Mint Digital

We are looking for a couple of outstanding individuals.

HTML/CSS/JS developer who wants to learn Rails (London or New York)

Football3s Marketing Intern (London)

I know I'm talking our own book but Mint is a great place to work. Everyone gets involved in brainstorms. Every February, we head off to the WebApp Weekender. Our London office has a pub built-in called 'The Open Sauce'. We pretend we're squires.

The details to apply are on the job listings. Don't hesitate to get in touch!

When making a web page load faster, one of the most commonly cited front-end techniques is minimizing the number of HTTP requests. In fact, it's Yahoo!'s number one rule. Each HTTP request is slow; making many requests is very slow.

Last Friday, the 20,000th bug was entered into our tracking database. As Christopher commented when we reached bug 10,000, this industrial-scale error generation is not cause for recrimination. Quite the reverse, it is time to celebrate.

By that logic, it should be a double celebration: we've doubled our rate of bug creation. Mint's first 10,000 bugs took 26 months, the second 10,000 took under 14 months.

To get this online party started we are holding a prize sweepstake. Guess the date Mint hits bug 30,000 to win (enter in the comments below).

The prize is fumigation for life.

Kevin Slavin, co-founder of Area/Code, spoke at the RSA's Playing The City event on Wednesday night.

Area/Code's initial focus was creating games that use technology but take place in the real world, like PacManhattan. Some of their recent work has had a TV focus, like Parking Wars or Sopranos A&E Connection.

Mint has gone in the opposite direction. We started in TV and, with Football3s, are moving closer to the real world. It felt like we are interested in the same things but from different perspectives.

I can't do justice to his talk, but here are a couple of nuggets.

Who would believe it? 5 years old and still in business.

A few months back, I read Visual Decision Making. It's all about the role of visual aesthetics in web design. The author, Patrick Lynch, talks about how "classical aesthetics stress orderliness and clarity in design", and "expressive aesthetics emphasise originality, creativity, and visual richness".

I'm a huge advocate of the classical aesthetic. In fact, I believe it's the best aesthetic model to adopt when designing a social website. Here are four reasons why.

A couple of weeks ago documentary film maker Adam Curtis spoke at BBC Vision Forum on his latest work, a co-production with installation theatre group Punchdrunk, called It Felt Like a Kiss.

A few notes:

1. The internet is changing the dominant sensibility from wanting to be told stuff to wanting to experience stuff.
2. Punchdrunk has cottoned on to the fact that personal experience is the most important thing. Everything else, TV included, feels thin.
3. The internet, on its own, can't do stories. Hybrids of TV and the web may be the way forward.

Apparently, two Mint projects for Channel 4 have been nominated for the Royal Television Society Innovation award for UGC.

Both projects combine TV audiences with web mass-participation. For the last four years, we have been convinced that this combination provides great opportunity. It is great to see these ideas come to fruition.

Where did these ideas come from?

In the corner of our New York office, a guy called Joel has spent the last two years beavering away on rocket software.

Yesterday his team qualified for Level 1 of the X Prize Lunar Landing Challenge.

Congratulations, Joel and Masten Space Systems... that's an awesome achievement!

Last Thursday, I presented at 2-screen.

The presentation was broken down into 3 parts:

1. About Flow
2. Flow as a framework for design
3. TV programme patterns

This post discusses parts 1 and 2. Part 3 will arrive in a separate post.

Last night saw 120 people cram into Hoxton Hall to see if TV & web could make a baby. OK, so there was no actual baby-making, but there was plenty of ideas and discussion on how we can seize the opportunity this new kind of user behaviour presents.

The 2Screen event has reached capacity. If you'd like to come and haven't got a ticket, you can add yourself to the waiting list. We'll do our best to fit you in.

Thanks to everyone who bought a ticket. Look forward to seeing you on the 24th.

More and more people watch TV with their laptops open.

Groups of web and TV producers are attempting to create experiences that make use of this new behaviour.

The area is ripe with possibility. Most recent web successes have social interaction at their core. Nothing beats TV at getting large audiences to congregate.

It also throws up new problems. How can you create an experience that is compelling on both screens, but not distracting on either?

We thought it would be good to talk. 2Screen is an event that gathers a bunch of innovators who are doing interesting things in this area. Each speaker has 10 minutes to present their experiences.

The evening aims to answer the burning question: 'Can web & the TV make a baby?'

It is at Hoxton Hall at 7pm, 24 September. There will be a party afterwards.

Sign up now!

Until yesterday, one of our in-development applications was routinely taking over 4 minutes to run its full test suite (without running our Cucumber tests). Four minutes per run can pretty easily turn into an hour per day when testing every commit. I was beginning to think that "testing" is the new "compiling".

Often we go to and organise events talking about the future of the Internet and at these things we can get well ahead of ourselves speculating about the next fandangled widget or some 'seriously smart guys' or other. This morning at about 11am, a man came to our offices, walked through the door, stood in the middle of the office and said "Have you got any work or jobs going here?".

At Mint, we make some pretty cool websites. We also pride ourselves on the quality of our code. Sites like Landshare, Orange unsignedAct and Sexperience all use technologies like AJAX and JavaScript to make them look good and feel great. But, as with anything in life, adding complexity to something increases the risk of things going wrong.

Until now, we have relied on our eagle-eyed Quality Assurance Police to prod, poke, push and pull our sites ad nauseum in search of these failures.

This is time consuming and error prone, even for our über talented QAs. So, being the geeks we truly are, we thought we’d get a computer to do the leg-work. Consequently I have been working on a little hocus-pocus to bewitch web browsers into thinking a real person is using the site. The result is pretty entertaining: a browser dancing away, apparently all by itself! It also uncovers any errors in the code - but that is less fun.

I had to move the browser so you could see it, but other than that it's all magic!

‘How does the web make you feel?’ MediaSnackers asked young people, to discover their emotional response to the web. ‘Naked’ was the reply from one 16-year-old girl. (She didn't have virus protection)

Unlike the world economy, Mint's design team has increased in size over the past few months. This has allowed us to spend some quality time focusing on refining the Mint 'brand'. Clearly, the first step in this process was to ask everyone at Mint their favourite anagram of MINT DIGITAL. Some highlights include:

It a Mild Ting
Man Id Gilt It
Tim Gitin' Laid
Giant Tim Lid
Militant Dig
Tidal Timing
Dig Latin Tim

Aside from some great anagrams, this may appear like a bit of a waste of time. However, it was useful in helping set the tone in how we approached standardising and unifying exposure to the Mint brand.

Since we posted this ad we still havent found the right person. Well we said it'd be tough...

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.

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.