Back in March I started thinking about doing a photo project, something to force myself to take more photos. This turned into Threee, a project with Blaine Bowers, John Hoover and myself. We each take and post one picture a day starting April 1st. The iPhone 4 was recently released and we all got one on launch day. With the new phone comes the ability to record 720p HD video. This prompted me to think about a video project that we could do to go along with Threee. We came up with Ninety Second Week, shooting as much as you can during the week and compile it into 90 seconds to show off your week. We hope this turns into more videos then just those for 90SecWeek. As with Threee, the rules require the video to be shot using the iPhone only. We can also only edit using iMovie (full or mobile version) and the video has to be posted every Wednesday. I’m looking forward to this project and hope we can keep it going as well as we have with Threee. Check out the other videos at 90secweek.com.
Recently we have had several clients wanting to display weather information on their website. Although there are several ways to do this with widgets provided by a wide range of sites, none provided the ease of use and ability to style it and use the tags I wanted. Most we came across would return flash, a bulky block of html that wasn’t easy to control the style of or you couldn’t control what values were returned. When it doesn’t exist exactly how you want it, create it.
Over the weekend I set about to create a jQuery Plugin that would use the Yahoo! Weather API but keep things simple. My goal was to get every piece of data I could from Yahoo! regarding the weather and give you the choice on what to display and how to display it. I also wanted it to be extremely easy to get your locations weather. Other jQuery Plugins require you to enter a code as your location, which is only found when looking at the rss feed url for your location on Yahoo! Weather. How is that user friendly? Using a zip code/postal code is all you need.
After a few hours of coding and learning about Yahoo! YQL API I had a plugin that did exactly what I wanted. I give you the data and you decide what html to use, what id’s or class’ should be applied and what info you want to display. Check out the demo to see a styled example and a full example showing all the data returned. You can download the plugin at the jQuery Plugins site or get the full source on the GitHub repo.
I’ve been wanting to do a photo project for awhile and about a week ago I had the idea to involve the guys at work and we all do one together. After discussing it with John and Blaine it turned into Threee. The goal is for each of us to take a photo every single day. The site is setup to side scroll through the days (when we get that far) so you will scroll through each day and see a photo from each of us. Its a whole, see the world through different eyes kinda thing. We started the project on April 1st and there is no end date. The only rules are you must take a photo every day and can only use the iPhone and iPhone Apps to edit it. Its a mobile photo mashup project.
We all three have different lives outside work and it should be interesting over time to see what becomes photo worthy for each of us. Day one had a theme, we wanted to post a picture of ourself to get things started and had some fun with it since we knew the photos would be stacked. We do plan to do theme days like day one in the future. We have some ideas in mind to keep it interesting and involve some themes in the project. Overall it should at least be an interesting project and I look forward to seeing where it goes. So check out the site for the latest photos, http://threee.monkeecreate.com (a domain is coming).
