Peeled Carrots by Stephen Blake

The team at Technovated has been working very diligently for the past few months to get a new application off the ground. Its called Kindo and we have finally released a private beta which is open to invitees only. If you would like to get onto the beta testers list, then submit your email address via the form on www.kindo.com.

We have also released a new blog on blog.kindo.com, so if you would like to keep up to date with our latest news, then please visit it. Comments are more than welcome

Here are some snippets from two interesting posts on the Kindo blog

http://blog.kindo.com/2007/08/02/some-technical-details/en/

We’re having fun building the Kindo application and used a number of frameworks and components to achieve the finished result.

For the web framework we’re using Seagull which offers excellent integration with Flash through the AMF PHP request handling and easy integration with Ajax and Graphviz. For the Ajax interactions we use jquery exclusively, for Graphviz a heavily extended version of the PEAR lib of the same name. Working with the dot language has been interesting and a good opportunity to experiment with the subtleties of a genealogy graph.

http://blog.kindo.com/2007/09/04/welcome-to-the-beta-release/en/

A little while ago we released an Alpha to a small group of people, to gather valuable user feedback. Thanks to those great people, we’ve had our heads down improving Kindo, and as a result we’re releasing the Beta, and at the same time opening it up to a wider audience for more feedback.

We have finally got the site up and running and are getting some really positive feedback from the web commuunity. Not just in South Africa, but in other parts of the world as well.

The guys at cowboysengines wrote a pretty cool article about the conference idea and they are giving us some solid support!

Please visit the site, at www.technologyforafrica.org and give us some feedback, so that we can give feedback to the speakers, justify sponsorship and organise a really worthwhile event.

Cheers

With the onset of an extremely cold snap of weather on the 1st November, I am longing to go back home to soak up some rays from the hot African sun during Christmas time.

Instead we will be hard at work in a cold and gloomy London, which is really not as bad as it seems. One of the things we have been working on is a project which is really close to the heart and will hopefully benefit the whole of Southern Africa.

The aim of this project is to hold a “web and emerging technologies conference” in South Africa. We want to get international speakers, who are industry leaders and who would like to give some advice to Africans involved in the Web and IT industry.

I have been doing quite a lot of research over the past few months and I really believe that a conference of this nature will be beneficial to the “African technology community”

We have a site up at and running (www.technologyforafrica.org), which is still undergoing some final testing before we start to contact Southern African companies involved in the IT industry. However, if you have any comments or suggestions please contact one of us, or just post a comment to this article.

I am hoping that we will get positive feedback from the majority of people who we contact because I think the concept of “Technology for Africa” is a fantastic opportunity.

We have been working on updating a cool dating website (well at least I think that it is cool ;)), to make it meet some of the new web 2.0 standards. The project involves revamping the original site, so we have inherited the previous code from the initial developer. I have been trying to do some backwards engineering of the code, to try and figure out how the site works. This is however proving to be quite a task because the previous developer did not put much effort into commenting and there is some quite complex code to sift through.

While I was studying, my programming lecturer always talked about the importance of commenting and he used to subtract marks from projects if the code wasn’t commented correctly. I am now realising how important a simple thing like commenting can be, especially if there are multiple developers working on a project.

I am sure that a vast majority of developers do use comments in their code and I will definetly make sure to use them more appropriately in the future