We had another coding dojo tonight, courtesy of our able facilitator, Ms Hunt.

I enjoyed it. The task this time was to write a simple text adventure. We made slow progress as a group, but ended up with a functioning model for a game, which allows motion around a game world.

I felt that the confines of 5-minute stretches as navigator or driver in a pair programming scenario led to unintended consequences... personally I felt pressured to deliver something solid in my 5 minutes, and I wonder if this doesn't lead to the now-familiar situation where we've written lots of classes representing entities in the system, but can't quite see how they fit together. Some design up front seems to be warranted ;) This time around it seemed that we had a good model done (with some bleed-over into a controller, leading to a little heated debate) but no view.

High point: at the very end of the evening the cry went up "did anyone read the spec?". Urk, no...

ScreenRecycler: "Most Mac users have a spare computer sitting right next to their main computer on their desk. ScreenRecycler now enables you to use this spare computer as second display for your Mac. You can even use an idle machine for that purpose."

BenQ's iF concept: "The little surfaces that Gabriel White has devoted an entire blog to are about to get a little bigger as the screen expands to fill the front of the device. The history of buttons is about to get a virtual chapter as we chuck out those tiny QWERTY thumb boards. The tactile issues will get sorted and someone will liberate us from fingerprint smudges and scratched screens. The touch screen is finally developing to match the physicality of human hands. Maybe we're reaching the tipping point for convergence."

Over the years I've developed an allergy to reading about "concept phones" but this is still quite neat IMHO.

A petition to bring back buttons on phones?: "I am starting to feel such non-mechanical buttons actually reduce the user experience rather than enhance it. Often because these static buttons are not used in a correct context and it lacks the most important thing a tactile and haptic feedback."

TomTom to track phones for real-time traffic info: "The system uses standard signalling data sent back and forth between mobile phones and cellular base-stations to pin-point a handset's location and speed, which are effectively the position and speed of the vehicle it's inside. Build a composite of all the data received this way from handsets located along a road and you have an indication of how congested - or not - that road is."

Interesting; I'd heard of this technique before, perhaps it was their trial...?