Tomatique Blog

Tweeting Map

Tweeting Map is an experimental visualization of near-realtime public geo-localized tweets. It was developed as a demo with no visualization goals in mind, but it is still nice to see where (and what) people are tweeting at each moment, or even not tweeting at all.

Each circle represents a tweet on its location. The color comes from user’s profile, and size represents the number of user’s followers.

A more technical description and source code are available on GitHub.

Portmanteau

I’ve been working on web development for a while, and after some years of freelancing I started, along with Ademar Aguiar and Mário Lopes, a company to support the development of a social web platform for elementary schools called Escolinhas. I dedicated two years of full-time working at Escolinhas where I found that doing SaaS and rolling out a company is hard. Nevertheless, it was a great experience.

About half a year ago, I decided to leave Escolinhas and the company that supports it to start a brand new project. At that time I didn’t had any specific idea of what it would be, but I wanted it to be smaller and simpler than Escolinhas so that it could fit the work capacity of a very small team, at a minimum of only myself :)

After a few weeks of brainstorming I ended up with a concept for the new project. I wanted it to be something on the web but not a SaaS anymore. Instead, it should provide some kind of added value to an existing SaaS. Some kind of very thin software layer that, making usage of web APIs, could offer new features and usage experiences on existing web platforms and services. It should also be doable by a very small team because I wanted to keep things small in order to produce high quality stuff without the weight of a bigger structure.

After defining those principles, I was still missing the right environment and technology on which the project would be based. Soon, I found mobile application development, and in particular iOS development, as the right way to achieve the thin layer of software I was looking for (Apple and the Open Web).

Another fundamental principle to follow would be “Scratching your own itch”. This is the principle that makes us work with the necessary care to build such quality products. For a long time I was missing a very simple iPhone app that allowed me to share shopping lists with my wife, and I used that itch as the starting point for everything else.

After some mockup development on a shared lists iPhone app, I’ve asked my dear friends Ana Carvalho, Ana Ferreira and Paulo Zoom to join me on this project. I did it because we love to work together (we were a great team at Escolinhas), and I really needed them on the project to accomplish the desired quality I wanted. I decided to share the whole project with them so that they could feel it as their own and give the same commitment and passion I was.

We named the project Portmanteau and we started evolving the shared lists mockup that became Listary. The app evolved so much… much more than I was expecting at the beginning. It also took much more time to design and build but that’s the right way to work! We’re building a product for ourselves first of all, and we believe that making it that way, a lot of users will appreciate it as well. That’s the reason why we wanted to keep it small. We want to build our own stuff.

We’re not a company, we have no hierarchy and among our principles is the total agreement. We always try not to proceed with anything if someone does not agree with it. This principle slows down the process but it produces a very rich output, because everything we do is a merge of everyone’s ideas.

As of Wednesday, Listary is finally available on the App Store. I feel that we had made an excellent product with this very tiny structure, and I’m so happy about that.

Floating Bubbles submitted to 10K Apart

I’ve just submitted Floating Bubbles to 10K Apart, “a contest for people who make web sites” which premise is “Could you build a complete web application using less than 10 kilobytes?”.

Floating Bubbles is based on an organic system developed in 2003 while exploring the interactive behavior of FireGirl. At that time, Flash was the technology that supported those exploratory works.

When Paulo Zoom told me about 10K Apart it occurred to me to rewrite that system using HTML 5’s canvas element and JavaScript.

The system was redesigned with a new concept:“The lifecycle of an organic floating bubble that splits itself on smaller parts until they pop” .

Enjoy it :-)