How it was made

DoodleBuzz started life as a series of simple sketches in a notebook, originally looking at how to create an interface system that as much as possible moved away from the ubiquitous "click here" that seems to pervade the web.

I first had the idea whe I chanced upon a piece of of code at senocular.com which makes it easy to create a line and distribute objects along that line. I was thinking about what could be done with such a concept when I started to scribble an idea for, well, creating information displays from a scribbled line.

A series of small interactive sketches created in Flash was then put together to explore the idea of placing "objects" along a scribbled line. After several iterations of these scribbling interface concepts, an information source was then needed to make best use of such an idea.

DayLife is creating a new architecture of news. They believe that reading the news should be more fun and less of a chore. So they've created a wonderfully powerful platform that allows designers, developers and artists to create new kinds of news applications using their DayPI

Over a period of two weeks (though in reality about 40 hours ot total time) DoodleBuzz was developed in Flash using Actionscript 3 with a little bit of PHP - which is needed to create a proxy between Flash and DayLife.

I also used Dapper.net to create a "Dapp" to effectively "screen scrape" the DayLife homepage to get the top five hottest news topics which are then placed into DoodleBuzz as the default search.