This post is cross-posted with our friends at Source.
We usually build relatively simple sites with our app template. Our accessible playgrounds project needed to be more complex. We needed to deal with moderated, user-generated data. But we didn’t have to run a server in order to make this site work; we just modified our app template.
App template-based sites are HTML files rendered from templates and deployed to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). This technique works tremendously for sites that never change, but our playgrounds site needs to be dynamic.
When someone adds, edits or deletes a playground, we POST to a tiny server running a Flask application. This application appends the update to a file on our server, one line for each change. These updates accumulate throughout the day.
At 5 a.m., a cron job runs that copies and then deletes this file, and then processes updates from the copied file. (This copy-delete-read the copy flow helps us solve race conditions where new updates from the web might attempt to write to a locked-for-reading file. After the initial copy-and-delete step, any new writes will be written to a new updates file that will get processed the next day.)
Each update is processed twice. First, we write the old and new states of the playground to a revision log with a timestamp, like so:
{
'slug': 'ambucs-hub-city-playground-at-maxey-park-lubbock-tx',
'revisions':[
{
'field': 'address',
'from': '26th Street and Nashville Avenue'
'to': '4007 26th Street'
},
],
'type': 'update'
}
Second, we update the playground in a SQLite database. When this is complete, a script on the server regenerates the site from the data in the database. Since each page includes a list of other nearby playgrounds, we need to regenerate every playground page. This process takes 10 or 15 minutes, but it’s asynchronous from the rest of the application, so we don’t mind. We’re guaranteed to have the correct version of each playground page generated every 24 hours.
At each step of the process, we take snapshots of the state of our data. Before running our update process, we time-stamp and copy the JSON file of updates from the previous day. We also time-stamp and copy the SQLite database file and push it up to S3 for safekeeping.
Maintaining a crowdsourced web site requires a little work. We fix spelling and location errors, remove duplicates, and delete playgrounds that were added but aren’t accessible.
Typically, you’d run an admin site for your maintenance tasks, but we decided that our editors use the public-facing site just like our readers. That said, our editors still need a way to check the updates our users are making.
Since we only process updates once every 24 hours, we decided to just send an email. For additions, we link the playground URL in the email so that editors could click through. For updates, we list the changes. And for delete requests, we include a link that, when clicked, confirms a deletion and instructs the site to process the delete during the next day’s cron.
Flat files are awesome, but without a web server, how do you search?
To solve this, we use Amazon’s CloudSearch. Eventually, we’ll probably implement a way to find playgrounds with certain features or to search by name. But right now, we’re using it just for geographic search, e.g., finding playgrounds near a point.
To implement geographic search in CloudSearch you need to use rank expressions, bits of JavaScript that apply an order to the results. CloudSearch allows you to specify a rank expression as a parameter to the search URL. That’s right: Our search URLs include a string that contains instructions for CloudSearch to order the results. Amazon has documentation on how to use this to implement simple “great circle” math. We took it a step further and implemented spherical law of cosines because it is a more accurate algorithm for determining distance between points on a sphere.
You can see the source code where we build our search querystrings in the playgrounds repository, but you should take note of a few further caveats.
CloudSearch only supports unsigned integers, so we have to add the 180 degrees (because latitudes and longitudes can be negative numbers) and also multiply the coordinates by 10,000 (because an unsigned integer can’t have a decimal point) to get five decimal points of precision. Finally, we have to reverse this process within our rank expression before converting the coordinates to radians to calculate distance.
Also, a single CloudSearch instance is not very stable when running high-CPU queries like geographic searches. During load testing we saw a large number of HTTP 507 errors, indicating that the search service was overloaded. Unfortunately, 5xx errors and JSONP don’t mix. To solve this, we catch 507 errors in Nginx and instead return a HTTP 202 with a custom JSON error document. The 202 response allowed us to read the JSON in the response and then retry the search if it failed. We retry up to three times, though in practice we observed that almost every failed request would return a proper result after only a single fail/retry.
Finally, while Amazon would auto-scale our CloudSearch instances to match demand, we couldn’t find any published material explaining how often Amazon would spin up new servers or how many would initialize at once. So, we reached out to Amazon. They were able to set our CloudSearch domain to always have at least two servers at all times. With the extra firepower and our retry solution, on launch day we had no problems at all.
You might notice we’re doing all of our CloudSearch interaction on the client. But the CloudSearch API doesn’t support JSONP natively. So we need to proxy the responses with Nginx.
We could have modified the headers coming back from our CloudSearch to support Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, aka CORS. CORS works when your response contains a header like Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, which would instruct a Web browser to trust responses from any origin.
However, while CORS has support in many modern browsers, it fails in older versions of Android and iOS Safari, as well as having inconsistent support in IE8 and IE9. JSONP just matched our needs more closely than CORS did.
Once we settled on JSONP, we knew we would need to rewrite the response to wrap it in a function. Initially, we specified a static callback name in jQuery and hard-coded it into our Nginx configuration.
This pattern worked great until we needed to get search results twice on the same page load. In that case, we returned a function with new data but with the same function name as the previous AJAX call. The result? We didn’t see any updated data. We needed a dynamic callback where the function that wraps your JSON was unique for each request. jQuery will do this automatically.
Now we needed our Nginx configuration to sniff the callback out of the URL and then wrap it around the response. And while this might be easy using some nonstandard Nginx libraries like OpenResty, we didn’t have the option to recompile our Nginx on the fly without possibly disturbing existing running projects.
One other hassle: Amazon’s CloudSearch would return a 403 if we included a callback param in the URL. Adding insult to injury, we’d need to strip this parameter from the URL before proxying it to Amazon’s servers.
Thankfully, Nginx’s location pattern-matcher allowed us to use regular expressions with multiple capture groups. Here’s the final Nginx configuration we used to both capture and strip the callback from the proxy URL.
Another thing you might notice: We had to specify a DNS server in the Nginx configuration so that we could resolve the domain name for the Amazon CloudSearch servers. Nginx’s proxy_pass is meant to work with routable IP addresses, not fully-qualified domain names. Adding a resolver directive meant that Nginx could look up the DNS name for our CloudSearch server instead of forcing us to hard-code an IP address that might change in the future.
Static sites with asynchronous architectures stay up under great load, cost very little to deploy, and have low maintenance burden.
We really like doing things this way. If you’re feeling inspired, complete instructions for getting this code up and running on your machine are available on our GitHub page. Don’t hesitate to send us a note with any questions.
Happy hacking!
Updated February 9, 2015
Hi, Livia Labate here, Knight-Mozilla Fellow working with the Visuals team. These great instructions have been verified for OS X Yosemite and a few tips and clarifications added throughout.
Updated June 12, 2014.
Hey everyone, I’m Tyler Fisher, the Winter/Spring 2014 news apps intern. Today, I setup my work machine with OS X Mavericks and found some new wrinkles in the process, so I thought I would update this blog post to reflect the latest changes. Shelly Tan and Helga Salinas also contributed to this post.
I joined the News Apps team a week ago in their shiny new DC offices, and in-between eating awesome food and Tiny Desk concerts, we’ve been documenting the best way to get other journalists setup to build news apps like the pros.
The following steps will help you convert your laptop to hacktop, assuming you’re working on a new Mac with OS X 10.9, or Mavericks, installed. Each Mac operating system is a little different, so we’re starting from scratch with the latest OS.
We’ll be installing a number of programs from the command line in this tutorial, so that means you must have administrative privileges. If you’re not an admin, talk with your friendly IT Department.
Click on the Apple menu > System Preferences > Users & Groups and check your status against this handy screenshot.
Go to the App Store and go to the updates tab. If there are system updates, install and reboot until there is nothing left to update.
With the release of OS X 10.9, Apple decoupled its command line tools necessary for compiling some of the tools we use from Xcode, Apple’s proprietary development suite.
All Macs come with an app called “Terminal.” You can find it under Applications > Utilities. Double click to open that bad boy up, and run this command:
xcode-select --install
Your laptop should prompt you to install the command line tools. Install the tools and move on once that process has completed (about 5 minutes).
If it doesn’t install, or there isn’t an update for Xcode to install the tools, you’ll have to download the command line tools from developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action. You have to register, or you can log in with your Apple ID.
Search for “command line tools,” and download the package appropriate to your version of OS X. Double click on the .dmg file in your downloads file, and proceed to install. In my case, I downloaded Command Line Tools (OS X Mavericks), which is highlighted in the screenshot above.
Homebrew is like the Mac app store for programming tools. You can access Homebrew via the terminal, (like all good things). Inspiration for this section comes from Kenneth Reitz’s excellent Python guide.
Install Homebrew by pasting this command into your terminal and then hitting “enter.”
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
It will ask for your password, so type that in and hit “enter” again. Now, paste this line to test Homebrew.
brew doctor
This will test your Homebrew setup, and any tools you’ve installed to make sure they’re working properly. If they are, Homebrew tell you
Your system is ready to brew.
If anything isn’t working properly, follow their instructions to get things working correctly.
Note: If there are two lines inside any of the code blocks in this article, paste them separately and hit enter after each of them.
Next you’ll need to go in and edit ~/.bash_profile to ensures you can use what you’ve just downloaded. bash_profile acts like a configuration file for your terminal.
Note: There are many editors available on your computer. You can use a pretty graphical editor like SublimeText2 or you can use one built-in to your terminal, like vim or nano. We’ll be using nano for this tutorial just to keep things simple.
Open your bash_profile with the following command.
nano ~/.bash_profile
Then copy and paste this line of code at the very top. This lets Homebrew handle updating and maintaining the code we’ll be installing.
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
Once you’ve added the line of code, you can save the file by typing control + O. Doing so lets you adjust the file name. Just leave it as is, then hit enter to save. Hit control + X to exit. You’ll find yourself back at the command line and needing to update your terminal session like so. Copy and paste the next line of code into your terminal and hit enter.
source ~/.bash_profile
You’ll only need to source the bash_profile since we’re editing the file right now. It’s the equivalent of quitting your terminal application and opening it up again, but source lets you soldier forward and setup Python.
Virtualenv isolates each of your Python projects in their own little sandboxes, keeping your installed software neat and tidy. Your Mac comes pre-packaged with the most stable version of Python, but you’ll need to tell your bash_profile to use it first. Edit the file again with nano and add this line:
export PATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages:$PATH
Update your session again
source ~/.bash_profile
Next, you’ll need to install pip. Like Homebrew, it’s sort of an app store but for Python code.
sudo easy_install pip
We use sudo to install this software for everyone who might use your computer. sudo lets you install things as the admin. You will be prompted for your password.
Next, we’ll actually install virtualenv.
sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
Note: virtualenv is the actual environment that you’ll be using, while virtualwrapper helps you access the environment and its variables from your PATH.
Edit your ~/.bash_profile file again,
nano ~/.bash_profile
and add this line below the line you just added:
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper_lazy.sh
Save and exit out of nano using control + O, enter, and then control + X.
Sanity Check: Double check your ~/.bash_profile file, and make sure you’ve properly saved your PATH variables.
less ~/.bash_profile
It should look like this:
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
export PATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages:$PATH
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper_lazy.sh
To exit less, press “Q”.
Finally, we’ll install a tool called LESS that we use to write CSS, the language that styles websites. LESS is a built with Node, so we’ll need to install that and NPM, Node’s version of pip or Homebrew.
Install Node using Homebrew.
brew install node
Then, add Node to your ~/.bash_profile like you did for Homebrew and virtualwrapper. Copy and paste the following line below the previous two.
export NODE_PATH=/usr/local/lib/node_modules
Save and exit out of nano using control + O, enter, and then control + X. Then type source ~/.bash_profile one more time to update your session. After that, you can treat yourself to a cup of coffee because you now have the basic tools for working like the NPR news apps team. Next up we’ll be getting into the nitty gritty of working with the template, including things like GitHub and Amazon Web Services.
Github has written a great guide for setting up SSH authentication for Github. You will want to do this so Github knows about your computer and will allow you to push to repositories you have access to.
Read that tutorial here. Do not download the native app. Start at “Step 1: Check for SSH keys”.
We occasionally make maps and analyze geographic information, so that requires some specialized tools. This appendix will show you how to install the Postgres database server and the PostGIS geography stack — which includes several pieces of software for reading and manipulating geographic data. We’ll explain these tools a bit more as we install them.
First, we need to install a Python library called NumPy. We don’t use NumPy directly, but PostGIS uses it for making geographic calculations. This may already be installed, but run this command just to double-check. You will be prompted for your password.
sudo pip install numpy
Next up: the Postgres database server. Postgres is a useful tool for dealing with all kinds of data, not just geography, so we’ll get it setup first then tweak it to be able to interpret geographic data. Postgres will take about 10 minutes to install.
brew install postgresql
Edit your ~/.bash_profile to add a pair of commands for starting and stopping your Postgres database server. pgup will start the server; pgdown will stop it. FYI You’ll rarely ever need to pgdown, but we’ve include the command just in case.
nano -w ~/.bash_profile
Add these two lines:
alias pgdown='pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres stop -s -m fast'
alias pgup='pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start'
Save and exit out of nano using control + O, enter, and then control + X, and update your session one more time,
source ~/.bash_profile
and let’s initialize your Postgres server. We only need to do this once after installing it.
initdb /usr/local/var/postgres/ -E utf-8
Finally, let’s start up the Postgres server.
pgup
These deceptively simple commands will install an awful lot of software. It’s going to take some time, and your laptop fans will probably sound like a fighter jet taking off. Don’t worry; it can take the heat.
brew install gdal --with-postgresql
Still hanging in there?
brew install postgis
Now you can create your first geographically-enabled database. For more information on how to do that postgis tells you how to do this.
Since you’re going to be working from the command line a lot, it’s worth investing time to make your terminal something that’s a little more easy on the eyes.
Download iTerm2. The built-in terminal application which comes with your Mac is fine, but iTerm2 is slicker and more configurable. One of the better features is splitting your terminal into different horizontal and vertical panes: one for an active pane, another for any files you might want to have open, and a third for a local server.
Solarized is a set of nice, readable colors. Unzip the solarized.zip file.
Now, inside iTerm2 go to iTerm > Preferences > Profiles and select “Default.” Choose “Colors” and find the “Load Presets…” button at the bottom of the window. Select “Import” and navigate to solarized/iterm2-colors-solarized/ and double-click on Solarized Dark.itermcolors. After it’s been imported, you can find “Solarized Dark” on the “Load Presets” list. Click and select “Solarized Dark” to change the colors appropriately.
See? Much nicer.
Since your code is stored entirely as text files on your computer, you’ll want a nice text editor. Our instructions showed you how to use nano, a text editor that you’ll find on almost every computer. However, there are at least two others that the team uses. Text editors are like the Microsoft Word of the programming world, except they come packed with all kinds of handy dandy features to make writing code a cinch.
If you’re more comfortable with an editor that you can open up like Word, Sublime Text 2 has a sweet graphical user interface and some nice customizations available. You’ll likely want to learn some keyboard shortcuts to make yourself more efficient. You can also prettify it with the Flatland theme.
Note: In recent versions, installing Package Control (necessary for many customizations) assumes you have purchased Sublime Text, so consider getting a license first. Additionally, speed up your use by making Sublime Text your default editor from the command line. Here’s how. And another way.
Personally, I prefer vim — a terminal based editor that requires you to type rather than point-and-click to work on files. It comes pre-installed on your computer, but there’s a lot of little keyboard shortcuts you’ll need to get comfy with before you can just dive-in. You can add all kinds of features, but our teammate Chris recommends nerdtree and surround. Here are some videos to help make vim and those particular add-ons.
Note: In your terminal, type in vim to begin using the editor. Here’s a resource to become more acquainted with vim: Vim Tips Wiki.
And with that you now have a sweet hackintosh. Happy hacking, and if you haven’t setup a Github account, you can try out your new tools and play with some of our code. Github provides a thorough walkthrough to get you setup and working on some open sourced projects.
For NPR’s ongoing series “The Changing Lives of Women”, we wanted to ask women to share advice gleaned from their experience in the workforce. We’ve done a few user-generated content projects using Tumblr as a backend, most notably Cook Your Cupboard, so we knew we wanted to reuse that infrastructure. Tumblr provides a very natural format for displaying images as well as baked in tools for sharing and content management. For Cook your Cupboard we had users submit photos, but for this project we couldn’t think of a photo to ask our users to take that would say something meaningful about their workplace experience. So, with the help of our friends at Morning Edition, we arrived at the idea of a sign generator and our question:
“What’s your note to self – a piece of advice that’s helped you at work?”
With that in mind we sketched up a user interface that gave users some ability to customize their submission—font, color, etc—but also guaranteed us a certain amount of visual and thematic consistency.
The traditional way of generating images in the browser is to use Flash, which is what sites like quickmeme do. We certainly weren’t going to do that. All of our apps must work across all major browsers and on mobile devices. My initial instinct said we could solve this problem with the HTML5 Canvas element. Some folks already use Canvas for resizing images on mobile devices before uploading them, so it seemed like a natural fit. However, in addition to saving the images to Tumblr, we also wanted to generate a very high-resolution version for printing. Generating this on the client would have made for large file sizes at upload time—a deal-breaker for mobile devices. Scaling it up on the server would have lead to poor quality for printing.
After some deliberation I fell upon the idea of using Raphaël.js to generate SVG in the browser. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, an image format typically used for icons, logos and other graphics that need to be rendered at a variety of sizes. SVG, like HTML, is based on XML and in modern browsers you can embed SVG content directly into your HTML. This also means that you can use standard DOM manipulation tools to modify SVG elements directly in the browser. (And also style them dynamically, as you can see in our recent Arrested Development visualization.)
The first prototype of this strategy came together remarkably quickly. The user selects text, colors and ornamentation. These are rendered as SVG elements directly into the page DOM. Upon hitting submit, we grab the text of the SVG using jQuery’s html method and then assign to a hidden input in the form:
The SVG graphic is sent to the server as text via the hidden form field. We’ve already been running servers for our Tumblr projects to construct the post content and add tags before submitting to Tumblr, so we didn’t have to create any new infrastructure for this. (Tumblr also provides a form for having users submit directly, which we are not using for a variety of reasons.) You can see our boilerplate for building projects with Tumblr on the init-tumblr branch of our app-template.
Once the SVG text is on the server we save it to a file and use cairosvg to cut a PNG, which we then POST to Tumblr. Tumblr returns a URL to the new “blog post”, which we then send to the user as a 301 redirect. To the user it appears as though they posted their image directly to Tumblr.
Text was probably the hardest thing to get right. Because each browser renders text in a different way we found that our resulting images were inconsistent and often ugly. Worse yet, because our server-side, Cairo-based renderer was also different, we couldn’t guarantee the text layout a user saw on their screen would match that of the final image once we’d converted it to a PNG.
Here is the same text (Quicksand 400), rendered in Chrome on the left and IE9 on the right:
Researching a solution for this led me to discover Cufon fonts, a JSON format for representing fonts as SVG paths (technically VML paths, but that doesn’t matter). There is a Cufon Javascript library for using these fonts directly, however, there are also built-in hooks for using them Raphaël. (For those who care: they get loaded up via a “magic” callback name.) These resulting fonts are ideal for us, because the paths are already set and thus look the same in every browser and when rendered on the server. It’s a beautiful thing:
We found that the various SVG implementations we had to work with (Webkit, IE, Cairo) had different interpretations of width, height and viewBox parameters of the SVG. We ended up using a fixed size for viewBox (2048x2048) and rendering everything in that coordinate reference system. The width and height we scaled with our responsive viewport. On the server width and height were stripped before the SVG was sent to cairosvg, causing it to render the resulting PNGs at viewBox size. See the next section for the code that cleans up the SVG on the server.
A similar issue happened with IE9, which for no apparent reason was duplicating the XML namespace attribute of the SVG, xmlns. This caused cairosvg to bomb, so we had to strip it.
Unfortunately, no amount of clever rewriting was ever going to make this work in IE8, which does not support SVG. Note that Raphaël does support IE8, by rendering VML instead of SVG, however, we have no way to get the XML text of the VML from the browser. (And even if we could we would then have to figure out how to convert the VML to a PNG in a way that precisely matched the output from our SVG process.)
Here is the code we use to normalize the SVGs before passing them to cairosvg:
One final thing we did for this project that is worth mentioning is building out a lightweight system for defining the ornaments you that can be selected as decoration for your quote. Although there is nothing technically challenging about this (it’s a grid of squares), it was awfully fun code to write:
And it gave us a chance to use good-old-fashioned bitmaps for the configuration:
You can see the full ornament definitions in this gist.
By using SVG to generate images we were able to produce user-generated images suitable for printing at large size in a cross-platform and mobile-friendly way. It also provided us an opportunity to be playful and explore some interesting new image composition techniques. This “sign generator” approach seems to have resonated with users and resulted in over 1,100 submissions!
Why aren’t we flying? Because getting there is half the fun. You know that. (Visuals en route to NICAR 2013.)
Hey!
Are you a student?
Do you design? Develop? Love the web?
…or…
Do you make pictures? Want to learn to be a great photo editor?
If so, we’d very much like to hear from you. You’ll spend the summer working on the visuals team here at NPR’s headquarters in Washington, DC. We’re a small group of photographers, videographers, photo editors, developers, designers and reporters in the NPR newsroom who work on visual stuff for npr.org. Our work varies widely, check it out here.
Our photo editing intern will work with our digital news team to edit photos for npr.org. It’ll be awesome. There will also be opportunities to research and pitch original work.
Please…
Are you awesome? Apply now!
Our news apps intern will be working as a designer or developer on projects and daily graphics for npr.org. It’ll be awesome.
Please…
Are you awesome? Apply now!
Our app on a shiny iPad: Inauguration 2013.
I’ve been on the NPR apps team for a little over a month now. I’ll be real – it’s been pretty dope.
We launched a slideshow showcasing the family photos of Justice Sotomayor, an inauguration app using Tumblr, and we just wrapped up our State of the Union live coverage.
And we did it all in the open.
But the thing that really blew my mind is this: We’re only running two servers. These two servers let us build news applications that never go down and cost very little (here’s looking at you, S3). Exhibit A: NPR’s elections site only required a single server for running cron jobs — and was rock solid throughout election night. Even in 8-bit mode.
Developing in the newsroom is fast-paced and comes with a different set of priorities than when you’re coding for a technology product team. There are three salient Boyerisms I’ve picked up in my month as an NP-Rapper that sum up these differences:
Servers are for chumps. Newsrooms aren’t exactly making it rain. Cost-effectiveness is key. Servers are expensive and maintaining servers means less time to make the internets. Boo and boo. (We’re currently running only one production server, an EC2 small instance for running scheduled jobs. It does not serve web content.)
If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work. Most of our work averages 10 to 20 percent mobile traffic. But for our elections app, 50 percent of users visited our Big Board on their phone. (And it wasn’t even responsive!) Moral of the stats: A good mobile experience is absolutely necessary.
Build for use. Refactor for reuse. This one has been the biggest transition for me. When we’re developing on deadline, there are certain sacrifices we have to make to roll our app out time – news doesn’t wait. Yet as a programmer, it causes me tension and anxiety to ignore code smells in the shitty JavaScript I write because I know that’s technical debt we’ll have to pay back later.
On our team, these Boyerisms aren’t just preached — they’re practiced and implemented in code.
Cue our team’s app template.
drumroll …
It’s an opinionated template for building client-side apps, lovingly maintained by Chris, which provides a skeleton for bootstrapping projects that can be served entirely from flat files.
Briefly, it ships with:
For a more detailed rundown of the structure, check out the README.
There’s a lot of work that went into this app template and a fair amount of discipline after each project we do to continue to maintain it. With every project we learn something new, so we backport these things accordingly to ensure our app template is in tip-top shape and ready to go for the next project.
Here’s a rundown of how we chose the right tools for the job and why.
We run a Flask app to simplify local development and is the crucial part of our template.
app.py is rigged to provide a development workflow that minimizes the pains between local development and deployment. It lets us:
templates.jsapp_config.py into app_config.js so our application configuration is also available in JavaScriptThat last point is worth elaborating on. We store our application configuration in app_config.py. We use environment variables to set our deployment targets. This allows app_config.py to detect if we’re running in staging or production and changes config values appropriately. For both local dev and deployed projects, we automatically compile app_config.js to have our same application configuration available on the client side. Consistent configuration without repetition — it’s DRY!
Our homegrown app template asset pipeline is quite nifty. As noted above, we write styles in LESS and keep our JS in separate files when developing locally. When we deploy, we push all our CSS into one file and all of our JS into a single file. We then gzip all of these assets for production (we only gzip, not minify, to avoid obfuscation).
Chris wrote some dope “pseudo-template tags” for Jinja that allow us to automatically serve original files locally or compress them when we deploy.
<!-- CSS -->
{{ CSS.push('css/bootstrap.css') }}
{{ CSS.push('css/bootstrap-responsive.css') }}
{{ CSS.push('less/app.less') }}
{{ CSS.render('css/app.min.css') }}
<!-- JS -->
{{ JS.push('js/app_config.js') }}
{{ JS.push('js/console.js') }}
{{ JS.push('js/lib/jquery-1.8.3.js') }}
{{ JS.push('js/lib/modernizr.js') }}
{{ JS.push('js/responsive-ad.js') }}
{{ JS.render('js/app-header.min.js') }}
You can see these in action in base.html.
The push and render are defined in render_utils.py.
So what does this actually mean? Our asset pipeline works like this:
We push all our CSS and JS into single files to make our apps mobile-friendly. This translates to fewer browser requests and a faster page load time. Of course, this helps with desktop performance as well, but you really feel the snappiness on your phone.
We use Bootstrap as our base layer of CSS. Why? Because of reasons.
Let’s elaborate on that last point. Having Bootstrap on the page is a giant CSS reset (plus plus). Our browser testing process becomes much simpler, way less painful, and there’s almost no crying.
As a n00b on the apps team, using the Bootstrap as a foundation gives me reasonable peace of mind that the hacky JavaScript event bindings and functions I write will work across browsers.
fab ties our template together. We’ve got environment-configuration functions, template functions, deployment functions and supermerge functions (stay tuned!) all covered.
We use Fabric to manage our setup and configuration, both locally and when we deploy. fabfile.py pulls its config from app_config.py. The cool thing I learned about Fabric in my first week here was its ability to chain commands together.
Here’s the command that deploys our master branch to production:
$ fab production master deploy
This will automatically render files with the correct configuration for prod, gzips our assets, and then pushes files out to S3.
Get our code here. It’s got a shiny MIT license so take ‘er for a spin! If you are so inclined, try deploying a small little test app. All you’ll need is S3 and a small EC2 instance (only if you want crons). Our template is always a work in progress and we’d love to hear your feedback.
Nerd aside: ICYW, our servers are running vanilla Ubuntu. We are planning to document our server configuration, but we haven’t had the time to do so yet.
Happy hacking!
NOTE: We published an updated explanation of our app template. Read about all the cool new stuff it does here.
Hi, my name is Richard and I'm a technologist working in the BBC Blue Room.
It's my job to highlight immediate consumer technology trends and game changing media consumption devices and to bring them to the attention of our editorial, technical and management teams.
In the Blue Room we often find the strongest way to convey the importance and impact of new electronic equipment and content services is to put them in the hands of our colleagues and allow them to discover the potential for themselves.
Ultra High Definition TV screens at The International Consumer Electronics Show 2013
The Blue Room is our den of devices where colleagues can touch, test and trial new consumer cameras, emerging displays, fresh forms of digital content and connected experiences across mobile, tablet, PC and televisions.
One of the biggest events in the technology calendar is the International Consumer Electronics Show. It features 20,000 product launches, more than 150,000 attendees and over 3,250 exhibitors.
With the exception of Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft nearly every technology company from start-up to the multi-billion dollar global brand have a presence in Las Vegas in January.
My fellow Blue Roomer, Lindsey Suter and I were there too.
Attending the CES show served three core knowledge gaining purposes for the Blue Room. It allows us to select interesting and exciting products to showcase, make contact with developers and engineers who make them and to pick-up on overarching themes and trends that show provides.
Smart utensils, bizarre iAccessories,' booth babes' and Ultra High Definition TV made headlines.
We'd like share some of our findings about the next generation of televisions and the potential for new content with you so we've produced our Little Blue Book from CES (Link to PDF).
If you have any comments or would like to suggest any exciting consumer technology products that you think the BBC should be across please use the comments section below or tweet us @BBCBlueRoom.
Richard Robbins is a senior technologist at the BBC.
We're busy on the Red Button this week preparing to host a maelstrom of great music for your viewing pleasure. It's an eclectic offering - from stadium rockers Bon Jovi to Asian Network collaboration with the BBC Philharmonic to the very best of Northern Ireland's music scene. Add to this insider exclusives from eccentric new comedy Blandings and firm favourite Miranda and we hope you'll agree it's a great week to stay on red!
Here's a look at what's in store - and if you want to stay updated throughout the week, why not follow us on Twitter or visit our Red Button page.
Bon Jovi play live for BBC Radio 2
Bon Jovi fans listen up - we've got a real treat in store this week as we bring you the band in concert from the intimate BBC Radio Theatre. Watch on your Red Button as they play some of their stadium-filling hits as well as an early taster of their new material.
Thu 24 Jan, 8pm-9.30pm
Fri 25 Jan, 9am-10am
Fri 25 Jan, 7pm-6am
Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody will perform at the Sons and Daughters concert
Girls Aloud's Nadine Coyle, Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody and The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon perform in the opening concert for the Derry-Londonderry City of Culture 2013. Press your red button for the concert featuring 'sons and daughters' from stage and screen reflecting on the city's cultural achievements through music, word and song.
Sun 20 Jan, 7.55pm-11pm
The characters from Blandings - take a tour inside the castle
Want to take a closer look at the castle and characters in BBC One's new Sunday-night comedy? Join us as Beach gives a guided tour of Blandings Castle and its ancestral history - watch out for encounters with some of the present residents including the Empress of Blandings, Lord Emsworth's prize sow.
Sun 20 Jan, 6.55pm-7.55pm
Sun 20 Jan, 11pm-12am
Mon 21 Jan, 11.30pm-12.30am
Get closer to Miranda with this sneak peek into Monday's episode plus it's your chance to hear the cast share some exclusive backstage gossip.
Mon 21 Jan, 8.25pm-9pm
The BBC Philharmonic and Asian Network collaborate for the first time to celebrate the life and songs of iconic Pakistani singer Noor Jehan and other legendary divas. Join us as international artists like Shazia Manzoor and Quratulain Balouch perform alongside the orchestra, conducted by David Heath.
Mon 21 Jan, 6am-10am; 12pm-8.25pm; 9pm-11.30pm
Tue 22 Jan, 12.30am-7am; 9am-10am; 12pm-6am
Wed 23 Jan, 6am-7am; 9am-10am; 12pm-9.55pm
Thu 24 Jan, 4am-7am; 9am-10am; 9.30pm-6am
Fri 25 Jan, 6am-7am
Dale Winton's In It To Win It, the game show where people use their general knowledge to win a big-money jackpot, is back. Think you can do better than the studio contestants? Every Saturday press the Red Button during the show to pit your wits against our studio contestants.
Only available on Sky/Freeview:
Sat 19 Jan, 8pm-8.50pm
Catch up on all the latest Sport here on the Red Button.
Highlights this week include:For the latest information refer to the BBC Sport website.
**Note all Red Button times are subject to change at short notice
A final reminder about your chance to tell us your views on BBC Online and Red Button services before the review finishes on 23 January.
The BBC Trust carries out an in-depth review of each of the BBC's services at least once every five years. This time the Trust is looking at BBC Online and BBC Red Button Services.
The Trust wants your views and suggestions on these services and how they can be improved. There is also space in the consultation to raise any other points not covered by our questions. The consultation closes this Wednesday.
To find out more about the consultation and how to take part, visit the BBC Trust site: BBC Online and BBC Red Button Service Review
If you would like a paper version sent to you, email onlineandredbutton@bbc.co.uk or call 0800 0680 116.
To request the questions in audio or braille please call 0800 0680 116 or textphone 0800 0153 350.
Large print is also available to download via the BBC Trust site: BBC Online and BBC Red Button Service Review
CBeebies Red Button welcomes younger viewers and grown-ups with a sense of adventure to the big, bright and fun world of CBeebies interactive!
Your children's favourite characters are at the heart of the interactive TV experience. Satellite and digital terrestrial viewers will have slightly different offerings from one another. This has enabled the Red Button team to offer the best games tailored to each system.
CBeebies Red Button is available on the CBeebies channel.
Visit the CBeebies website to find out more.
Available on Freeview and Sky only
I'm Richard Smith and I look after feedback and public accountability for BBC Online (including managing the small team who produce this blog and plan and deliver our BBC Online Industry Briefings.)
Part of my role involves working with BBC commissioners and external suppliers to facilitate the working relationship between BBC Online and the UK's digital industry, whether these are big players or start-ups.
BBC Online is subject to a quota which ensures that we spend at least 25% of our eligible budget with external suppliers, with the aim of creating the highest quality service and the best possible value for money.
In 2011 the BBC Trust asked us to report back with answers to six key questions relating to what our quota aims to achieve and how we work with the digital industry.
Today we're publishing our response. These findings and our recommendations are based on research carried out on our behalf by independent analysts MTM London, and today we are also publishing their final report (with some redactions where required for commercial confidentiality).
I'm pleased to say that the Trust have accepted our findings and recommendations. As a result we will be retaining the existing supply arrangements for at least two more years.
They've also asked to us to look at ways we can make further improvements in how we commission and work with external suppliers and to regularly review and report performance against our stated objectives.
Later this year we'll be publishing our 2012/13 Out-turn report for BBC Online which will have further details about how we have fulfilled the quota this year. (Out-turn reports for previous years are available on our Commissioning web site)
If you are a digital business who work with BBC Online and have any questions about the reports I'm happy to try and answer any queries - so please do leave a comment.
Richard Smith is head of public accountability, BBC Online and Red Button.
Executive Response to the Trust Review of Online Supply 2012/13
Recently I had the pleasure of working on US Elections on the BBC News site, a subject I'm especially passionate about as an American living in London.
My team produces a huge range of infographics that accompany our daily online news stories and we also do the UX design for larger stories such as this.
Four years ago I followed the elections closely on the BBC and getting the chance to design for them this time around has been incredible.
US Elections on mobile
A lot of people worked very hard on this project but the team's greatest achievement (though there are many I'm proud of) has to be our mobile design success.
The design brief for the 'news story that brings the web to its knees'
The design challenge was to create an engaging and informative experience for the US Election results that would work across all mobile, tablet and desktop platforms and be consistent with TV.
The main focus of this was showing national and state-by-state presidential and congressional votes in an easy to understand yet visually exciting way.
US Elections has been described as "the news story that brings the web to its knees". It's a big worldwide story that only happens once every four years which means technology has moved on sufficiently enough that the last version can't just be dusted off and reused.
For this election there was no question that we had to create a great experience on our mobile site.
From the beginning of the creative process mobile was on the agenda and by presenting mobile designs at every team catch up we were able to make sure it never became an afterthought.
Designing mobile first is hugely beneficial, not just because it means there will be a mobile solution but also because it means the content has to have a clear hierarchy and progressively enhance.
Designing responsive mobile results pages
This approach not only fits into the development (as the screen enlarges more content is added thus the smallest devices get the lightest pages) but it also fits into people's mental models.
People expect a streamlined view on the mobile which is often relying on a data connection, with a more in-depth solution on their desktops which have greater screen real estate and usually a better connection.
The page that required the most design effort was the results page. There was a long list of requirements from detailed state results to congressional overviews.
I started by creating a post-it note board of everything the page must, should and could do and then began wireframing the modules.
Helene wireframes the results page
We initially experimented with versions of the results page that didn't have a map but we found it was a reference people were so accustomed to that we couldn't drop it.
The map is tricky because the size of a state often is not representative of how many votes it has. Montana is massive yet only has three votes so a map can be dominated by a party colour when actually the opponent won.
I decided to introduce a bar to the top of the page to give a more accurate snapshot of the election score.
As we moved forward we realized we wanted US Elections to have a singular home.
Previously the index, results and live updates page have all been separate pages. By tabbing all the content under the 'scoreboard' banner we were able to ensure users wouldn't miss all that was on offer, or they could choose to quickly check the latest tally if they just wanted an overview.
This score snapshot above in-depth tabs was especially effective on mobile.
State icons
I also wanted to give the site a bit of character so along with designer Nina Monet we gave each and every state an icon. These were things that the state was famous for and although only a small detail on the page it was fun to read people's tweets about them. [N.B links to external site with strong language]
Taking the designs worldwide
As this story is of interest worldwide we worked closely with World Service. Designers Nour Saab and Charlotte Thornton adapted our designs for over 20 languages.
World Service face difficult challenges. For example words in Russian are often much longer and don't fit the spacing allocated for the English words and Arabic reads right to left so the whole page has to be flipped.
Charlotte spent many days sitting with the developer - the ideal way to work I believe - making sure the design and development were aligned.
The results page in Arabic
Final thoughts
The benefit of this project was that regardless of the user's device or language there was a consistent US Elections home with a 'scoreboard' overview above the tabbed index, results and live page.
Although not fully responsive it's close. The mobile site has a clear relationship with the desktop. We had 16 million unique visitors to the site of which 30% were on mobile proving our mobile first approach was worthwhile.
This project had the support of the Visual Journalism team and I'd like to send a big thank you to everyone who helped make it a reality. It would be great to hear what you thought of the site.
Helene Sears is the editorial designer for UX&D.
Hi I'm Andy Pipes, executive product manager for Knowledge & Learning at the BBC.
Knowledge and Learning (K&L) is a new product in the BBC Online portfolio.
When complete, it will exist as a standalone property while also connecting related content across the other nine BBC products. It will pull together over 100 existing BBC websites from Bitesize to Food to Science to History and bring them into a single, consistent user experience.
The vision is to channel inspiration from across the BBC and the world around us to spark our audience's natural curiosity and establish a positive relationship with learning.
Learning journeys based on the Thames Barrier
The new product is making a promise that is firmly rooted in the BBC's mission to Inform, Educate and Entertain. To meet this promise requires moving from the current portfolio of individual web sites to a single product with a central production system and innovative new content formats.
The content currently produced by the editorial team in K&L ranges from formal learning formats (revision guides for students, guides for adult learners, and BBC programme clips to be used by teachers in classrooms) to topical features around arts, food, science, history and health.
We are now in the process of redefining the way that our audiences consume that educational and factual content. We believe that technology combined with storytelling broadens horizons for our audience. We hope the new product will satisfy our audience's appetite for topical content in an experience that is optimised for learning.
Below are some of the challenges that the team faces in building its longer-term vision, and some scenarios and themes that those attending our Connected Studio could help us explore.
If you've got an idea you'd like to pitch at the Creative Studio for K&L taking place on the 21st of February, apply via the Connected Studio website.
Key opportunities: audience and product
The Knowledge & Learning audience is large, diverse and ever-changing. We cater for school-aged children revising for their exams, empty nesters seeking more information about the birds in their hedgerows and almost everyone in between.
But one constant is that our audiences are all in some way open to learning. Finding ever more inventive ways to pique our audience's natural curiosity is the K&L product's principal challenge.
At this stage in development we're searching for innovative content formats, tools and user experiences. The challenges we have set out here provide a chance to contribute to fundamental elements of the future K&L product.
1. A K&L interactive video player
We have content around a large range of topics, places, people, events and fields of study. We now have the technology (as seen in the Olympics) to combine video and data to deliver statistical overlays, chapterised content and social elements to the video experience.
How should we design a player for people to consume our video content in the way that best sparks their curiosity and allows them to follow where it leads them?
We need to cater for a range of needs, from searching for a specific answer to allowing people to follow interesting links and relationships between topics.
How could this player offer a unique learning experience that is as immersive as it is useful? This is different to a second-screen experience - what we want to explore are ways to deliver a more immersive first-screen experience.
Content based on topical news stories
2. Doing, not just viewing
People learn better by doing and we would like the K&L product to include an opportunity for playful "practice" - activities designed to reinforce learning without feeling onerous.
How do we bring a level of interaction to our audiences that would mean their experience is more enjoyable, their learning is better absorbed and their curiosity is better sparked in order to continue learning more?
An interactive guide format with modular and 'stackable' content forms the building blocks of the new K&L Product. Each piece we create will be a single unit, the smallest unit of knowledge appropriate for a single step in a learning journey. Each unit will be consumed or completed in three to four minutes, is viewable on any device and is heavily wrapped in metadata so that it can easily be connected to any other unit of knowledge content.
We don't have the time or resource to 'reinvent the wheel' for each guide so it's important these interactive elements are designed to scale across the broad range of K&L topics and audiences. How can we create reusable patterns of interactivity to reduce the time it takes us to create activities?
3. Connecting the TV experience with K&L
A large proportion of our audience watch or listen to factual content without benefiting from the wealth of related content online. We know our audience are open to learning but don't want to be distracted from the content they are already enjoying.
How might people signal to us that they are interested in learning more during a broadcast of TV or radio content? How do we help them follow their curiosity without interrupting the original content?
4. Connecting the real world with Knowledge & Learning
More and more, people expect to see what they do in the real world reflected in their online world and vice versa.
How can our audiences easily track digitally what they do in the real world (e.g. trips to a museum, real world Stargazing Live activities, baking a cake, helping friends revise, etc), and then use that information to enrich their learning experience? What will they see when they go to BBC spaces online which represent the real world? And, how might these digital spaces change the way they experience real world events?
I will be at the Knowledge & Learning Connected Studio with the K&L team. We are very excited to see what ideas come from the community of designers, technologists and storytellers and look forward to seeing some of you in February.
Andy Pipes is executive product manager for BBC Knowledge & Learning.
N.B. The images used in this post are early concept designs only and not finished products.
Here's a breakdown of what we've got on the Red Button this week. To stay updated on everything Red Button follow us on Twitter or visit bbc.co.uk/redbutton.
Mountain Hare camouflaged against the winter snow
The Winterwatch webcams return, live from Aigas in the Scottish Highlands where the team hope to be following the beavers and pine martens again, as well as some new species.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Mon 14 Jan, 11pm-10am, Tues 15 Jan
Tues 15 Jan, 11pm-10am, Wed 16 Jan
Wed 16 Jan, 11pm-10am, Thu 17 Jan
Fiona Bruce at Cawdor Castle
You can now also play along on a mobile or tablet. Find out more and read the step-by-step instructions and don't forget to tweet your scores to #antiquesroadshow.
Available on Sky/Freeview:
Sun 13 Jan, 7:55pm-9pm
What's up with Dot?
Why has Dot Branning stayed away from Walford for so long? Why won't she come home? We're about to find out when Abi Branning leaves the East End on a mission to seek out her Grandma Dot.
This epiosde is also avaliable on iPlayer to watch anytime for seven days.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview: Sun 13 Jan, 12:45pm-4:45pm
Matt Bardock as Jeff Collier
A repeat of the mini-episode for Casualty fans to enjoy as one of Holby's most hard-bitten characters gets a rude awakening.
Paramedic Jeff Collier thinks he's seen everything the job can throw at him and there's nothing left to shock him. But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he arrives at the scene of a school coach crash...
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview: Sat 12 Jan, 9:35pm-1:15am
Dale Winton returns with another series of In It To Win It, the game show where people compete on general knowledge for a big money jackpot.
Think you can do better? Every Saturday press the Red Button during the show to pit your wits against our studio contestants. Come the final round will you still be In It To Win It?
Available on Sky/Freeview: Sat 12 Jan, 8pm-8:50pm
Sat 19 Jan, 8pm-8:50pm
Catch up on all the latest Sport here on the Red Button.
Highlights include:For the latest information refer to the BBC Sport website.
**Note all Red Button times are subject to change at short notice
The BBC Trust carries out an in-depth review of each of the BBC's services at least once every five years. This time the Trust is looking at BBC Online and BBC Red Button Services.
The Trust wants your views and suggestions on these services and how they can be improved. There is also space in the consultation to raise any other points not covered by our questions. The consultation is open until 23rd January 2013.
To find out more about the consultation and how to take part, visit the BBC Trust site: BBC Online and BBC Red Button Service Review
If you would like a paper version sent to you, email onlineandredbutton@bbc.co.uk or call 0800 0680 116.
To request the questions in audio or braille please call 0800 0680 116 or textphone 0800 0153 350.
Large print is also available to download via the BBC Trust site: BBC Online and BBC Red Button Service Review
CBeebies Red Button welcomes younger viewers and grown-ups with a sense of adventure to the big, bright and fun world of CBeebies interactive!
Your children's favourite characters are at the heart of the interactive TV experience. Satellite and digital terrestrial viewers will have slightly different offerings from one another. This has enabled the Red Button team to offer the best games tailored to each system.
CBeebies Red Button is available on the CBeebies channel, and via page 5900 on other channels.
Visit the CBeebies website to find out more.
Available on Freeview and Sky only
Hi I am the head of product for BBC News Online and lead the product strategy and development of website, mobile, tablet and IPTV products for News.
The change of year is a good time to look back and also forward. In the BBC News Online product team in recent weeks we have been reflecting on a year in which we delivered a number of innovative product features to the audience while also planning an exciting event to kick off 2013: our first Connected Studio for News which begins on January 21.
Pages from BBC News Online
With the delivery of our brand new responsive design website, our coverage of events such as the Diamond Jubilee and the US Presidential elections, 2012 was a huge success in News for what we call our 'Four Screen strategy'.
In the UK alone we saw a 28% increase in weekly unique browsers to our websites and applications, the number of tablets accessing our product more than trebled following a massive increase during Christmas week and there has been a 50% increase via smartphones.
Considering that one-third of our users are now not using a desktop PC it is essential that we continue to deliver great experiences across all devices from phones to connected TVs - not only in 2013 but beyond.
This is where Connected Studio comes in.
One thing that is clear to us from talking to the audience and seeing the trends in how people consume news is that in an age of an endless flow of information with access to the news from all the different devices we carry around with us, people increasingly want to more easily find news that is more relevant to them.
It's not that people don't want to see the big major stories that affect us all and the BBC is committed to ensuring it uses its editorial skills to ensure the world is well informed about the things that really matter to the broadest audience.
However, people are increasingly interested in lots of different topics which affect their own personal daily lives and we think we can do a better job in the future allowing you to follow stories that interest you across multiple devices.
So this is the focus of our Connected Studio initiative - discovering ways to consume and distribute news that is more relevant to people. That might be news about where you live or where you work or what happens on the commute between the two places. Or it might be news about the industry you work in, or something that directly affects friends and family. Or just news about your hobbies and what interests you.
We have a great opportunity to build on the systems and products BBC Online built for the Olympics in 2012 and use linked data to describe our content and make it easier to find.
Our journalists are starting to tag stories accurately for the location, people, companies and organisations that they are about and then by linking this data together we will be able to make it possible for you to find and follow the news that affects you.
Where our current local news sites only offer a limited view of the world in those areas, in future we will be able to surface stories about companies who employ lots of people in an area.
Or when an MP has said something in the House of Commons which features on Democracy Live we will be able to show it immediately to people in the area that he or she represents and also to all the people interested in that subject.
We also want to work with the wider media industry to link to other people's content more effectively in the same way.
The Connected Studio is an opportunity for people from outside the BBC to meet up with experts from our teams, to play with our data and develop product ideas and prototypes which we will show to real audiences during the day.
We are hoping to hear from many people across the media and digital industry who would like to get involved and help us with this exciting challenge.
I look forward to seeing many interesting people gathering to help us on January 21 in the heart of the BBC's new journalism headquarters at New Broadcasting House in London. A creative brief for the studio has been published and you can sign up here.
Chris Russell is head of product for BBC News Online.
I'm Lucie McLean, executive product manager for BBC Sport's mobile services - including the new BBC Sport app which was launched today.
The iPhone version of the app is now available from iTunes in the UK and the Android version will follow within the next few weeks.
The main features of the BBC Sport app are explained by the head of Sport Interactive Ben Gallop over on the Sports Editors' Blog.
The new BBC Sport app
To support the amazing summer of sport in 2012 we focused on delivering a great mobile experience for big events including creating the BBC Olympics app which almost two million people in the UK downloaded.
Like the Olympics app, the Sport app is a hybrid app. It contains the same web-based content as the mobile sport website and adds extra features and functionality using native app technology.
The Sport app allows you to create quick links to your favourite sports using the standard native iOS pattern for adding, removing and re-ordering. We deliberately set out to use patterns that users recognise from others apps and we'll continue to do this in the other native features we'll add to the app over the next year or so.
The Android version still needs some more development work and testing to ensure it works on the wide range of Android devices available and will be live in the next few weeks.
You may notice that some of the links in the app such as the football team pages, stats for other sports and other sport indexes open the old BBC Sport mobile site. The next phase of the app project will update these pages and add this content fully to the app and add football teams to the quick link options.
These updates will be released in the next couple of months. The tutorial screen shown when the app is first downloaded helps explain its key features. This tutorial is always available for reference in the app's Other menu. When updates to the app containing new features are available we'll update the tutorial so that it's clear what is new.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions
Watch the BBC Sport app tutorial
For example we know some Android users were disappointed that the Olympics app wasn't available on larger Android phones and smaller tablets. One of the benefits of building the app around a responsive web product was that it was much easier to build an app that scales to serve larger devices.
As a result the sport app will be available for Android devices with a screen width of seven inches or smaller. We'll also roll it out to the Kindle Fire family too once we've thoroughly tested the app on these devices.
We'll also be adding video to both the iPhone and Android versions of the app in the coming months. The BBC's solution for delivering video to Android devices was recently outlined in a blog post by my colleagues Chris Yanda.
We are developing the app for Apple and Android devices which currently account for approximately 75% of the UK smartphone market. We haven't ruled out developing the app for other platforms but building apps is expensive and as a publicly-funded organisation we have to prioritise the areas where we can reach the most users at the lowest costs.
Users with tablets and other mobile devices will be able to access both the mobile and desktop versions of the BBC Sport website and we will continue to use feedback and usage data to help us prioritise future features and versions.
Over the coming weeks there will be further posts on this blog by key people in the technical and design teams about how they built the app for iPhone and Android devices. Until then we hope you enjoy using this first release of the Sport app and we're keen to hear what other features you'd find useful in future updates.
The BBC Sport app is available for iPhones and iPod touch devices on iOS 5.0 in the UK.
Search for 'BBC Sport' in the iTunes App Store.
Lucie Mclean is the executive product manager for BBC Sport, Future Media.
It's a new year and we've got lots of great red button content to keep you entertained throughout 2013.
For drama fans we have EastEnders and Casualty specials coming up this week plus a visit to the CBBC drama Dumping Ground where you can take part in a quiz and watch some extras too.
There's a showcase of the musical talent predicted to make waves in 2013 and the return of the ever popular Antiques Roadshow play along quiz where you guess the value of antique items - can you beat the team of experts?
Add to that a bit of Miranda and a lot of sport and you'll agree that we've got a great start to the new year on red button.
Here's a look at what's in store - and if you want to stay updated on Red Button, be sure to follow us on Twitter or visit www.bbc.co.uk/redbutton
What's up with Dot?
Why has Dot Branning stayed away from Walford for so long? Why won't she come home? We're about to find out when Abi Branning leaves the East End on a mission to seek out her Grandma Dot.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview: Fri 11th January, 8:25pm-9:10pm
Fri 11th January, 9:45pm-11:30pm
Sun 13th January, 12:45pm-4:45pm
Who's tipped for the top in 2013
Discover which bands and musicians who have been tipped as the Sound of 2013 by tuning into the BBC Red Button. Huw Stephens will reveal the top five acts and the longer top list of 15, all nominated by music critics, editors, broadcasters and bloggers. Huw is also joined by Radio 1's Zane Lowe, Annie Mac, Ally McRae and 1Xtra's Mistajam to tell us why we should love these new artists. Find out more now at www.bbc.co.uk/soundof2013
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Sat 5th January, 6:00am-11:00am, 7:00pm-8:25pm, 9:00pm-10:00pm
Sun 6th January, 4:00am-7:00am, 5:00pm-5:30pm, 6:30pm-7:55pm and 9:05pm until
Mon 7th January, 7:00am, 7:00pm-8:25pm, 9:00pm until
Tue 8th January, 7:00am, 7:30pm until
Wed 9th January, 7:00am, 7:30pm until
Thu 10th January, 7:00am, 7:00pm until
Fri 11th January, 7:00am, 7:00pm-8:25pm, 11:30pm-4:00am
L-R Sally Phillips, Tom Ellis, Miranda Hart, Sarah Hadland and Patricia Hodge
Take a glimpse into the world of Miranda
and get a sneak peak of tonight's episode plus a chance for you to hear the cast share secrets and tell tales of what really happens on the set.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview: Mon 7th January, 8:25pm-9:00pm
Matt Bardock as Jeff Collier
There's a brand new mini-episode for Casualty fans to enjoy as one of Holby's most hard-bitten characters gets a rude awakening.
Paramedic Jeff Collier thinks he's seen everything the job can throw at him and there's nothing left to shock him. But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he arrives at the scene of a school coach crash...Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Sat 5th January, 22:00pm-04:00am
Sat 12th January, 22:00pm-04:00am
Fiona Bruce and the team travel to the newly restored Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, once one of the grandest houses in the country. Experts uncover treasures amongst the family heirlooms, including a sixteenth century print that could be worth tens of thousands of pounds, evidence of one of the earliest Beatles concerts arranged by a school boy, plus there's a big surprise for one of the team as he is shown a rare piece of furniture made by an important artist.
You can now also play along on a mobile or tablet, find out more and read the step by step instructions and don't forget to tweet your scores to #antiquesroadshow.
Available on Sky/Freeview:
Sun 6th January, 7:55pm-9:05pm
If you have been enjoying CBBC's drama The Dumping Ground then you are going to love The Dumping Ground Quiz hosted by Tyler and Carmen. There are 11 questions about previous Tracy Beaker series to test your knowledge. You simply answer by pressing the coloured buttons on your remote control. So press red and get involved!
Available on Sky/Freeview: Sat 5th January, 11:00am-2:30pm
Sun 6th January, 7:00am-5:00pm
Mon 7th January, 7:00am-7:00pm
Tue 8th January, 7:00am-7:30pm
If you want more The Dumping Ground fun, The Dumping Ground Extra is jam packed with a whole host of exclusive goodies from CBBC's brand new drama. Press Red on the CBBC Channel and see what happened when Dodge went behind the scenes on the show, join Iain and Dodge for some silly sketches, there's exclusive character profiles and check out a sneak peek from the next dramatic episode in the series.
As always you can also read Chris and Dodge's blog, check out the answers to some of your questions, read your horoscopes and see if the jokes that made Chris and Dodge LOL will have the same effect on you.
Go on, press red... You know you want to!
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview: Wed 9th January, 7:00am-7:30pm
Thu 10th January, 7:00am-7:00pm
Fri 11th January, 7:00am-11:00am, 1:00pm-7:00pm
Alan Yentob meets China's Lang Lang
Following Lang Lang: The Art of Being a Virtuoso on BBC FOUR there's another chance to see the pianist in concert from the Latitude Festival in Southwold, Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Albert Hall in London. Previously shown as part of Imagine... Do or Die: Lang Lang's Story
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Fri 11th January, 9:10pm-9:45pmDale Winton returns with another series of In It To Win It, the game show where people compete on general knowledge for a big money jackpot.
Think you can do better? Every Saturday press the Red Button during the show to pit your wits against our studio contestants. Come the final round will you still be In It To Win It?
Available on Sky/Freeview:
Sat 5th January, 8:00pm-8:50pm
Sat 12th January, 8:00pm-8:50pm
Catch up on all the latest Sport here on the Red Button.
Highlights of the festive fortnight include:For the latest information refer to the BBC Sport website.
**Note all Red Button times are subject to change at short notice
The BBC Trust carries out an in-depth review of each of the BBC's services at least once every five years. This time the Trust is looking at BBC Online and BBC Red Button Services.
The Trust wants your views and suggestions on these services and how they can be improved. There is also space in the consultation to raise any other points not covered by our questions. The consultation is open until 23rd January 2013.
To find out more about the consultation and how to take part, visit the BBC Trust site: BBC Online and BBC Red Button Service Review
If you would like a paper version sent to you, email onlineandredbutton@bbc.co.uk or call 0800 0680 116.
To request the questions in audio or braille please call 0800 0680 116 or textphone 0800 0153 350.
Large print is also available to download via the BBC Trust site: BBC Online and BBC Red Button Service Review
CBeebies Red Button welcomes younger viewers and grown-ups with a sense of adventure to the big, bright and fun world of CBeebies interactive!
Your children's favourite characters are at the heart of the interactive TV experience. Satellite and digital terrestrial viewers will have slightly different offerings from one another. This has enabled the Red Button team to offer the best games tailored to each system.
CBeebies Red Button is available on the CBeebies channel, and via page 5900 on other channels.
Visit the CBeebies website to find out more.
Available on Freeview and Sky only
If you'd like to stay up-to-date with more news from the Red Button follow us on Twitter.I'm Tom Williams, development editor for Red Button and dual screen in BBC Vision.
Today we launched the Antiques Roadshow play along app for mobiles and tablets. It's a first for the BBC and builds on the hugely successful Red Button play-along game we launched last October.
Play along with Antiques Roadshow from your mobile
Here's how it works: launch the app while you're watching Antiques Roadshow, press 'Play along with the programme' and choose a value for each of the objects featured.
A clock tells you how long you have before the expert gives their valuation. The app keeps a running total of the objects you value correctly and gives you a ranking at the end of the programme: novice, enthusiast, connoisseur or expert.
You need to get over 75% correct to get to expert level and believe me that's quite a challenge. At the end of the quiz we'll link you to more information on the top finds of the episode you've just watched and from the series so far.
Why Antiques Roadshow?
As development editor my priority was to create a companion experience that would genuinely enhance a programme for a mainstream audience.
We piloted a number of titles but Antiques Roadshow stood out. As soon as we tested the first prototype of the app with audiences we saw what a buzz it created in the living room.
The interface is simple enough not to distract from the programme and the interaction builds on existing behaviour - who doesn't shout out what they think an item's worth?
Antiques Roadshow is a key title for BBC One regularly pulling in over six million viewers on a Sunday night.
It's now in its 35th year and Simon Shaw, the series editor, and his team are constantly seeking out new ways to keep the programme fresh while maintaining the core values that audiences love.
The new app does exactly that.
Play along with Antiques Roadshow
The app is one of BBC Vision's portfolio of companion experiences - a strategy driven by Victoria Jaye and outlined in her blog last year and part of the BBC's plans announced by Daniel Danker to build on our Red Button offer in a connected world.
Viewers love playing along
The mobile and tablet app builds on the existing Red Button offer providing a much improved interface and the ability for multiple players to play along in the same room.
So far, over 1.5 million unique users have pressed red to play along and the response on Twitter has been incredibly positive. You can read some of our favourite tweets about the red button service on Tom Bedwell's Storify page (N.B: includes strong language).
Simple magic
At the heart of the app is a great bit of technology that's totally invisible to our audiences - audio watermarking.
We've embedded inaudible signals in the soundtrack of the programme that are picked up by the microphone of a phone or tablet.
These are used to identify the episode, line up the correct questions and then display them at exactly the right point in the programme.
In short it provides a way of joining up your TV and mobile/tablet without having to do anything complicated. In fact it makes the whole experience feel a bit like magic.
It has the added bonus of synchronising the app with the programme however you choose to watch it, whether on BBC One, a recording of the programme or on BBC iPlayer.
There's more information on audio watermarking and one of our early pilots in the R&D blog.
Collaboration
The app was built and designed in Salford by the BBC Future Media team. It's editorially driven by the television production team in Bristol, enhanced by onward journeys into the history behind the programme's top finds from Knowledge and Learning with invaluable contributions from R&D, Marketing and Audiences teams here in London.
It's been an amazing feat of collaboration across multiple teams considering that four-way video conferences were often the only way of linking the teams together.
An alternative career beckons?
Give it a go and let us know what you think
The Antiques Roadshow website has details on how to download the app and information on when the programmes go out on BBC One.
If you can't wait until Sunday, you can play along now with the programme in iPlayer. Give it a go and see how you do. Are you novice, enthusiast, connoisseur or expert? We'll be keeping an eye out for the hashtag #AntiquesRoadshow if you want to let us know.
By the way, the image above shows my score last time I had a go so beat that if you can.
The app works on Android mobile devices up to 7" running firmware 2.2 & above and iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches running iOS 5.1 and above.
Tom Williams is development editor, Red Button and IPTV.
I'm Dave Price head of iPlayer here at the BBC.
Christmas is always a highlight of the TV calendar. If you're anything like my family, after a long Christmas dinner and a busy day unwrapping presents we gather around the telly watching the celebs on Strictly or the drama from Albert Square.
Happy 5th Birthday BBC iPlayer
Christmas Day is also a particularly special day for my team as it's BBC iPlayer's birthday. Five years ago we unwrapped iPlayer on the PC. Fast forward five years and it's the number one brand in the UK, and now on over 650 devices and platforms ranging from TV platforms and games consoles, to mobiles and tablets. In October we broke the 200 million-requests-per-month mark for the first time.
BBC iPlayer - total requests for streams and downloads, TV and Radio programmes (millions)
BBC iPlayer at Christmas
Christmas is a popular time of year for iPlayer. And with so many new gadgets given as gifts this year many of you downloaded the iPlayer app to watch and catch-up on the programmes you've missed.
On Christmas Day itself most viewing is via broadcast TV with families flocking around the best screen in the house. It's the days afterwards, especially Boxing Day and New Year's Day, when requests on iPlayer really start to peak - when many of you are catching up on those essential Christmas programmes.
During the festive season last year Monday 2 January was the best day BBC iPlayer ever had with 5.4 million TV programmes requested. This year Tuesday 1 January (New Year's Day) was the most popular for TV viewing with 6.7 million request for TV programmes.
Online requests for streams and downloads (27 Dec - 1 Jan)
Christmas 2012 on BBC iPlayer
This year we saw 77 million requests for TV and Radio programmes throughout the festive period (22 Dec - 1 Jan, excluding Virgin Cable data which is not yet available).
Throughout this period:
• The most popular day in terms of TV programme requests was New Year's Day.
• Doctor Who - The Snowmen was the most popular programme, followed by Eastenders and Miranda. Other top performing programmes were Outnumbered, Call the Midwife and Merlin(see table below for the top 20).
Top 20 programmes (requests rounded to nearest 1000)
BBC iPlayer - whenever and wherever you want it
As I've talked about before one of our key goals for iPlayer in 2012 was to take it beyond the PC and onto a host of different devices from mobile smartphones and tablets to smart TVs and games consoles. We want to make it as easy as possible to watch and catch up on your favourite programmes.
It appears the UK was particularly generous with gifts this Christmas! We've witnessed a significant spike in users installing iPlayer on new tablets and smartphones with devices such as the Nexus 7, iPad and Kindle Fire HD proving popular.
Throughout the festive period we saw more and more viewers accessing programmes on mobiles, tablets and internet-connected TVs.
Please note: all the following data is for TV only, for a fair comparison across devices, some of which are not primarily used for radio listening.
On mobiles and tablets:
• Requests increased on Christmas Day +40% on tablets and +66% on mobiles compared with Christmas Eve. Mobile and tablet viewing requests grew even further on Boxing Day and saw another catch-up viewing peak on New Year's Day.
• During the whole festive period the iPlayer app was downloaded nearly one million times - with almost 300,000 downloads on Christmas Day alone.
• By the end of 2012 the iPlayer app had been downloaded nearly 13 million times.
Popular programmes on mobiles and tablets:
• While Doctor Who was in the top three most popular programmes for all types of device, the Christmas Day EastEnders was number one on mobiles and tablets across the festive period.
• Some comedy programmes such as Outnumbered also ranked more highly on mobiles and tablets.
But people still want to watch TV on a TV and with increasing numbers of TVs being connected to the internet iPlayer requests were also strong on these devices throughout this period.
On internet connected TVs (such as smart TVs, games consoles and TV platforms):
• These devices followed the overall pattern of viewing on PCs, since they saw stiff competition from live TV screens - dipping on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day and picking up for catch-up viewing from 27 onwards. Requests from PCs saw their largest peak on New Year's Day.
• Most popular programmes were in line with the overall trend - Doctor Who, Miranda and EastEnders - with family films and comedy also very popular.
Daily online requests by device type for TV programmes (millions)
Happy New Year from BBC iPlayer
I hope you've had a great Christmas and are looking forward to the year ahead.
We've got lots of exciting plans to make iPlayer even better and look forward to sharing them with you in the months to come.
As always, it's great to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment below. Have a great 2013.
Dave Price is the head of BBC iPlayer, Programmes and On Demand, BBC Future Media.
Hi I joined the Internet blog as the content producer in November.
There is a distinct feel of Christmas in the air in our office today and as this will be the last blog post of the year I thought it would be a good place to do a quick 2012 round up, Clive James style (without the jokes).
So here is a look at some of our most popular posts as well as some of the topics that have got our audience talking. It would be impossible to cover everything and sorry to any loyal and enthusiastic blogger who hasn't got a mention here.
First off, no one could avoid the Olympics this year (believe me I tried), including the blog. We had a great series of posts on the BBC's role in the coverage of what was hailed by many as the first 'truly digital Olympics'.
24 streams of Olympics
The Story of the Digital Olympics by Cait O'Riordan attracted an audience of 27, 480 users to date. For me one of the key insights gleaned from this post is the incredible speed with which users are able to adapt to new technology and tools to get the maximum personal enjoyment out of the content that appeals to them:
Audiences quickly grew accustomed to being able to switch between up to 24 streams. In between the peaks of Team GB medal moments, our data clearly shows people moving across streams to check out a whole host of different events. For example, around 6pm on Saturday 4th, audiences finished watching GB Gold in Women's Team Pursuit Cycling on stream 7 to take a look at the end of Brazil v Honduras in the football on stream 6, before switching back to stream 7 as the cycling action kicked off again.
The post also offered some valuable insights into the way that BBC audiences consume content on different devices.
The post Olympics: User and Design was shared over 1000 times (which we think is a record number of shares for the blog) Nick Haley explains:
Shaping, structuring and arranging Olympic content for many different contexts and devices was a big challenge but hopefully the end result is an overall experience that feels joined up and cohesive, and most importantly something that you enjoy using. I also hope I've been able to shed some light on the design process involved in the first truly digital Olympics.
Some of our most popular posts of the year were related to BBC iPlayer.
iPlayer app on your mobile
BBC iPlayer: iPhone app & 3G streaming by David Madden continues to generate traffic a year after going live on 12 December 2011 and has now been viewed nearly 100,000 times.
In the first three months this post received 123 comments. The long tail traffic for this post as well as the level of debate generated on this as well as our other posts dealing with Android indicate that this is a hot topic for the readers of the blog. The frustration of some is clear:
Icono wrote: While your goal of having one universal app which also runs on old 2.x versions is commendable, it seems to be doing little more than diminishing the experience for more modern devices (which probably have the highest consumption rate of the app) since the Adobe Air framework imposes its own limitations.
Kevin Chadwick wrote : Flash was the obvious choice for cross platform at the time of iplayers design, but the landscape even within adobe has changed with linux and android flash updates now set to a 5 years maximum. It would be good if the BBC moved all their services onto HTML 5 video and dumped flash.
For the latest on the BBC's approach to this read Dave Price's post and his latest comments as well as Rory Cellan Jones' interview with Daniel Danker.
Elsewhere on iPlayer there was the launch of the (hugely popular) Live Restart function as blogged about by Henry Webster as well as the new iPlayer Radio on PC and mobile which was introduced by Andrew Scott. The User Experience and Design team chimed in with a video post on how they developed the product.
Blogs about BBC Sport products and updates also attracted a lot of attention. Launching the new BBC Sport website by Cait O'Riordan was commented on 164 times, showing the huge level of anticipation around this relaunch.
Rhythm of sport on the BBC Sport site
It also gave a chance for dedicated users to take part in a dialogue with the people directly involved in building these products:
bezbarber wrote: in terms of user experience did you look at how easy it was to read the horribly cramped headlines? Please make the middle column wider so they are readable.
Scott Byrne-Fraser replied: @bezbarber: The usability of the homepage and sports indexes was tested. The feedback in the earlier rounds indicated that the pages were too long, so the amount of content on the pages was reduced and simplified to help people find the content they were looking for.
The blog featured an on-going series of posts about BBC Connected Studios from a range of contributors. These gave a really good overview of the different ideas and innovations rumbling away under the surface of the BBC.
Personally I find it fascinating hearing about the new ideas coming out of these workshops and events. I look forward to reading more about what they get up to in 2013 when we hopefully start to see some of these pilots launched as new functions and products across the BBC.
Major changes were made to BBC Red Button this year which were introduced by Daniel Danker in his blog post:
Red Button might have started simplistically as a way for the BBC to provide audiences with instant, highly relevant information right on the TV [ ...] But while some might have expected Red Button to slowly be replaced with the web across an assortment of devices, no one would deny that the simplicity and ease of Red Button is as important today as when it was first introduced. So rather than anticipate a transition away from Red Button, at the BBC we're bringing the very best of Red Button together with the very best of BBC Online, to reinvent the experience on any screen.
Tom Williams gave us some more detail about how and why this is being done:
On 15th October the video component of BBC Red Button on Sky, FreeSat and Virgin Media will be reduced from five to one stream, bringing it in line with our Freeview offer. We are doing this because these services rely entirely on linear broadcast technologies, which are not cost-effective for an interactive service like the red button.
While towards the end of the year the launch of Connected Red Button on Virgin TiVo was welcomed by some, but not so much by others:
ChrisCornwall wrote: Good move, but also concerned at the target launching. I would expect the Corporation to have a broad range of release platforms at the start, even if this means delaying launches to accommodate this.Expect more posts in the new year about the release on other platforms.
This was the year when BBC Online went responsive with sites relaunched throughout the year. Designer Ste Everington blogged about responsive design for the new TV Channel Homepages:
To achieve a truly consistent experience across all devices we opted for responsive web design - a single code base with an optimised layout for the device or screen size you're viewing it on. While the idea of fluid websites is nothing new, the way in which we design them is rapidly evolving. In our research phase we quickly noticed that the majority of good examples are mainly blogs and news websites.
Interaction and layout changes for browser orientation for channel homepages
Lucie Mclean updated us on the responsive Sports sites:
Pages are assembled on our platform using PHP. The PHP or page assembly layer obtains all the data it needs for the final page by calling several RESTful services (for stats, stories, live event updates) before serving the final, complete page to the audience. Since we assemble a single page for each request it also means that we become extremely cacheable and can benefit from efficient serving of pages using Varnish and Content Delivery Networks in order to reduce the load on our own servers.
While Dan Forys blogged about the new One Response Barlesque which will work across all BBC sites.
And finally, we may live in a high tech world of fast-pace technological change and adaption, but some things will never alter: we are all still obsessed with the weather.
New 10 day forecast on BBC Weather
Some of the most popular blogs for 2012 were about the changes made to the BBC Weather pages. Jo Wickremasinghe, head of product for BBC Weather in BBC Future Media blogged three times for us this year reflecting a number of changes to the service from an easier user experience for localisation, an extended 10 day forecast and a more granular approach to the service.
Let's hope it will predict a good festive season and we can all get home ok!
That's it from the blog. Comments will be closed for the festive period, reopening again in January 2013.
Have a great holiday and a very merry new year - see you all in 2013!
Eliza Kessler is the content producer on the BBC Internet blog.
It's the last Red Button blog of the year - but with Christmas and New Year nearly upon us it's also one of the biggest.
We've a bumper line-up to keep you entertained over the next fortnight including a glittering array of sporting highlights from the past year, Karen Hardy's expert analysis of the Strictly Come Dancing final and special mini-episodes of Doctor Who and EastEnders. There's also Christmas fun for kids from CBBC, highlights from Radio 1's spectacular Hackney Weekend and the triumphant return of the Antiques Roadshow play-along quiz - not to mention a preview of next year's big shows on BBC One.
Here's a look at what's in store - and if you want to stay updated on Red Button throughout the festive season, be sure to follow us on Twitter or visit http://www.bbc.co.uk/redbutton.
Look back at a stunning year of sporting action on the BBC
It's been an incredible year of sporting action and over the holiday period you can relive some of the most memorable moments on the BBC Red Button.
We've picked out an array of events to watch again in full including the Wimbledon men's singles final, the Brazilian Grand Prix and Wales's clash with England in the Six Nations. There's also another chance to see highlights from this summer's Olympics featuring gold medal-winning performances by stars including Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah, Usain Bolt, Nicola Adams, Andy Murray, Chris Hoy and Greg Rutherford.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview - visit the BBC Sport website to find out what's on when.
Who will get their hands on the famous glitterball?
This year's thrilling series reaches its two-part conclusion tonight with four celebrities still in the running for TV's glitziest title. Dani Harmer, Louis Smith, Kimberley Walsh and Denise Van Outen have wowed judges and viewers throughout the competition - but which of them will be able to perform when it really counts?
Join Karen Hardy on Red Button during the final for expert analysis of each couple's crucial routines. She's also joined by a familiar face from Strictly's past - former England cricketer Mark Ramprakash, the man she partnered to the title in 2006.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Sat 22 Dec, 6.30pm-7.55pm, 8.50pm-10.05pm
Can Fatboy give Poppy the Christmas she deserves?
EastEnders fans can get an extra helping of fun from Walford on Thursday 27 December as we join young lovers Fatboy and Poppy for a special festive episode.
Fatboy is thrilled when Poppy returns for Christmas but not all goes to plan. Unless he mans up the big lad may lose the best Christmas gift he's ever had...
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Thu 27 Dec, 8.55pm-12.30am
The Doctor returns to BBC One on Christmas Day - and Red Button viewers can get ready for this year's festive adventure by watching a mini-episode.
Madame Vastra, accompanied by her loyal companions Jenny and Strax, is called upon to investigate a Victorian murder mystery. But where is the Doctor?
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Sat 22 Dec, 6pm-6.30pm, 7.55pm-8.50pm, 10.05pm-1.25am
Mon 24 Dec, 7pm-6am
Tue 25 Dec, 3pm-5.15pm
If you love Christmas and you like singing then press red for the CBeebies Christmas Karaoke. You can sing along to songs from a whole host of CBeebies Christmas specials including Mr Bloom's Nursery, Baby Jake and Mike the Knight. Why not get your family and friends to join in too and follow the words as they appear on your screen?
Go on, press red... You know you want to!
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Sat 22 Dec, 6am-2.30pm
Sun 23 Dec, 6am-1pm
Mon 24 Dec, 6am-7pm
Tue 25 Dec, 6am-3pm
Wed 26 Dec, 6am-2.30pm
Thu 27 Dec, 6am-7pm
Fri 28 Dec, 6am-12pm, 2pm-4pm
Sat 29 Dec, 6am-2.30pm
Sun 30 Dec, 12pm-4pm
Mon 31 Dec, 6am-2pm
Radio 1 helped kick off the build-up to the Olympics in June by hosting a huge weekend of live music at Hackney Marshes headlined by two of the biggest stars in pop - Jay-Z and Rihanna. Catch highlights from the festival that took east London by storm this fortnight on the Red Button.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Fri 28 Dec, 4pm-8.30pm
Sat 29 Dec, 12am-6am, 7pm-8.15pm, 9.10pm-1.15pm
Sun 30 Dec, 9pm-6am
Mon 31 Dec, 9pm-6am
Tue 1 Jan, 6am-12pm, 9.40pm-6am
Wed 2 Jan, 6am-11am, 10pm-6am
Thu 3 Jan, 6am-11am
Are you one of the 1.5 million people who've played along with our Antiques Roadshow game? If so you'll know how much fun it is to join Fiona and the team to guess the value of the items featured in the programme. If you haven't played yet, then don't miss your chance this Sunday and find out if you're a novice, enthusiast, connoisseur or expert - and don't forget to tweet your scores to #antiquesroadshow.
Available on Sky/Freeview:
Sun 30 Dec, 7.55pm-9pm
Discover which bands and musicians who have been tipped as the Sound of 2013 from 7.15am on Friday 4 January by tuning into the BBC Red Button. Huw Stephens will reveal the top five acts and the longer top list of 15, all nominated by music critics, editors, broadcasters and bloggers. Huw is also joined by Radio 1's Zane Lowe, Annie Mac, Ally McRae and 1Xtra's Mistajam to tell us why we should love these new artists. Find out more now at www.bbc.co.uk/soundof2013.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Fri 4 Jan, 7am-7pm, 9pm-6am
Sat 5 Jan, 6am-11am, 7pm-8.25pm, 9.15pm-10pm
Sun 6 Jan, 4am-6am
2012 was a big year for BBC One with shows including Call the Midwife, The Paradise, Last Tango in Halifax, Citizen Khan and The Syndicate capturing the imaginations of audiences across the nation and a fortnight of dedicated Olympic coverage bringing viewers closer to the Games than ever before.
It leaves us with a lot to live up to in 2013 so we've put together a showcase of new series and returning favourites to whet your appetite for the coming year. Check out what BBC One's got in store over the next 12 months with our special preview package on the Red Button this January.
Available on Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media/Freeview:
Tue 1 Jan, 8pm-9.40pm
Wed 2 Jan, 11am-7.30pm
Thu 3 Jan, 5pm-6am
Fri 4 Jan, 6am-7pm
There's a brand new mini-episode for Casualty fans to enjoy on Saturday 5 January as one of Holby's most hard-bitten characters gets a rude awakening.
Paramedic Jeff Collier thinks he's seen everything the job can throw at him and there's nothing left to shock him. But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he arrives at the scene of a school coach crash...
Available on Sky/Freeview:
Sat 5 Jan, 10pm-4am
If you have been enjoying CBBC's drama The Dumping Ground then you are going to love The Dumping Ground Quiz hosted by Tyler and Carmen. There are 11 questions about previous Tracy Beaker series to test your knowledge. You simply answer by pressing the coloured buttons on your remote control. So go on, press red... and get involved!
Available on Sky/Freeview:
Sat 5 Jan, 11am-2.30pm
Dale Winton returns with another series of In It To Win It, the game show where people compete on general knowledge for a big money jackpot.
Think you can do better? Every Saturday press the Red Button during the show to pit your wits against our studio contestants. Come the final round will you still be In It To Win It?
Available on Sky/Freeview:
Sat 5 Jan, 8.25pm-9.15pm
The National Lottery: Secret Fortune is an ultra-tense quiz show with lots of twists, hosted by Nick Knowles.
Studio contestants compete to win their Secret Fortune, anything from £100 to £100,000. Press the Red Button during the show to play along at home with the contestants.
Available on Sky/Freeview:
Sat 29 Dec, 8.15pm-9.10pm
Catch up on all the latest Sport here on the Red Button.
Highlights of the festive fortnight include:
For the latest information refer to the BBC Sport website.
**Note all Red Button times are subject to change at short notice
The BBC Trust carries out an in-depth review of each of the BBC's services at least once every five years. This time the Trust is looking at BBC Online and BBC Red Button Services.
The Trust wants your views and suggestions on these services and how they can be improved. There is also space in the consultation to raise any other points not covered by our questions. The consultation is open until 23rd January 2013.
To find out more about the consultation and how to take part, visit the BBC Trust site: BBC Online and BBC Red Button Service Review
If you would like a paper version sent to you, email onlineandredbutton@bbc.co.uk or call 0800 0680 116.
To request the questions in audio or braille please call 0800 0680 116 or textphone 0800 0153 350.
Large print is also available to download via the BBC Trust site: BBC Online and BBC Red Button Service Review
CBeebies Red Button welcomes younger viewers and grown-ups with a sense of adventure to the big, bright and fun world of CBeebies interactive!
Your children's favourite characters are at the heart of the interactive TV experience. Satellite and digital terrestrial viewers will have slightly different offerings from one another. This has enabled the Red Button team to offer the best games tailored to each system.
CBeebies Red Button is available on the CBeebies channel, and via page 5900 on other channels.
Visit the CBeebies website to find out more.
Available on Freeview and Sky only
If you'd like to stay up-to-date with more news from the Red Button follow us on Twitter.
Hi, I'm Chris Sizemore executive editor for the BBC's Knowledge & Learning product. Alongside Ian Myatt, head of product for Knowledge & Learning, I'm privileged to be responsible for the BBC's digital output around the factual and educational genres.
In November BBC Learning held its annual Indie Commissioning meeting at MediaCityUK in Salford. This event gives BBC Learning a chance to share our plans for the coming year with partners and indies.
We also presented an update on the BBC's new Knowledge & Learning online product, discussing both the progress we're making and the strategy behind the product.
Saul Nassé, controller of BBC Learning, spoke about the BBC's overarching vision for Learning: to "inspire a life full of learning for all our audiences".
Saul laid out BBC Learning's three main areas of focus:
Saul described BBC Learning's job as influencing and collaborating with other parts of the BBC, with partners and with indies to get this "life full of learning" to happen right across the BBC's output, not just within the Learning department itself.
In that sense the department's mission is to act as a kind of 'glue'.
In keeping with this strategic approach, Saul, Ian and I want the Knowledge & Learning online product to play a 'glue' role too, helping bind the different parts of BBC Online together for audiences.
I'd like to thank all the independent companies who gave their time to join us and share their questions and experiences. I met a lot of folks I didn't know before and from my point of view the event was a big success.
You can download the presentation from the BBC Learning Indie Commissioning session at the About BBC Learning website.
The range of commissioning briefs that were mentioned on the day can be found now (or in a couple of cases will be posted very soon) on our page about Learning commissioning priorities and opportunities.
Chris Sizemore is executive editor for the BBC's Knowledge & Learning product.
Hi I'm Yasser and until recently I was the head of User Experience and Design for TV & iPlayer, Radio & Music. Back in October I took part as a judge for the BBC User Experience and Design Connected Studio.
BBC People presented by Faith Mowbray at the BBC Connected Studio
The brief for the event was focused around One Service. We want to create experiences and connections across the BBC portfolio so that whichever of the ten BBC products you are using it's possible to move between them seamlessly through features and interactions.
It's a brief that conveys the role of User Experience and Design at the BBC. The team work right across the BBC portfolio ensuring that whatever product we are working in we are reflecting the Global Experience Language (GEL) which informs the way our products look and behave.
But GEL is something that is continually evolving and it's important for us to look to the future. Multi-platform, personal, participatory and live experiences are all things that are influencing the future outlook of our products and the challenge is how we integrate all these things into one coherent experience across the BBC that we call One Service.
The UX&D Connected Studio highlighted how complex meeting this challenge is but it also brought some fresh perspective on how we might begin introducing some great new features that could make a really distinctive digital BBC service.
Six teams were shortlisted for the build studio on October 30 and 31. The outcome of those two days varied between the teams but the most successful projects did three things really well:
1. They had insight that illustrated that their idea was meeting a real audience need.
2. A clear articulation of why the project would help to achieve the One Service ambition.
3. A demo or prototype to bring the idea to life.
At the end of the second day all six teams presented 12 minute pitches with a Q&A afterwards from the judges. Here is an overview of each of the ideas.
383 Project showing a demo of their project BBC Highlights
383 Project created a prototype called BBC Highlights. It's a feature that enables the audience to create and share their own personal highlights. Using Top Gear as an example they illustrated how their feature could work in the context of the current BBC video player that exists across bbc.co.uk.
When the team pitched the project they did some research using Twitter and found that lot's of people refer to particular moments within programmes, sharing timecodes or references. This sparked their motivation behind the project and it was great to see how they pursued and developed their idea from the pitch to a working demo.
The pitch was a good example of how the team took on board the brief and thought about how their concept addresses the BBC's four screen strategy.
In contrast the project Crowd Surf evolved quite a bit from the original idea that was pitched during the Creative Studio. The core idea of reflecting moments of popularity across content remained. However, the method of navigation and discovery moved away from the idea of zooming in and out of popular content and seeing the number of people watching/listening.
Instead the team chose to develop a multi direction nav that delivered onward journey's deemed most popular by other users.
BBC and System Concepts demo Crowdsurf
The most radical idea during the connected studio was Face Value by Soda and Nottingham University's Mixed Reality Lab. The team developed facial recognition software that could respond to audience reaction. So it could tell you whether or not the person sat in front of their laptop with a webcam switched on was happy or sad watching something on BBC iPlayer for example.
For me the idea was reminiscent of the Meet the Listeners project by Radio 1 back in 2010 but that relied on people taking photos of themselves and sending them to the station.
This idea sounds fairly novel but it's an interesting concept to consider when many devices that people buy now have built in cameras. It's a method of input that is rarely considered when designing experiences for content, but as the recent version of iPlayer for Xbox (that uses kinect for gestural navigation) illustrates maybe that could change in the future.
Soda and Mixed Reality Lab showing a demo of their face recognition software
The agency TorchBox teamed up with BBC to explore an idea called the Live Companion. It's an app that enriches a live event by collating relevant information from around the BBC and enables the audience to add their voice creating a mix of social and BBC content. The team put together a simple prototype using Javascript and CSS to present the idea.
Sarah Plant from TorchBox has written a good overview of her experience of the Connected Studio which is worth a read.
Torchbox presenting their mobile app prototype Live Companion
I've always been interested in how you can use time as a method of navigation through content so it was great to see one team try and tackle this concept.
Mudlark and the BBC teamed up for the project Time Machine - an interactive timeline of BBC content that lets you explore the threads of a story. The used BBC News as their starting point. So, if I'm reading a story about the Leveson enquiry for example, Time Machine would enable me to go back in time and explore all the events leading up to the most recent event.
BBC People is a really compelling concept that explores the idea of using BBC talent, historical figures, contributors or subjects as a way to navigate content across products.
Professor Brian Cox was their example of choice and although the team didn't have a working demo to show they were able to tell a good story with some nice illustrations of user journeys that conveyed how their idea would meet the audience need they had identified during the creative studio.
It was a tough couple of days for the teams but as a judge I found it really inspiring. It was interesting for me to see the range of approaches that the teams took to convey their ideas and also the fidelity of their visualisations and prototypes.
We Are Mudlark presenting their Time Machine concept
Hopefully the UX&D Connected Studio provided the teams taking part with an insight into the BBC, not only its complexities but also the opportunities that exist to create new kinds of experiences.
It was good to have people from my team at the BBC working together with external companies as it gave them an insight into how other teams work and think. This kind of collaboration is important to encourage innovation.
Although we only selected a couple of projects for the pilot stage each project that was presented during the build studio offered lots of food for thought in terms of how we might approach creating a One Service BBC.
Yasser Rashid was formally head of User Experience and Design for TV & iPlayer, Radio & Music. He has now left the BBC.
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