Hawksworx

After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve recently been concentrating on developing my pet project, teamtasks again. Teamtasks is a simple application built using TiddlyWiki to provide a place to manage your tasks alongside other content in your very own personal wiki.

This little project is by no means new. I have been tinkering with it for quite a while but have been working on other projects so teamtasks has had to sit patiently in the corner and wait for me to get back to working on it.

Rather gratifyingly, quite a few people had seen the early work on teamtasks and expressed interest in using it for all manor of purposes. The attention made me realise that it was time to promote teamtasks from its place in my playground (version 0.3 can still be found there for those keen on glancing in the rear view mirror) to the big time! Or at least, a place of its own. And so getteamtasks.com was born. From there you can download the latest version (v0.4 at time of writing) and configure it to fit your task management habits.

This is an open source project and I’m doing my best to resist the urge to tinker with it until I think that it’s perfect before letting it out into the wild, so you may find things about teamtasks that don’t work perfectly or you just don’t like. If that’s the case, then please let me know, or better yet, fix it and then show me. I’m living by the old “Release early. Release often” mantra here and welcome contributions, in the form of suggestions, bug reports, bug fixes, enhancements, criticism, praise, sticky buns, pats on the back, or hugs.

Along with the new site and new release, there is a new way to get in touch and keep track of developments. Obviously, you can leave your comments here, but now you can also follow teamtasks on Twitter. You’d get to hear about teamtasks developments if you just followed me on Twitter too of course, but then you’d also be subject to other random utterances.

After just a few hours of launching getteamtasks.com, I have already had a nice response. This really helps to keep me motivated and on track. As the project gains a little momentum, it also gains more pairs of hands to do the work. We’ve spent some time here at Osmosoft today planning the next set of enhancements for teamtasks which will soon be listed on the site for you to inspect.

Roll on version 0.5!

Last week the entire Osmosoft team visited Paris to attend the LeWeb3 conference. Initially, we had intended to be attending simply as delegates, but as time went by, we decided that we might be able to build something handy to use at the conference, and that perhaps, others might find it useful too.

And so, RippleRap (then dubbed ‘TiddleLeWeb’) was conceived. We considered that building a tool based on TiddlyWiki where you could make notes on the conference and effortlessly share those notes with others, while being shielded from network hiccups, would be cool. To be ready, we had much to do, and little time to do it.

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Following on from some previous work re-branding the Osmosoft.com website, we have now discovered that we can take a slightly different approach to our branding. Previously we were expecting to be very tightly constrained by the BT branding guidelines (what with being acquired by BT and all), but after a consultation with the people in the know, we have learned that we have rather more latitude.

With that in mind, and retaining the consideration that we want to fit in with the general brand principles of BT, even if we add our own bit of ‘Osmosoft Special Sauce’, I’ve been working on a new identity.

This work is gaining some momentum now, but as with other projects, there is value in sharing the work prior to its completion and gathering feedback. Hey, we are an open source house here, after all.

As ever, I’d welcome comments and suggestions. Keep in mind that this work is by no means definitive, and that it currently contains temporary photo stock that would be replaced before we went live with the brand.

Over the last couple of days I have got to meet some members of the BT SDK team. I’m likely to be working quite closely with some of these guys over the coming months in my role at Osmosoft and so it was great to get to meet them and see how they work.

There is a great feeling of energy and enthusiasm in the team, which I found infectious. I personally am rather excited about getting the chance to play with some of the cool features of the BT SDK to build some funky web apps. As a newcomer to the telecoms sector, I find that the functionality being exposed through the SDK are inspiring me to build all kinds of gizmos, widgets, gadget, and do-hickies. I’ll be shouting about some of those here soon, no doubt.

..but I find myself wondering, what would you build?

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Last night the newly assembled Osmosoft crew attended WikiWednesday - a regular meeting of technologists and business folk who share an interest in matters of all things wiki. These monthly sessions are an opportunity for people to discuss the use of wikis and any issues that surround them, from techie issues to business cases and adoption patterns.

We were lucky enough to be given the opening slot to demonstrate our latest toy - an implementation of TiddlyWiki which leveraged BT’s SDK to initiate phone calls. UnaMesa’s Martin Budden and our own Paul Downey demonstrated what we dubbed ‘Speed Geeking’, a little mashup which interpreted a set of contact details gathered from the WikiWednesday attendees as hCards and then randomly paired up the contacts so that a phone call could be created between each pair. It isn’t typical to hear a speaker at such an event remind the audience to “please keep your phones turned on!”, but that was how this session began. It ended with a room full of people coupled via phone calls, waving at each other across the room as they identified which stranger they had been connected to. Ring-tone chaos!

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I recently commented on the fun I was having repurposing a TiddlyWiki to be the new Osmosoft website. I’m pleased to say that the site is now live.

The fun thing is, that here at Osmosoft we like the open source approach, and that even extends to our website. We invite anyone to offer improvements to the site, and since it is built using TiddlyWiki it is easy for you to grab the code with a quick File > Save As and then you can set about making whatever changes you like, right from within the site. Confused? Well it took me a little while to come to grips with this way of working, and it is becoming apparent that I have just uncovered the tip of the iceberg, but once you get started, this way of working can be really fun and can be very efficient.

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I have used TiddlyWiki, the popular self-contained wiki, before and had even tinkered under the hood a little, but I have never really tried using it in anger. My uses for it until now have been mostly simple tasks such as keeping lists and jottings in central location up in the cloud.

A useful resource, I think, is TiddlySpot, who will host a TiddlyWiki for you and let you access it via your own URL. TiddlySpot also use AJAX to save your changes back to their server. Neat.

In the past I have spent some time tweaking TiddlyWiki’s CSS to customise the look and feel a little, but this has always been fairly shallow exploration.

Since one of the exciting applications of TiddlyWiki is that it can be used as a platform for hosting your website, it seems good sense for us to use it as our own site at Osmosoft. After all, we should ‘eat our own dog food’, right?

With that in mind, today I have been working on restyling a TiddlyWiki in order for it to look and behave like a company website with all the branding considerations that go along with the task. …and I have to say, this is fun!

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I am very excited to be joining BT Osmosoft, an open source development group recently set up by BT and the creator of the excellent Tiddlywiki, Jeremy Ruston. I will be joining the team as Client-side Developer and hope to have lots of fun designing and developing new and exciting web resources in an open source, “web 2.0″ styleee.

BT have had some criticism recently for some bizarre recruitment techniques in the area of web technologies. I am pleased to say that this was certainly not my experience. I met with some very capable and opinionated web professionals and am really looking forward to the experience of working with them.