Omniversity of Manchester

Web Design Foundations for everyone

I’m Chris Mills, and I work for web browser company and general geek haven, Opera Software! I have been taking part in little projects at Madlab for over a year now, and have always found them to be welcoming, innovative, creative and very much in agreement with my philosophy of open source information sharing to help everyone improve their skills and get ahead!

I therefore decided to help them out by running a course as part of their Omniversity programme. The course is about web design/development, but before you go running for your nerd shields, please just consider what I have to say.

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Adrain McEwan, our good friend and leader of our Internet of Things course, recently gave a talk at the Insight11 digital communication event in The Liverpool Chamber of Commerce.

You can see his ‘Getting Beyond the Screen‘ talk here.
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We’re always tinkering with our offer at the Omniversity, and think there might be some interest in a course about interaction. Who would like to learn vvvv, or sharpen their skills with this amazing system? We asked Elliot Woods, who recently presented the LitTree during FutureEverything 2011.

What is vvvv?

©2011 vvvv/meso

vvvv is a ‘multipurpose toolkit’ which can be interfaced to all the inputs and outputs of a computer. It can connect your webserver to your heartbeat, or your old nokia phone to an array of 300 projectors. Inside, lies a ‘more infinite’ array of possibilities to generate, arrange, mix, manipulate, store, communicate and react to data.

vvvv specifically excels is in the generation of interactive live visual graphics, but the tool is so flexible that you may never need to learn another.

vvvv is a graphical ‘node based’ programming language which allows for rapid development and deployment of professional media experiences.
You develop whilst the program is running, there’s no need to compile or ‘setup’ your program each time you want to make a change.
If a node doesn’t exist for what you want, then you can create a new node at runtime using the inbuilt code-editor, or patch a new node out of existing ones.

Why use vvvv?

In Elliot’s opinion, vvvv is the most elegant and powerful patching environment in existence. It allows him to develop between 5 and 10 times faster than openFrameworks, which he also uses extensively.
It has built-in power features such as ‘Boygrouping’ which allow you to seamlessly patch across an array of computers (e.g. for multi-projector arrays) and ‘Spreads’, which allow you to simultaneously handle groups of data in an elegant and tidy way.

vvvv is always free to download and use for non-commercial purposes, so there’s nothing stopping you trying it out (except for that it only runs on Windows). It’s both a great platform for sketching out interactive ideas, as well as delivering final release versions.

If you would be interested in taking this course or learning more, please leave a comment below!

Omniversity courses work best when there’s a busy room of people who can work together and develop contacts, as much as it is about learning new skills and opportunities. As such, we’re trying an experiment where we open up the choice of date, rather than set one and hope people can make it – we know a lot of people who want to come on the courses don’t get a chance because it’s the wrong time of the week for them.

So before we run our next Arduino course, we want to ask you – if you’re interested, what day would suit you best? Remember, there is absolutely no obligation for voting.

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Paul Plowman recently received a bursary to attend the Omniversity “Internet Of Things – Advanced Arduino” one-day course at Madlab, Manchester’s geek hub. Here is his account of the day…

I’ve been interested in the Internet Of Things – the connectivity between the online and physical worlds – ever since the heady days of the Cambridge coffee pot. Now, fifteen years on, we’re used to the idea of the internet being a vast repository of information and data, but this is still largely a case of retrieving information stored on distant hard-drives. The broadcasting of live data directly from real-world inputs has, in most people’s experience, largely been confined to webcams and weather-stations. And as for devices which import network-sourced data and manifest it physically, apart from specialised projects these have tended to be limited to the realms of novelty, such as toasters which burn different images into your bread, depending on the weather forecast.

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Web Design Foundations is a four part modular course aimed at anyone who wants to learn about how the Web works from the very basic beginnings and be taken step by step, in a friendly informal style, up to the point where they know how to build a basic modern best practices web site and put it online.
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Thanks to anonymous benefactors who are supporters of life long learning, we’re establishing an Omniversity Bursary. We are offering 1 free space, paid for from the bursary, on some courses. The first workshop we are supporting a placement on is Building the Internet of Things – Advance Arduino.

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We’re conducting a survey to find out what you – the community want to learn. The Crowd Sourced Curriculum Survey allows us to find out what workshops, and when would be the best for you to up-skill and explore life long learning.

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