chrisblunt.com

Toupix will be on display at Plymouth’s B-Bar theatre on the Barbican this Saturday. Tomorrow then will be spent making some last minute ammendments to the website, and some promo material to explain the project and entice signups.
The show starts at 8pm and is free to attend.

This event creates a space for interaction with contemporary art bringing closer to the public new developments and ideas from the field. The event offers a framework to bring together people that want to share their activities and ideas with the public. It comprises both media installations and live music performances from students, researchers, and artists coming from Australia, Brazil, Portugal, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.

HostManager 1.12 has been released and is available for download from the software pages.

Universal binary build
HostManager is now built as a universal binary for PPC and Intel architectures. The first release of this (1.1) wouldn’t run on Intel due to a configuration error. This has been fixed in the 1.12 release.

True address book integration
The previous address book implementation was pretty awful, as the copied contacts bore no link to your Address Book data. Newly added contacts will be linked to your Address Book rather than copied, so changes made in AB will be reflected in HostManager. This also allows for clients that are flagged as Companies to be displayed with their company contact details rather than personal details.

Previously added clients will be shown with a little Address Book icon next to their name. This indicates they are not yet linked to Address Book. To do so, select them in HostManager’s client list and click Address Book… Then select the relevant contact in Address Book and click Associate.

New updates functionality with Sparkle
Sparkle (beta) is a really nice update framework that automatically handles update checking, download and installation.

HostManager now uses Sparkle to handle updates. An added preference allows to switch checking for updates at start-up on or off.

True client payment recurrence with days, months or years
Another poor legacy of early code was the package recurrence frequencies. Due to being set in days only, they didn’t handle monthly packages or leap years. This has now been changed to a true recurrent date. You can choose from Days, Months or Years and recurrence dates are calculated correctly. By default your previous packages will be carried over as ‘Days’ (as per previous versions of HostManager). To change their reccurence, click Packages in the toolbar.

Improved payments for hosting; introduces payments history viewer
The most requested feature for HostManager is invoice management. This payments history isn’t it, but it’s a step in the right direction. The new Payments history viewer should make keeping track of payments by clients a little easier.

Client payments are now logged in the new Payments panel, accessible by clicking Payments under the client list. To add a payment, choose Make Payment from the hosting tab.

Improved licence management
Makes licence validation and management a little easier and more robust.

Interface improvements
Changes to the interface including simplifications and tidying of some areas

New icon!
A sparkly new icon and improved (subject to preference application graphics

The latest Toupix MIDlet is now available to download from www.toupix.com. This version uses the new and improved Bluetooth code I have developed for this and Transience. It also re-enables the ’send-on-shoot’ option for those people who don’t mind sending images over GPRS.

The next step is to test Toupix at an event or two. I’m hoping to get it into next week’s (Wednesday) Apollo as a secondary piece, and also at the mTATE show on April 1st.

Today was the final presentation of Transience, my assignment submission for the Production of Space module. However, I found that the old code running in Transience (since replaced thanks to my development for Toupix) would not find other users in a noisy (Bluetooth-wise) environment. The result was a presentation that was unfortunately theoretical, with only a couple of screenshots available and no real demo.

The current build can be downloaded from the main Transience page, although I’ll be uploading the new (improved Bluetooth code) version later today. I also hope to get a video of the project in use to publish as part of the final submission.

Points to remember for my final project presentation in May: prepare.

Some social applications, such as Checkmates (previous post), are built with the perspective of an overarching, or top-down (social) mapping. A chat with Chris Speed this week introduced me to the idea of reversing this perspective, such that it becomes the multiple observations of those at the happening. This, it was realised, is the event that Toupix (my final project) revolves around.

Toupix allows users to snap photographs of an event (space) on their mobile phone. When they take the photograph, Toupix checks for other users nearby, and tags that photograph with their details (peopletags?). The photos are then uploaded to the Toupix website, and can be browsed by everyone who was ‘at’ that event, or photograph. This allows for the realisation of the innumerable interconnected (yet perhaps unseen) social networks in which we coexist.

On perspective, though, Toupix shifts the observation away from a surveillant to a multitude of sousveillant perspectives. One event can be observed in any number of different ways, yet these perspectives are lost when we observe the event as a whole.

By breaking down the observation into a collection of participant perspectives, the event can be realised more as the construction of socio-spatial interactions that it is, rather than perhaps an adaption of (purely) spatial history that is adopted as the real.