, which is a core concept of Agile Development.

His final point on knowing how to satisfy the customer was illustrated with a selection of famous portraits. A great artist will look beyond the surface of their subject, which might not directly reflect reality but does capture the meaning and personality of the person within. In software terms this means getting into the nitty-gritty details with the client by asking why again and again. Often a client's initial project request is quite different to what they actually want and need.

Dave wrapped up by saying that there is art in engineering and there is engineering in art; Ruby is the canvas and Rails the paint. He ended by suggesting to everyone to
Treat your next project as if it were a work of art”

- quite a challenge!

Photo credits: Duncan Davidson and Zeno Crivelli

By Tom Beddard
Published: 19 September 2007
0 Comments

Global engineering firm are on board

Global engineering group Proclad have confirmed the appointment of tictoc to revamp their website. Proclad Group is a global network of companies operating worldwide with manufacturing sites & offices located in Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, C.I.S., & North America.

For Proclad, understanding how their site could work harder for their business will be the first step. Working with tictoc they are now aware of how they can more effectively use their site and are keen to take advantage of effective web technologies in creating a dynamic website which will benefit their business, generating a real buzz around the Proclad brand.

By Melanie Russell
Published: 25 June 2007
0 Comments

Introduction to Microformats

As web standards start to become, well, the web standard, we can start to use some of the power that this structured approach to web development affords us. Microformats, that is, standardised chunks of web pages that represent data, will allow machines to not only read our published data, but to understand it.

As an example, hCard is one of the more established microformats. The hCard is used to represent people or organisations and can be used in situations where you would traditionally offer a vCard file. As support for microformats in browsers grow, the browser would automatically detect the contact details and ask if you would like to add the contact to your address book. Taking it one step further, search engines could 'know' that your contact page contains information to contact you. The search engine then becomes a massive online public contacts database (Although in the future this could be abused to help find John Connor).

Likewise, selling online has a potentially interesting future under microformats. Rather than posting a classified advert on an online marketplace (such as eBay) simply add an advert to your own website. The next time the search engine spider visits your website, it understands the advert microformat that you are using to display your classified ad and uses the information accordingly. Your advert could then be added to a global (and local) searchable shop-window without any further effort on your behalf.

Microformats make your organisation's information more accessible to the Internet. Right now, the support isn't there, but it is coming. Both Microsoft and Mozilla are expected to support microformats with the next major version of their browser and who knows, desktop software (such as Outlook or Thunderbird) may follow. For those keen to have an early preview of microformats in action, Mozilla Labs released Operator, a Firefox extension to detect microformats as you browse.

With the momentum behind the microformats movement, understanding the concept and potential of microformats can only benefit those involved in the website procurement process.

By Andrew Donaldson
Published: 17 May 2007
1 Comment