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You wanna play, check out Most Pixels Ever and Open Frameworks

A short summary of my last months of 2010. Life is good and there is a lot going on right now.

Everything started when we went to Stockholm to code and have fun during a weekend in September. It was a hackathon for open data and APIs in Stockholm called codemocracy. We ended up winning with our entry and got some hype on the internetz. Its a real time map of all the buses in Malmö, pretty cool. You find some of the coverage here, helalf.se, popdevelop.com, idg.se, feber.se, inuseful.se, peterkrantz.com, hb.se, filipandersson.se, andreas.thoresson.net, epsiplus.net and utvbloggen.se. Possibly the most fame i’ve got so far in my 30 years as a software developer (I don’t count selling cameras for $millions). Below is a short interview with @brissmyr about our hack, check it out.

All the positive feedback and our drive to do more stuff together got stronger from this and we continued with other hacks. Trying to handle a full-time job while putting your hart into projects takes a lot of time and eventually it was to much to handle. After a few weeks of talking we decided to start our own company and quit our jobs. At the time I was really broke and actually had some credit card debts. So during the last three month of working at my day-job I have tried to save every penny to be able to survive without my usual monthly salary. We have also put a lot of time into Popdevelop trying to nurture our network, meet new people, record some youtube classics and of course code.

Its has been a great year and it was a long time since i experienced so much in such short time period. Leaving my job as a technical lead for camera projects at Axis was a big step for me. Going from a big company with safety, money and career to starting your own company with no income to begin with is a big change. But the challenges we face is something we enjoy and embrace. So bring it on 2011 @popdevelop is here to stay!

Since the Vim editor is such an important tool in my daily tasks, a new release is always welcomed. Vim version 7.3a BETA was released a few days ago. It contains over 400 patches that mostly are bugfixes, but there are some new features also

• Lua interface
• Python 3 interface,
• Persistent undo
• Blowfish encryption, also encrypt the swap file
• Conceal text

Screenshot, Monaco 12 font, Vim, iTerm and Mac OS by tilljoel

To download the latest vim, use mercurial with the following commands

hg clone https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/ vim
cd vim
hg update vim73

I dont know how the persistent undo and conceal text features work right now, but I’m gonna try them out when i get to work today using :help version-7.3. My Vim Configuration will be updated as soon as possible!

I was reading up on some trends over at trendwatching and found this posts:Trendwatching “Mass Mingling” and it made me create this post about social tech events in Malmö, Sweden. Now days everyone wants to be a geek and the number events for us tech-heads are just growing, here is a list of a few I’ve read about lately.

@forskningsavd / Forskningsavdelningen

A creative hackerspace in Malmö that promotes learning and sharing of knowledge. Work on your opensource project or your arduino hardware hacks. Contact them on @forskningsavd, #forskningsavd/Freenode or check out their weekly Tuesday hacks. The epic event Hacknight 2 was also organized in the same venue by them.

FABLAB stapelbäddsparken

This fabrication laboratory is a small-scale workshop that supplies knowledge, tools and materials to build almost anything. Currently I think most stuff is around arduino projects since @dcuartielles is involved. Expect good stuff to come out of here!

@thoughtmade / http://www.thoughtmade.com

Awesome event I attended a few weeks ago, explained by one of the organizers as “We take hackers and CEO’s, young college students and senior iPhone developers, and we give them a Friday afternoon in a laid back environment, surrounded by incredible interactive installations and good music”. There was a good mix of hipsters and smart people and I think more events like this are planed.

minc

Is a company founded by Malmö that helps innovators and entrepreneurs with office and meeting places. Most startups in Malmö seems to be located here.

Malmöhögskola related

• Living Labs Malmö – Not really sure whats going on here, the page is kind of outdated. Seems like some creative projects were founded by them during 2007-2009.
• MEDEA dotanks (updated 27/7)- same here, not really sure whats going on but a cool presentation video.
  “MEDEA Collaborative Media Initiative is a center for new media at Malmö University. Our work is built on co-production where academic researchers work together with other actors outside the university: companies, organizations, institutions and individuals. We develop products, services and productions as well as theories in the field of new media. The main focus is on new communities, publics and forms of expression.” is a short presentation taken from their site.
• Skiften – a series of really good lectures about change and new media, make sure you check out their bambuser stream.

Local meet-ups

• nosql summer Malmö – book club for database hackers I guess, read a white paper each week on a new hip nosql database.
• jsmeetup – seems like a javascript meet-up
• mosig – Malmö open source interest group. It’s a group with members interested in open source. I try to attend the meetings and hacks. They usually meet up once every second week and between that hang out on irc #mosig/Freenode or the mailinglist. Its a group of creative, smart, and nice people that love open source.

Mobile Monday

I attended one of their events a year ago and it felt kind of promising tho very corporate. They still hold some events in Malmö and Copenhagen.

Social Media Club Skåne

Seems to be a club for people involved in social media. Dunno if my irc presence is good enough?

Öresund entreprenurship

Search for entrepreneurial courses in the area

Ideon incubators and kujenga-lund

- Nice, but still in Ideon.

Sweden Social Web Camp

I just signed up for this event, its not really in Malmö but the founders live here. A lot of geeks meet up on a nice island in the archipelago of blekinge for an unconference. I think thoughtmade will help out with some art projects for the meet-up and I’m thinking of producing some kind of lightart to bring. Check out the participant list here

Malmö based podcasts

• Northern Lights – A new videocast covering entrepreneurship in the Malmö area. Was last seen filming the #hacknight at @forskningsavd
• Whats next – a new media podcast by the people behind SSWC. Perhaps the SSWC-preparations take all time now days since the url is broken.

Kujenga

(updated 27/7)
Explained very well here, but make sure to check out the etherpad were it started. They recently released a new logo and they have found a good location for kujnega. I just donated a few 100kr to help out, since i dont have the time to lend atm. Follow the action at their blog

There is probably twice as much happening that I currently don’t know about, please help me add stuff to this list!

Yesterday we drank some wine and did some paper mock-ups for the next version of Dogvibes. After the unofficial demonstrations we made during thoughtmade.com we decided to focus on mobile access. Design and usability is not our best trade, but we decided to draw some mock-ups to use for discussion. We hope that this will help us with some ideas and give us some basic user requirements for the client. Here are some of the stuff we came up with, we will release a digital version of the mock-ups pretty soon i hope.

android/iphone mockups for dogvibes by tilljoel

android/iphone mockups for dogvibes by tilljoel

Wallpaintings instead of android/iphone mockups by tilljoel

Some conclusions from our night of drawing were

• Try to print wire frames for iPhone/Android and use them as a base for your designs
• Untalented artists like us probably could get some help from UI Stencils
• Use a scissor and move the screens around to get a grip of your navigation
• Start with pen/paper before you try to create your digital mock-ups
• Buy good material, check out Posca pens

We also installed some development packages for Android and iPhone. Since I don’t have OS X anymore I will brush of my java skills and write the android app i guess. I guess this means I am allowed to by a new phone?

We are also looking for some good collaborative tool for mind-maps that work for both Mac and Linux, ideas?

(Updated May 12, 2010)

This blog post is a request for comments on an idea we have for a social music player based on the Dogvibes server.  Its still just an early idea and all feedback is appreciated!

About a year ago we started our social music project called Dogvibes. It all began with a simple paper design that @gyllen wrote, initiated by the release of libspotify. We did a few weeks of hacking and got a prototype running and then came the summer and we took a break to get some sun. A few month ago we took up the work and started to finish our social music server. We now have a working server and a few different clients that look really awesome! The design is very similar to spotify but we are using a webpage to render the user interface that communicates with our server. We used this approach to develop the API in the server and now we have something that handles most use cases. The screenshots below show the user intraface rendered both in a desktop browser and on an iPhone.

Now we want to improve on the social part of playing music and develop a new client optimized to select and play music for a group of people.

When hosting a party, usually you have a computer with a media player and a big playlist where you can add the tracks for the night. Depending on the people and the amount of alcohol this can fail, some things that usually happen are:

• A small part of the group tends to pick most of the songs
• People that search for music start playing their song instead of adding it to the playlist
• Some cool dude with a unique elitistic genre tries to enforce his unknown music
• Most songs only get a 30 seconds of playtime before someone changes track

Below is a description of an idea to solve this problem, discussed by the Dogvibes developers: @brissmyr, @gyllen, @swallin, @nystrom and me (@tilljoel).

SocialMusic-Idea1-Tabs by tilljoel

Everyone shares the same playlist where you can add your songs or vote on songs already added, the order of the tracks should be decided by an algorithm. It should work in a similar way as flattr works for micro payments. It means that adding, up voting, down voting tracks should cost you and if people up vote your tracks you receive(I have no clue what to call this “currency” yet). All users should regularly be given some amount of this currency, perhaps depending on number of songs in the playlist queue, user activity etc.

Search

Search for songs in a simple way, use same kind of browseability that spotify, lastfm or itunes has. The scope of the songs search could be limited in some way.

• Eighties party with 1000 preselected songs to pick from
• Normal party with all music found locally and on Spotify
• An espresso bar that only wanna play music from the genre “hiphop”

Users can add tracks from here to the toplist.

Toplist

This list contains all the tracks added and the current track playing. There are at least three different actions this view should handle:

• up vote a song
• down vote a song
• comment a song
• more?

SocialMusic-Idea1-Toplist by tilljoel

The order in the playlist should be decided from some algorithm that take into account: up votes, down votes, number of tracks added by the same person and the time since a track was added.

Social

This view should reflect all actions on the server by the users, imagine an irc-like log with information like this:

SocialMusic-Idea1-Socialtab by tilljoel

We are about to start development during the following weeks and all feedback is highly appreciated!