Some of us here at Cogapp were lucky enough to get tickets to Friday’s sold out dConstruct conference, just down the road from us in Brighton. It was an extremely inspiring day…

Adam Greenfield kick-started the morning with a detailed and compelling study of the role that ubiquitous computing is/can/will play(ing) in large cities (there’s no avoiding a capricious use of tenses when discussing the near-future). His talk was fuelled by the fact that, as of last year, most human beings on planet Earth live in cities. This comes at a time when we’re in the process of shifting from a state of having hundreds of people per computer to hundreds of computers per person, so it stands to reason that the laws and trends that have governed cities of the analogue past will not be relevant for modern/future times.

Information, argues Greenfield, is becoming ‘persistent’ - offered to us at every waking moment, whether it is desired or not. When surrounded by statistics on every object and person in our vicinity, people begin to cluster into groups of common identity, avoiding encounters that do not seem desirable in advance. Ubiquitous computing is likely to usher in mind-boggling efficiency and agency over our environment, but we are at risk of losing a textural, unplanned, helpless quality that has previously made cities such ‘centres for human vitality and creativity’.

Greenfield’s thorough account of possible urban conditions of the near future felt neither pessimistic nor naively utopian, but underlined our need to be fiercely conscientious and adaptable. A couple of chaps from Stamen Design talked us through the creative process for some of their celebrated data visualisations, ranging from busy, data-rich apps like Historical Hurricane Maps and Oakland Crimespotting...

Augmented Reality (AR) is the practice of adding computer-generated information to something you are experiencing already. Often, this involves injecting computer-generated images into a live video feed, and there's some very impressive stuff out there which sees computers spotting special tokens (fiduciary markers is the jargon name) and overlaying images or videos.

However, it turns out that there is another, simpler way of letting the computer know what you are looking at: if you can specify the exact location of the camera in relation to what it is viewing, then you can go ahead and enhance things to your heart's delight, without having to go around tagging everything with markers.

As an example of this, I've found that augmented reality has become a lot more, err, real, thanks to my new phone, an HTC Dream. It contains some handy embedded hardware that means it knows exactly where it is and where it's pointing (the GPS tells it where it is on Earth, the accelerometer tells it which angle it is pointing relative to the surface, and the compass tells it which direction it is facing relative to the poles).

One application that takes advantage of this is Wikitude AR - it will search publicly available sources of information, and then overlay their position on top of the camera feed from the phone, as you can see from these screenshots taken while I was looking out of our office windows:

Then, there's the truly amazing Google Sky Map: you simply point your phone at the area of sky that you are interested in, and it will overlay constellation information. You can also type in a search term (e.g. Venus), and it will give you a handy arrow and target, helping you to swing your phone round until you are pointing right at it. This is extremely useful for any other parent who has been pestered by their child wanting to know what that bright star is called...

Yes folks, it's that festive season again, and thoughts naturally turn to 'what application should I use to draw a snowflake?'

Well, for starters, there's Cogapp's own Infinite Snowflake. This allows you to draw a pretty snowflake using our tasteful Christmas colour palette, and to optionally send it as an e-card to your friends.

It's been a while since you were last fed, so you must be hungry for the latest tasty morsels from the smörgåsbord that is the Cogapp Internal Blog (these elaborate analogies are getting harder to think of, ok?).

10 tips for managing a creative environment
Spotted by Gavin.

After coming back from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Gavin spoke to the production team about 10 tips for managing a creative environment by Adaptive Path - a really interesting presentation where they went to talk to a number of different creative groups, looked at how they managed their creative processes and then developed a ‘ten tips’ presentation. You can find it here.

Patients Like Me
Spotted by Gavin.

Also at the New York Conference, this site came up loads:

Patients Like Me is a website that allows users to share experiences, track symptoms and ask advice from others - all specific by condition.  Useful in Cogapp's work with Arthritis Research Campaign, as well as the Kidney Patient Guide.

I've just come back from the excellent three day Flash on the Beach conference.

We've recently been playing with Open Frameworks (our first test project will show up in a blog post very soon) which is a C++ library that aims to provide people with some of the power available from a low-level programming language, while lowering the bar for entry.

Following the launch of the new Letsema Mapping Interface, I thought I'd write a little about how it works and how Letsema are hoping it will benefit them.

"The Letsema initiative is committed to fostering co-operation, collaboration and communication between all funders and aid providers in Lesotho"

Using a combination of geographic coordinates, overlay images and a filtering system we have taken advantage of the Google Maps API to create a map pinpointing the location of organisations and amenities in Lesotho.

Here's an image of the map with everything (so

While watching a video about the UK Museums and the Web Mashup Day, I came across ManyEyes. ManyEyes is an IBM service for data visualisation. You can upload data and then visualise it in dozens of different ways (one of the nicest of which is Wordle).