Andrew Nicolaou
Availability:

Week 4

January 2015—February 2015

This is a post about weeknotes.

Shuffle

The prototype I've been working on tidying up with a new landing page design launched on the BBC Taster, a new site that's about showing experimental new ideas.

Shuffle got mentioned a couple of times in the press:

The site also launched BBC Shuffle, a kind of Pandora for TV shows, which streams BBC TV based on what you watch and for how long.

—The BBC’s new tool pairs your life to global news events using Facebook data, Quartz

as well as the experimental BBC Shuffle, an epic timewaster that'll feed you random iPlayer videos and learn what you like from how long it takes you to click through to the next one.

—New BBC site is a digital sandbox for new ideas, Creative Bloq

Visit BBC Shuffle on Taster.

Radio

We wanted to spend a week as a team coming up with prototype radio ideas to test out the toolkit and process we've gradually been building. The process roughly involves, sketching the idea on a postcard, doing various forms of lo-fi prototyping and then using our code toolkit to prototyping a believable experience. Libby's really into this prototyping checklist by Richard Pope and encouraged us to do our own.

I came up with a few ideas:

  1. a virtual office radio where each connected radio plays back a collaborative playlist in sync;
  2. social radiodan - basically the Olinda Social module, see when your friend's are listening and press a button to hear what they hear;
  3. now replaying info - get now playing info for on-demand programmes in the same way as live programmes
  4. Playlister Follow - listen to the full tracks of any [Playlister playlist]() so you can follow your favourite presenters or shows and always hear the latest stuff.

See everyone else ideas on Flickr.

I chose to prototype the Playlister-Follow radio because it's an idea that doesn't need multiple people using instances of the radio (like the office and social radio) and was a bit more interesting that the metadata one. Also, I've wanted to try out the Spotify support in the radio toolkit for a while.

Spending an hour on Monday coming up with ideas together was fun and interesting to get an insight into people's listening habits. Although, in the end, we didn't get a whole week to work on this due to various other projects, I did manage to get a quick proof-of-concept working during the week. I spent a bit longer at the weekend getting it working a bit better via a web interface including some slick animations using CSS3.

I'll do a full write-up of it soon.

Radio toolkit

Chris has been working on adding the video support to the radio toolkit so we had a mini code review session to see how he was getting on and to familiarise ourselves with his approach. It all looks good and he'd fixed stylistic issues that jshint complained about and added "use strict" to every file. This prompted me to remind myself of the rules that it introduces. Also, had a look at [Google JavaScript style guide]() and the Airbnb one.