Archive for the 'Developer Diary' category

Today we’ve released Puzzlebee, an application for the Facebook platform. Puzzlebee allows you to create jigsaw puzzles from your own photos and share them with your friends! Read more

TheBroth server gets more RAM and some software updates. During the 24-48 hours, expect intermittent outages where TheBroth is not accessible. Read more

TheBroth as a platform for collaborative art will soon see whole range of new art forms. One of the coolest art forms, graffiti, will soon enter open beta. Read more

Popular news aggreggator site Digg.com censored user stories that contained a hexadecimal code that would allow the circumvention of the HDDVD copy protection. Users reacted and inundated the web site with new stories about the hex code and Digg’s decision to remove stories, ban users and even delete user accounts. At the time of writing, Digg.com is down, brought to its knees by its own angry user community. Read more

Today I had the privilege to attend a conference organized by education.au in Perth, Western Australia (my home town), entitled Challenging how knowledge is created.

The highlight of the conference for me was Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. His vision is for every person on the planet to be given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Read more

PNG is a very effective format for graphics, offering loss-less compression. It worked particularly well for the older type of mosaic artworks that were made out of unrotated and untextured tiles. However, it’s no good no more. What happened? Read more

This post compares transfer time and execution speed of several methods of data exchange between the Flash player and amfphp-enabled gateway on the server, written in PHP. Our test results indicate that for larger arrays (with approx. 1000 elements), using strings performs better than transferring array objects or mysql result sets. Read more

We have recently improved our gallery views by making the thumbnails larger and clearer, thanks to switching from PHP’s GD library to Magickwand, a PHP API for ImageMagick. Read more

Since the inception of TheBroth, we wanted to be able to rotate the tiles. This would make artworks possible that look like real mosaics, instead of the somewhat computerish, pixelated artworks that are the result of upright square tiles. Interestingly, tile rotation has no effect on the thumbnails, by which many artworks are rated. Read more

Happy Birthday, TheBroth! TheBroth is one year old. Find out how it all came to be! Read more