Mint Digital

Tom is docile, able to sleep in any environment and not a natural on guitar.

In other news, we have adopted an alpaca called Tom (pictured above in the centre) from Vauxhall City Farm.

It's been a long time coming. We've talked a lot about it, we've even teased a little bit, but we're finally there. Today marks the initial release of Hemlock, Mint's real-time web framework, to the public. The open source code is hosted over at GitHub and is available via hemlock-kills.com.

We are extremely happy to finally be able to share Hemlock with you and can't wait to see what you guys build with it.

(Photo by Gary Simmons)

So, we've launched Hemlock the website. It's a strange sort of open source project: no code, no documentation. Just hot air. That will be remedied soon.

(Incidentially, if you like the url, you might like Girl Talk murders Seattle.)

We've just got word over at Mint Towers that recently launched project landshare has just received a nomination.

Landshare has been nominated in the Food & Garden category of the Sustained Magazine Dandelion award.

Go Landshare!

A little over two weeks ago, Mint and Channel 4 launched Adoption Experience, a new experience-based site along the lines of Sexperience, launched last year. Adoption Experience seeks to take the same path and educate people through the real-life experiences of others, taking stories and opinions from all facets of the adoption process; adopters, adoptees, birth parents and professionals.

Play Football3s to any one of four matches this weekend. Tim & Kejia are playing along to all of them. I'll be there on Sunday.

Go to Football3s to see when the next game is on.

STOP PRESS: the first review of Football3s. Phew, it is favourable!

Mint is looking for a Head of Finance and Operations. We are growing quite quickly and it's getting increasingly difficult to stay on top of all the financial and operational issues.

We are looking for a Tester to join our Quality Assurance team to help ensure that our websites work efficiently, look great, read well and provide a friendly user experience. Please take a look at the Tester job details for more information.

(Picture by Elvissa)

For the last few months Mint's design team (that's Noam and Tom) have been working with an intensity best described as scary. From early to late, they have been thinking so hard that you can almost see steam coming out of their ears. If you distract either of them, they have a far-away, pained look as they attempt to keep their brain full of the design they are working on. They give the impression, oh so very politely, of needing to get back to their screen.

Now, help is at hand. Three tremendous designers have just joined Mint. That calls for an introduction:

Sanjay Mistry

Early on Friday 17th April, Andy Bell from Mint lost his newborn daughter after a Caesarian section. The cause of death seems likely to remain a mystery.

We are setting up Project Selma in her memory, aiming to improve maternity care in rural Morocco. If you'd like to know more or make a donation, visit projectselma.org.

This morning, to drum up support for Football3s, we set up nets on Parsons Green and offered passing footie fans the chance to win a signed Chelsea shirt. How did they get the chance to win the prize? Well they simply had to knock one out of three penalties past "the Goalie" (aka Mint's finance guru Colin Roughan who was one of the best GKs to come out of Acton in the '90s where he played with Kevin Gallen).

If they managed three out of three then not only would they get the chance to win the shirt but we also promised them a pint over at the nearby White Horse. Luckily for Mint, the GK had his eye on the ball AND the finances (its over £3 a pint in the White Horse) and nobody managed three out of three. Nobody that is apart from my good self and sadly I was excluded under the Ts and Cs as an employee of Mint Digital.

If you'd like an invitation to the beta launch then please email score@football3s.com stating the club you support (eg Swansea City).

Recently Noam blogged about a new project that we're working on called Landshare. It went live late last week and already we're seeing some great results.

We were overjoyed to see this comment on the blog:

"SUCCESS! in response to a request for land I was contacted by a Landowner over the weekend. We met today and I now have access to as much land as I could ever have wished for. I wish all other Landshare users good luck in the search for suitable partners as this is a fantastic project"

This is exactly what we were hoping for when we started on Landshare. It's great to see it actually happening in real life.

We're at it again. We've stripped off our renowned Mint Digital robes, and we're showing off the goods.

Replace "robes" with "CSS", and "the goods" with "some good HTML". But enough jargon. What happened to Mint's website? Where did that beautiful design go? You're not really naked, are you?

"How much success?"

Throughout the history of our client engagements, there is always a slightly uncomfortable moment when this question rears its ugly head.

"How much traffic do you think the site will do?"

The London version of Google Street View launched today. A few Mints have landed starring roles.

Thomas and Utku saunter round Oval (alas, photo now removed)

For the third year running, the Mints descended on Corfe Castle, Dorset for four days of drinking, feasting and robe-wearing. Oh, and we also split into three teams and competed to build web apps. The brief was "create something cool with Hemlock".

Hemlock is a new framework from Mint, due to be released, open source, in late March. It facilitates building real-time, multi-user web applications. Hemlock is also the driving technology behind Football3s, our exciting new game.

Here's what we built:

Team M: What The Tweet

What The Tweet is a guessing game built around Twitter. Random tweets from celebrities are pulled in but have a word missing from them. Players get points for guessing the missing word. The game also features power-ups, so you can mess with other players' game screens.

Team N: Go With The Flo

Go With The Flo is a rhythm game that maps keystrokes to videos. In theory, it can be used to turn any video into an interactive game. For the weekender, the concept was applied to an '80s aerobic video. Players emulate the moves of the aerobic video on their keyboards and compete for the most points.

Team P: Juked.it

Juked.it is a jukebox with a difference; whether you're sitting in the same office or halfway across the world, you can listen to music simultaneously. Users upload tracks to the playlist, vote tracks up or down and chat about the music they're listening to.

Results

Teams presented their apps on Sunday night to judges Alexis d'Amecourt (19 Entertainment), Jemima Kiss (MediaGuardian.co.uk) and Paul Fisher (Advent Venture Partners). After the unmissable spectacle that was the presentations, the Mints and the judges headed down to The Jolly Gardeners for the wrap party and the winner announcement. The best app of WebApp Weekender 2009 as chosen by the judges was...

Juked.it!

Congratulations to Team P; André, Andy, Dean, John, Kejia and Thomas.

Wrap-Up

As well as being a great bonding experience for a company that is split across two continents, the WebApp Weekender is a showcase of Mint's technical capabilities. The quality of the applications to come out from just four days of work is incredible. This year was also a credit to Hemlock, proving it as a platform for rapid development. If we can build three applications in four days, imagine what you could build with it.

Thanks

We couldn't do the WebApp Weekender without these people. Thanks to the judges for joining us on a school night, we hope you had a great time. Thanks to Imane, Safia and Amal for looking after us for four days. And thanks to the inimitable Belinda and Peter Bell for having us at Scoles for another year.

Watch this space for screencasts and more about What The Tweet, Go With The Flo and Juked.it. We look forward to seeing where we can take these applications. After some sleep that is...

All 18 Mints have decamped to the Dorset countryside for our annual web application building competition.

If you're interested, read more on the dedicated blog or on Twitter.

On Monday night, the Mint pub hosted a Friends & Family launch of Football3s.

It was a great night. People loved Football3s. And Spurs beat Hull 2-1. There are some photos on Flickr. Some are featured in this post.

Mint is looking for a passionate web designer to work in the London office.

See the full job advert on Krop.

We've been asked to join forces with some clever people to create the Landshare website.