Just a short week this week so a short blog post too I think. Fixed plenty of bugs in the two client iPhone apps I’m doing at the moment and got new versions over to the clients for testing. One of the apps seems to be running a bit slow but I think this is just an issue with how I’m keeping the UI up to date which should be quite fixable. They seem happy with the UI now which means that they’re happy with the functionality so hopefully it’s just some final bug fixing and polish left to do. I haven’t heard anything back about the other app so I’m hoping they’re happy with that one now too.

I finished off the week by attending the Hacks & Hackers event organised by ScraperWiki and OpenLabs Liverpool. The idea of the event was to bring together Journalists (hacks) and software developers/hardware hackers/general web people (hackers) and see what they could come up with by working together. We began the event by introducing ourselves and those with a specific interest in a topic declared this interest. We then had 10 minutes to meet each other and form groups around the various topics and then had 6-7 hours to get building something.

I ended up in a group who wanted to look at the social legacy left by the World Cup in Africa. Not something that specifically relates to me but I thought it might be interesting to see what we could produce. After an hour or so of looking for data sources we ended up realising that there really wasn’t much out there. We had tried looking for data on the social implications of the World Cup, looking at how previous similar events had affected developing countries and tried comparing aspects of this World Cup to England’s bid for the 2018 tournament. In the end we decided to bring together 11 facts about the South Africa tournament and 11 facts about England’s bid and display them like player lineups.

Trying to find 22 statistics proved fairly difficult, unfortunately we couldn’t find a single source to use for all of them so there was no opportunity for me to automate the process, which also meant I didn’t get to try out ScraperWiki. It did have one benefit though as the journalists could all spend the afternoon researching while I and the other developer, Francis Fish, could be working on the presentation mechanism.

We decided the best way to get the player lineups to display would be to use a HTML page styled up to look correct and then use CSS & JavaScript to present the statistics when the shirts were clicked on. Some of the CSS got quite tricky, and is still not perfect, but the JS wasn’t too bad just using jQuery to animate between properties. I thought having the numbers appear on their own on the shirts and then having any extra descriptive prefix and postfix fade in would look pretty good. A small description of each stat also appears below. I also tried out a jQuery plugin that allows fading between colours including alpha channels. This gives some nice effects allowing you to fade a colour background in by increasing its opacity without having to change the opacity of elements within the element. In the end though I found I didn’t need this but I may use it in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing what we created here’s a link to it, The other World Cup. (Now updated with the correct link)