Our latest iPhone application is a small demonstration of what can be achieved using the newly released data from The Ordnance Survey under the Open Data initiative combined with public domain data on Members of Parliament and Constituencies.

MP Finder locates where you are and then drops a pin on the map identifying your constituency and MP. No entering postcodes, searching for addresses, simply turn on and find your MP!

Visit the app store

Mindsizzlers have released their latest iPhone application. The Golden Hour app’ puts a sun clock in your pocket and allows you to plot the position of the sun for any location on earth and time of year. Of particular interest to photographers, the application highlights the so-called “Golden Hour” much appreciated by cinematographers and photographers alike.

Featuring a comprehensive database of over 45,000 locations around the world, accurate astronomical calculations and different views of the data, both graphical and numeric, the application is designed to accompany and augment the existing website at www.golden-hour.com.

Full Features;

Next event alert for the current location.

Sun clock display showing not simply the day-night terminator, but a coloured shadow highlighting the areas of the planet currently in golden hour, civil twilight, nautical twilight etc. Click on the map to instantly change locations.

Sun Angle display showing the Azimuth and Elevation for any time on the current day.

Golden Hour display, familiar to website users this is the core display of the solar altitude during the day. Users can scroll through the year or nudge the current date up/down with a tap. From this screen users can also access a comprehensive numeric data view showing the full range of astronomical,nautical and civil twilight times.

Huge drill down location database complete with full colour flags of the world for each country and population data for each city, town or village.

Particularly noteworthy is that the application does not require any network access and is therefore perfect for iPod touch users.

Yes, it’s true. We might be an innovation consultancy but we have in fact just opened our first shop over at print on demand specialists Cafe Press to showcase our high resolution Wordles generated automatically from the complete works of William Shakespeare!

Visit our shop

“Wordle” what’s that all about then?

You may have already come across wordles on the web when they appeared in the press earlier in the year. A wordle is a graphic layout of text where the size of a word is in proportion to its frequency in a document.

Here’s an example;

The Merry Wives of Windsor in 100 words

How did you do it?

The credit belongs to Jonathan Feinberg who wrote the original java application for generating a wordle. Although it looks simple, there is some complex mathematics going on under the hood and whilst I’d love to say we wrote it, we didn’t. What we did do was read the public domain text of the complete words of Shakespeare, parse the data to drop stage directions and so forth and then feed the text into a wordle generator written by Jonathan (see, told you he was the key to it all), kindly licensed by IBM and available on their alphaworks site here. We then generated 60 wordles of each play to pick the layouts we liked most and then built a shop so we could share them with you.

As a side note it’s worth mentioning that the images we use for the shop are special high resolution files generated at print resolutions and not simply web images taken from the wordle website.

What about the images, can I use them?

Absolutely, you are free to use the images under the same terms that wordle.net licenses them to us. Please read the FAQ on usage here.

Enjoy

Following on from our news about the launch of www.dodadog.com, we’re delighted to announce the release of our first iPhone application which complements the site by tracking users’ walks and giving them access to a special mobile web version of the website.

Written entirely in native objective-c for the iPhone, this is the first of a range of iPhone applications that Mindsizzlers has planned for the coming months, but if you have a project you would like to see realised on the iPhone, please don’t hesitate to get in touch as this is very much a space we are now confident working in.

Launch Screen

We’re delighted to announce the release of www.dodadog.com which is our new gregarious network for dogs and their owners. The site has discussion groups, breed information, photo galleries, news and articles and uniquely, the ability to track your walks using our related iPhone application.

DODADOG was the brainchild of TV producer / director Colin Brewer and has been developed by Mindsizzlers who are joint partners in the new venture.

Built entirely on Amazon’s compute cloud and utilising Amazon’s SimpleDB infrastructure as opposed to a conventional relational database, DODADOG is at the cutting edge of new web technologies and we wish it every success.

www.dodadog.com

We’ve been working on a little research tool that helps keep you in the loop of what’s going on in cyberspace and are pleased to launch www.webtrendsnow.com

The site works like this.

Ever hour, Google trends publish data about the hot search terms as determined by analysis of their US based users.

We then run a search against each of the top 100 search terms to find the top sites that web users will be visiting as a result.

We show you this information, together with a thumbnail of the website (made by another mindsizzling service we will soon be launching to the public) which makes it very quick and easy to see if the site is something you are interested in.

If you find it useful, do let us know …

We’re a fan of Amazon cloud computing and have been using SimpleDB within some projects that we will be launching soon. The problem though is that there is no backup solution for the service and whilst Amazon’s redundancy etc means that we should never lose any data anyway, that doesn’t protect you against the accidental deletion of data (been there, done that) or the desire to have data in files that you can import into other databases (eg Mysql)etc.

I was a bit surprised that this hadn’t been addressed by the Amazon community at large so I took a few days (well, a week) out of my schedule to pull togetherwww.backupsdb.com – the world’s first online backup solution for Amazon SimpleDB.

We launched it last week and you can read more over at the backupsdb blog