Genuine Labs: the Augmented Reality Business card

By mike@mike-miles.com

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, I love my job and where I work (Genuine Interactive).  It’s an enviroment that fosters hard work, creativity and great results.  It’s also a place where the guys in charge have made it clear that everyone can chime in and express their ideas for projects.

A few months ago I did just that.  I was talking to Chris Pape, and I asked him if any of our flash developers had experience with augmented reality.  I told him I had an idea I wanted to try, making an augmented reality business card where our company logo was the symbol.  He thought it was a great idea, and told me it was something he’d love to look into.

Since then I havent had any involvment, but some of the guys in our Flash department have been hard at work, and I was really excited to see that the took my basic idea and turned it into something really cool.  So here it is the Augmented Reality business card, a.k.a the butterfly effect. These guys took my inital basic idea, and turned it into something truly awesome. (I’m just giving myself 1% credit for this)

We wanted our business cards to say more about us than a title and email address – so we created our very own Augmented Reality Business Cards. They are our “Butterfly Effect Business Cards.” They tell who we’ve met more about how we got to the meeting we just had. We think its more interesting than the typical corporate bio

You can checkout the full blog post about it at my works blog: Genuine Juice

FontCapture.com

By mike@mike-miles.com

So the other day I stumbled upon the website FontCapture (beta).  What this does is creates a font from your hand writing.

It’s a simple process.  You print out their template, fill in each character with your own hand, scan it, upload it and viola!

I just finished installing my handwriting as a font on my home computer (I called it mike lefty, and yes you can download it here!), and tomorrow I plan on installing it on my work computer. I’ll then set it as the default font in Notepad++, and I’ll be able to program in my own handwriting!

Check it out, and create your own font! Or download mine, and begin plagiarizing notes by me!

The Mike Lefty Font at Work!

Drupal Module: Yelp Search Results

By mike@mike-miles.com

I had a bit of free time recently, so I began reading up on some of the new API’s that different websites have come out with (Digg, Yelp, etc…).  When I found the Yelp API it sparked an idea for a new Drupal module I could build.

Of course I first took a look around the drupal website to see if a module already existed, so I wouldnt waste my time, and suprisingly it did not.  Excited I planned out what I wanted to have the module do (after reading Yelp’s extensive restrictions list of what you can/cant do with their API). Since I’ve had alot more practice developing modules since publishing my first one (callouts), I gave myself just 2 days to code, complete and publish this module.

So yesterday (August 12th 2009) I began working on it, and am excited to say I’ve completed the module and it’s just as good as I would of hoped.

Enough of the back story, onto the module itself:

Yelp Search Results

This Module uses the Yelp API to display search results in a block on your site.

The module creates a new block (’yelp search results’) which you can place on your page from the block administer section.(Administer > Blocks).

For individual site pages (nodes) you can specify settings for the yelp block (Block title, location, search radius, maximum number of results and which yelp categories to search from).So you could display the 5 best rated Hotels near you on one page, and the 10 best bars near you on another page.

Initially the module will just display photo, name, rating, address & phone for each search result. The display of search results is completely themable and provides you with alot of information you can display (such as reviews, longitude & latitude, etc..) for a complete listing of variables available to you open ‘yelp-business.tpl.php’ and view the comments.

There are only 3 draw backs:

• You need a yelp API key to use this module (can get for free from http://www.yelp.com/developers/getting_started/api_access)
• If you have a very high traffic site, the module might stop working (yelp allows you 10,000 API calls per day).
• Per the Yelp API Terms of Use, you have to display the Yelp logo along with your results (the only part that is not themable.)

You can see an example of this module in action at: http://mike-miles.com/drupal/

A few screen shots

Results Display	Editing a Yelp block
Listing of Blocks

You can download the drupal module for your drupal site, from its offical module page: http://drupal.org/project/yelp

Find a Tweeter

By mike@mike-miles.com

You might of noticed that I’ve been absent from my blog for a while, well I’ve been very busy.  But I’m aback, and hopefully I’ll have some free time to blog more frequently.  Ok onto the nitty gritty.

I’ve been spending my free time (the little I’ve had these past few months) working with my pal Josh Milane (www.mittechnical.com) on a twitter website (Which I think is very cool). He’s the brains and I’m the brawn (a.k.a the developer). It’s agreat concept that we’re still improving, but it is good enough where I can blog about it.

The site is www.findAtweeter.com .  The site allows you to find tweeters near you (or any location) and mashes it with google maps so that you can see where the tweets are coming from.

findatweeter

It’s built on using the twitter REST API (search API), as well as the google maps API.  It’s a great tool if you want to see if any tweeters are interested in the same things as you. We tried to keep the interface as simple as possible, so its easy to search for a variety of tweets, and share those results.

findatweeter search

You might of noticed in that last picture a checkbox for ‘events’. Twitter Events are something we came up with for findatweeter.  on findatweeter you can create ‘Twitter Events’, eassentially they are tweets that tell twitter about an event thata going on.  For example you might want to create a twitter event for an upcoming party, or convention.  Theres alot of uses.

twitter event

Whats great is that findatweeter will post the twitter event to your twitter timeline, so that all your followers can see it.  Again, plenty of uses that as I programmer I’m unable to come up with (hence Joshs envolvment in the project).

You can also tweet directly to your twitter account from findatweeter.

Currently www.findatweeter.com is at version 1.5 .  I’m working on some minor bug fixes, and looking into using Oauth, so that it can be a registered twitter application. Take a look, some feedback on findatweeter would be great.

Edit: wow, I just noticed i used the word findatweeter alot in this post.