I wrote a detailed case study of what went into building Stream Congress. It's up on Google's HTML5 Rocks, an excellent resource for building cutting-edge web apps.
In particular, I cover how to get WebSockets and EventSource up and running, on both the server and the browser.
Continue readingStream Congress: An HTML5 App in the Google Chrome Web Store
Earlier today, Google announced their Chrome Web Store. For its launch, Sunlight is thrilled to announce a new HTML5 app called Stream Congress. Stream Congress gives you a quick look into what exactly your members of Congress are up to. Resembling a lifestream (but for Congress), the app takes in data points from various sources and combines them into a clean, real-time interface. Consider the app to be in a Developer Preview for now: we're going to launch it in earnest when the new Congress begins in January. Your feedback is appreciated.
Today, I wanted to share with the Sunlight developer community the process behind building this HTML5 app. It really does feel like we're entering a new era of the Web, and it's important for the civic hacking community to lead the way.
Continue readingSunlight’s (Mostly) Web-based Photo Booth
Sunlight Labs recently held an open house to bring members of the technology and transparency communities together over videogames and beer. Our systems administrator, Tim Ball, volunteered to create a photo booth for the event. A few days before the event Tim destroyed his arm in a terrible, unfortunate accident, nearly dashing our hopes for a photo booth. We had to honor Tim's memory (he's still alive) so rather than using an off-the-shelf photo booth software package, I hacked it up from scratch using Python, CSS3, WebSockets, and an iMac.
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