Engage Interactive Blog

Another hectic week at Engage Towers, seeing the sights (well, tube stations) of London and working on some cool mobile and geocoding functionality.  It seems to have been a busy week on the internets as well, with a few interesting snippets hitting the headlines this week.

Eternal moonwalk

I guess we have to start this weeks roundup with something Michael Jackson related. Opinion is firmly split about him in the office, but as it’s my roundup week, and all the others are wrong, I get to link to something nice!

This is a cool little tribute to the moonwalk, with user generated video content adding to the length of the piece all the time. Nice idea, well executed and simple too. We approve, and after practising our moon-walking over the coming weekend we’ll be submitting an Engage contribution next week.

HTML5 Doctor

This looks like it’s going to become an essential resource for (X)HTML5, which is undoubtedly going to be key to the future of the web, especially in regards to building web applications.

It’s got an especially useful article about implementing HTML5 on Internet Explorer 6/7 and Firefox 2, so there’s no real excuse not to start embracing the technology, even on commercial sites.

I feel a labs projects coming on!

SlickMap – CSS generated site-maps

Site-maps are great – essential when planning a website, useful as a navigational backup and required for Google submission. Creating site-maps on the other hand is a pain in the ****. It’s a pretty laborious and time consuming task, especially on a Windows PC with little in the way of pretty software for the job.

This little gem from the guys at Astuteo is, as the title suggests, a slick way of building site-maps either for documentation or as run time html. It would be easy to plug in a bit of PHP to make it all dynamic, and the results look really nice.

Google announces new OS

This is definitely going to be one to watch! If it was anyone else trying to threaten Microsofts grip on the OS market you wouldn’t take them very seriously, but who would bet against Google? As well as having the skills and knowledge, they crucially have the budgets and consumer awareness to really make a dent.

Ironically it would then pose the same kind of monopoly questions that the current Microsoft situation does – I’ll bet Alex’s salary that the Chrome browser is bundled or embedded in the new OS for example. Still, interesting times ahead, and the thought of an all new, lean OS that isn’t weighed down by years of backwards compatibility issues sounds exciting!

And finally…..

There were a few other bits and pieces that amused us this week, including Pizza in a cone – sounds like a taste sensation – and a sequel to the famous ‘spider‘ letters.

<geeks only>

And we’ve just discovered that ‘goto’ is in PHP 5.3>. That brings back fond memories of walking into Dixons as a kid, and typing out the following on the Commodore 64′s and BBC Micro’s:

10 PRINT “DAVE IS ACE”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

</geeks only>