Features:

• Until browsers support native webcam capture, an (open source) flash blob is used for the actual capture.
• The plugin can optionally prompt the user to allow flash access the webcam.
• The plugin writes the video to a canvas element.
• Support for adding callbacks and filters.

There is a demonstration available (testing on Firefox 3.6). The performance is terrible at the moment, but I will be working to fix that.

I’m planning to use this plugin for my next interactive art installation, which will allow the participant to interact with a virtual environment using facial emotions. Stay tuned!

All the bug ever saw in his lifetime was his problems. They stood up all around him, he couldn’t see over the top of them, and he had to fight his way through these tufts of wool, in the rug, to find some crumbs someone had spilled in the rug. And the tragedy of the story of the bug in the rug was this; that he lived and he died in the world’s most beautifully designed rug, but he never once knew that he spent his life in something which had a pattern.

Boxee Media Centre
Originally uploaded by mackers

A few months ago I decided to build a new media server from the bottom up. I needed something to sit in the living room and be able to play and stream music and videos.

It’s in the living room, so it has to be quiet and, as it will be turned on all the time it has to be relatively green. It also has to look good so I chose the very quiet Antec Fusion Black 430 chassis. For the hard drive I went for a 1TB WD Caviar Green. Again, almost silent and very energy efficient. I made sure the graphics card had a HDMI out and I accessorized with a DVD burner, TV Tuner card, WiFi and a remote control.

As I’m running linux on a new model, configuration was arduous, but I now have the remote control, volume knob and LCD display working nicely.

For the software, I’m running Boxee (on Ubuntu). Whilst still in Alpha, its mostly stable and looks very slick indeed.

I’m delighted with the final result. It’s a PC, but looks spiffy tucked there under the TV. I unplugged the keyboard/mouse; all interaction is via the IR remote (or the Boxee iPhone app).

Some highlights:

• 1TB is plenty of storage, but with Boxee having integrated bittorrent downloads, this will probably fill up fast. However, there’s loads of online content available through the interface. Boxee also has support for showing Photos (local, flickr, facebook).
• I can run emulators, games and things like Google Earth on the box. (Google Earth looks incredible on the HDTV!)
• I’m running mpd on the machine so I can play music without turning the TV on (via the MPoD iPhone app).
• The new version of the above app also allows me to stream music to my iPhone. This is especially cool, I can stream my music to my iPhone wherever I am (even over 3G).
• Boxee has mad social networking support, so if I recommend a movie or whatever through the interface it gets tweeted to my account.
• I also have mt-daapd running to stream to iTunes.

All-in-all very sweet, but I’m going to the beach now.

In November, we launched Fashion Your Firefox, which was a collection of add-ons that we felt were great for a novice user just getting started with customizing their browser. Now, we’d like to take it a step further and let anyone create their own collection of add-ons that can be shared with their friends, posted on blogs, and featured on the Firefox Add-ons website.

Working with Briks, I was the lead developer for the Add-on Collector extension, which allows Firefox users to share and discover add-ons from within the browser. I’m very pleased at the result and the positive feedback that we’ve been getting so far. That people are using it to discover new add-ons is great.

Some more coverage:  Mozilla Blog – A week of collections, Lifehacker’s Firefox Add-on Packs, New York Times Gadgetwise Blog.

o2sms is a program to send SMS messages using the websites of Irish mobile operators.

Like o2sms, it allows customers of o2 Ireland, Vodafone Ireland and Meteor Ireland to use their free “web text” allocation to send messages nationally (internationally in the case of o2). Unlike o2sms, this application supports many other providers (hence the move away from the name “o2sms”), so users in other countries can use their local provider’s web text allocation.

What’s more, Webtext supports actual proper bulk SMS providers, like Clickatell and VoipBuster. These providers expose an API, which is infinitely more robust than screen scraping. I bought a tenner’s credit on Clickatell and I’m using it to send international messages from Spain to Ireland. This reduces the cost from €0.60 to €0.03 per message, and all from the comfort of a familiar looking app. It even appears to come from my real number, so replies arrive as normal.

I’m aware of Vincent Coyne’s Eirtext. I think Webtext improves on his effort by providing a familiar interface and by supporting many more providers. 

This app is free for the next while. Check out Webtext and let me know what you think (and leave some positive reviews in the App Store)!

The new o2 site is a beast. Using the network analyser of the indispensable Firebug, the page to send the web text alone takes over 30 seconds to finish rendering and makes an incredible 288 HTTP requests to completely load the page (I develop with the cache disabled). This is well above the 5 seconds generally recommended by usability experts.

Not only that, there’s no way to “stay logged in”, meaning to send another message later on that day involves logging in again and making the 4 or 5 clicks to get to the send message page, with each page taking an eternity to load.

Any web monkey can whip up a page with a few simple inputs that loads in 100ms. Surely o2’s bells and whistles shouldn’t add too long onto that.

Can we be blamed for using o2sms and other similar tools to avail of the free text messages we’re entitled to with our o2 contracts?