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.

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.

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.

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.