Flaming Desks is a blog…

Oh hello. I’m from White October and I’m new here.

While Dave wasn’t looking I decided that the address finder while registering a desk wasn’t accurate enough, so a quick look on the Internets and I found a rather handy post. I would link to it but it seems that over the weekend the poor chaps blog has been hacked by some nice Chinese hacker. So I should just take all the credit myself….

It now should be as accurate as a postcode can be in the UK for most addresses, well the ones I have tried out anyway!

I have also made a few changes to the registration form as per Daves roadmap.

Social Innovation Camp. (It's a camp, where you innovate about social stuff.)

We’ve applied for this.  It’s a very nice concept actually; likeminded people hooking up to talk about interesting social things… sound familiar?!

Obviously, simply by reading this post, you have tacitly agreed to go and read our application, and then use the comments field at the bottom to leave a ringing endorsement for Flaming Desks to get picked for the camp on the 5th-7th of December.

(Also, if any of you brilliantly awesomely fantastic people from Social Innovation Camp are reading; we are free those dates, and we travel everywhere with big bags of chocolate and beer…)

First off, an apology : progress has been too slow on this project for the last couple of months, mainly because we’re very busy.  However, with a little help from John Wards in the office, we’ve got the full screen map wizardry version of the test site working.  And I think it’s looking brilliant:

http://www.flamingdesks.com/app/

The concept of using the map as the background for the home page of the site is awesome.  There are probably a few gremlins left in it to work out, but as a proof of concept, it’s great.

The search is working well on the front end - type in a city anywhere in the World and it will zoom in and display offices with desks in that city.  Click the icon on the map, or the search result list, and it will pan to the office on the map and display full details in a pane.  All we need now are some desks…

… and as for that, the registration has been tarted up, with amongst other things some icons (thanks to famfamfam for the free icon set).  Apart from the new look, the only thing that’s different to the previous test version here, is the ability to add business categories and a logo.

If I’m honest, the logo has been a bit of a lesson for me.  It’s a little bit clever in that it crops images to fit in a square, but tries not to stretch them by padding the image with the colour it finds in the corners of the logo.  Where I went wrong is that I tried to build in a cropping function where the user could crop their logo to the desired size.  I got tied up in knots, and probably wasted as much time on this as I spent on the entire rest of the project.  It’s not that it’s not possible - I could probably nail it pretty quickly if I came back to it again, but it was a major diversion.   We’d started off the project saying we were going to develop the simplest possible application that would work, in order to test the concept as quickly as possible.  But I got suckered in and started over-engineering a bit of functionality that just wasn’t needed.  Developers are prone to doing this from time to time, and I guess I’ve learnt I’m not immune.  Because time is tight, it’s more important than ever that we keep the development simple.

Anyway, not many of the profiles have a logo in, but if you search for offices in Oxford you’ll see that I’ve put one in for White October.

I’m not sure what to do about the handful of registrations we’ve had so far - I think I’ll keep them in until we’ve added the Login and My Account functionality… which is the next bit to do.  Watch this space.

So here it is, the Flaming Desks logo! Find below, a zip file containing everything any of us should need regarding the logo. GIFs and JPGs for web and print as well as Vector files too.

(You’ll also notice that the Web 2.0 style reflection is no more!)

Flaming Desks Logo Artwork

Guys,

great catch up meeting yesterday. Nice to get our first team pic of us ‘hard at it’!

It’s nice to see us getting more and more excited about this as everything unfolds. The PR and Marketing developments are really really promising, so Rob, please keep us updated with anything cool in this area!

Design-wise - the logo is more or less decided upon now and Nick will be getting these artworked up in the next day or so. In the meantime he is working on developing the look and feel of the site and we’ll be seeing some visuals posted soon for inspection! Dave - we hope these inspire and challenge you rather than send you running (especially one of them!).

Keep on keeping it up guys and look forward to our next catch up meeting!

I’ve updated the prototype today to make the geolocation during registration much more resilient. All of the scenarios are now covered - it does its best to locate the street address of the company, then falls back to the city, and eventually the country if it can’t locate the city.

I’ve also updated the interface on this page with instructions that change depending on the accuracy of the geo search.

The top 3 items on the outstanding list in this post have been sorted. It took almost as long as it did to get to the original prototype, but I was being distracted by Olympic medals for GB!

Update : Now when view the home page of the app it will try and figure out your country from your IP address and centre the map on that country.  I’ve used the open source IP to country database from MaxMind which is 99.3% accurate.  I think this is working but short of a round-the-world trip I’ll need people to let me know if it’s not!

I’ve been thinking about ways to represent cities and countries on the global map when we have lots of desks at each location.  I’d visualised opaque circles of differing sizes representing the differing numbers of desks at each location, and had started to think about how I’d generate the data for that.  Seems I may not now have to if this Techcrunch article is anything to go by.  Finder lets you store and share geo data and Maker will let you build interactive maps from the data that look like they’ll be what I need.

Another interesting link in the Techcrunch article is to Mapufacture, recently bought by the people behind Finder and Maker, which lets you build composite maps from your own, or other people’s data (via a feed).  So I’m thinking we should make our office locations available via a feed, with a link for each office to booking forms on the site (or mobile version of it).  I’m envisaging a mobile user with a mapping app, where they add their favourite feeds which they can use to discover things around them that are of specific interest to them.  Flaming Desks could be part of that user’s landscape if the desks are made available via a feed.

Fire Eagle from Yahoo’s Brickhouse was released today. Basically it keeps an individual’s location up-to-date, usually via their mobile device. We could use it to tie in to Flaming Desks so that we automatically search for desk locations near the user. Not so useful if you are accessing it from your laptop or desktop, but when we finish the mobile version (!) it could be handy.  Also a good way of getting it out there.

Possibly a better tie up would be with geographicly based social networks, some of which are conveniently listed on this fire eagle blog post.

This version of the app wouldn’t normally be shown to a client but, in the spirit of this project, here it is.

http://www.flamingdesks.com/app/

What I’ve concentrated on here is the trickiest bit : getting global geo location data into the app, which is relatively easy using the geocoder from Google. With this version you can register any address in the World and it will store your details in the database and plot all of the addresses on a global map.

I’d stress at this point that there is a lot more work to do! Amongst the outstanding work is:

• strategy for addresses which can’t be found. At the moment you can move markers, but I’d like you to be able to add a marker to a country and then move it around within that country to position it.
• There’s a bug if you search again once it has found an address : it creates two markers
• The geocoder doesn’t always find the address. I try a different variation of the address lines if this happens, but this needs a lot more work to make it run smoothly. There are probably lots of valid addresses that it won’t currently work for : it needs to try different combinations of addresses, starting with the most specific and working back to the city and country only : then hopefully we’ll get a marker for every address that’s entered.
• Implement photo uploads
• Implement company type drop down
• All of the desk functionality : adding desks within an office etc
• Filtering on the front end of the map
• Search and zoom on the front end of the map (i.e. search for London and it zooms to London from the globe and you can see relevant offices plotted on it)
• Implement the Google marker manager in anticipation of 1000s of offices (!) to help performance
• Forgotten password functionality
• Login, my account etc
• Plug in the design

For now, if you’re interested in giving it a go please do. All data will be thrown away, but if you’ve been interested enough to test it, we’ll put you on the list for a notification when it goes live, so feel free to put your real email address in. If you find any addresses that it fails for, or you spot any pitfalls, bugs, or have any suggestions, please post the details in a comment.

[winces and hits the publish button...]

Prompted by a techcrunch article this morning, I’ve done a bit of research into methods of importing addresses from users’ Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts.  We’re interested in doing this at some point because we want people to tell their friends and colleagues about the desk they’ve just posted.

Gmail has the Contacts Data API, Microsoft has Windows Live Contacts API for Windows Live accounts (Hotmail), and the Yahoo Address Book API.

It also looks as if there is an API coming for LinkedIn (which is appropriate for us since we’re in the business world) but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. I remember seeing an app that offered to import contacts from LinkedIn, so it must be possible - can anyone help with this?

It’s all phase [insert number > than 2] anyway but I thought I’d document it here for reference.