Tinopolis Interactive

Astronomy and space research are lifting off this week, with the launch of Cosmic Comics.  Published online by Llanelli-based media company Tinopolis, the project is the brainchild of Dr Emma Weitkamp, the creator of Science Comics, from University of West England, Bristol. 

The comic draws on the astronomical expertise of Prof Paul Roche of the University of Glamorgan and is brought to life by illustrator Dave Smith and website editor Charles Wilson of Tinopolis Interactive.

Cosmic Comics follows the adventures of three ordinary teenagers who are given access to the fantastic facilities of the Faulkes Telescope South , a world-class research telescope in Australia.

Published weekly on Planet Science, the five episode comic will be supported by short articles explaining the science behind the children’s exploits as well as interactive polls and quizzes to test readers’ astronomy knowledge. All five episodes will remain on the website allowing browsers to catch up on any missed episodes.

The central characters in the Cosmic Comics are Jake, Mara and Ravi who are studying for their GCSEs at the White Horse Academy in Rockley. They are taught by astronomy enthusiast Mr Krater who has managed to get access to the Faulkes Telescope South. The ‘Cosmic Comics crew’ turn their eyes towards the heavens and put our solar system under scrutiny. As they get to grips with using a real research telescope, their adventures begin.

Before starting the project Dr Weitkamp explored the reading habits of young teenagers and found that 40% of 13 to 15 year olds read a comic weekly or daily with a similar percent reading about science on the internet on a daily or weekly basis. Of 10 and 12 year olds, about 35% were reportedly reading a comic daily or weekly with about 24% reading about science on the internet.

“Young people love reading and research shows that placing science into a wider context not only helps engage readers but also facilitates learning”, said Dr Emma Weitkamp. “Feedback from the Science Comics project showed that children loved the stories and teachers commented how helpful it was to place chemistry in an everyday context.” Cosmic Comics aims to do the same with astronomy.

Prof. Paul Roche, chair of Astronomy Education at the University of Glamorgan and the science consultant to the project said, “The comic storylines will help us to communicate some very exciting space science and astronomy, like the threat posed by asteroid and comet impacts, or eruptions from the Sun that might damage our satellite networks.  It’s all about real science, but in a format that should appeal to our target audience. There is lots of really interesting science going on out there, and we want to show that the UK is at the leading edge of much of this international research.”

“Tinopolis Interactive have been hosting a world-class science education website for the last three years”, said Charles Wilson, editor of Planet Science. “It’s very exciting for us to be part of a project which will inspire a new generation of astronomy enthusiasts”.

Cosmic Comics is funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

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Back in July 2012 we published the first Welsh language children’s books on the Apple iBookstore. Sales have been successful and now we are pleased to announce that all fifty books from the popular Pobl Pedol series are now available as iBooks. They are aimed at helping children with Dyslexia and encouraging children and parents to learn Welsh. Split into four different phonic levels, each book covers certain letters and sounds.

At 49p each they’re a great addition to your electronic library.

The Pobl Pedol book are the third installment in the Pitrwm Patrwm series.

Buy Pobl Pedol books. 

Yn ôl ym mis Gorffennaf 2012, cyhoeddon ni’r iBook Cymraeg cyntaf ar yr Apple iBookstore. Mae’r llyfrau digidol wedi gwerthu’n dda a nawr rydyn ni’n falch o gael cyhoeddi bod pob un o’r 50 o lyfrau Pobl Pedol nawr ar gael fel iBooks. Eu nod yw helpu plant â Dyslecsia i fwynhau darllen yn ogystal ag annog plant a rhieni i ddysgu Cymraeg. Mae’r llyfrau wedi’u rhannu i bedair lefel ffoneg sy’n mynd i’r afael â llythrennau a synau penodol.

Am 49c maen nhw’n ychwanegiad gwych i’ch llyfrgell ddigidol.

Pobl Pedol yw’r drydedd gyfrol yn y gyfres Pitrwm Patrwm.

Prynwch lyfr Pobl Pedol.

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 Last night, after months of working together Tinopolis Interactive, Meat Promotion Wales and Careers Wales launched a careers DVD focusing on the red meat industry in Wales. Many industry representatives, assembly members and careers officers got together at y Senedd in Cardiff Bay to celebrate the occasion. 

The DVD was filmed in all over Wales on farms, with auctioneers, vets an butchers to name but a few.

Dai Davies, the chairman of Meat Promotion Wales opened the ceremony by inviting the young people of Wales to really consider the meat industry as a career path. Using quotes from the DVD's contributors he said the red meat industry holds "promising prospects" for the young people of Wales. He added, that the DVD really sings Wales's praises and that each of the ten contributors showed that you can have a successful career in the red meat industry in Wales.

He thanked Careers Wales for their support throughout the project and also to Tinopolis Interactive who managed to "capture on camera the spirit of the participants."

Alun Davies, Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Food, Fisheries and European Programmes who participated in the DVD said that it had been a privilege to be part of something that will encourage young people to think about a career in one of Wales' most promising industries.

Copies of the DVD are freely available to schools and careers officers. You can view the videos here.

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Tinopolis Interactive are proud to present a brand new animation, which has been a hot talking point at this week's Online Educa e-learning conference in Berlin.

The animation, which has now had more than 10,000 views online, uses a video of a pair of hands drawing to illustrate Dr Robert Cialdini's research on the universal principles of persuasion.

Dr Cialdini and Steve Martin, from the organisation Influence at Work, are world-leading pioneers of persuasion research, working with companies and individuals to increase their influence over others.

Cialdini and Martin's expertise combined with Tinopolis Interactive's creative talent has resulted in a unique expression of science and art!

Steve Martin said, "35 years of research in 10 minutes! Cialdini's principles of persuasion given the animation treatment.  Really neat."

To uncover how to most effectively persuade and influence others, watch Secrets from the Science of Persuasion.

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I recently spent a week researching how to convert our catalogue of educational books into ebooks.

At first glance, it looked like a fairly simple task. Our print books are created using Adobe InDesign and should export easily to the epub format.

But wait! Not so fast... Our educational books rely heavily on having text and images together and have audio on each page, so we can’t use the standard InDesign export. Ebooks are reflowable and that won’t work for us.

What can we use?

So we were back to the drawing board. Despite initially only targeting Apple’s iBook store, using iBook Author wasn’t an option. The software is too restrictive and doesn’t suit the style of our books. Luckily for us, the International Digital Publising Forum (IDPF) – the people who define the specification for epubs – recently released epub version 3 and, with that, a fixed layout mode! Even better, one of the only available epub readers with epub 3 and fixed layout support is... iBooks!

Bring in the cavalry...the developers

We started by converting 15 books from the Fflic a Fflac pack 3. InDesign’s epub export feature doesn’t work for us because it doesn’t fully support the epub3 specification. Our first ebook was manually created. One advantage of epub is that it is an uncompressed zip file containing all content in HTML, XML and css so creating the first book was simple, albeit rather time consuming! Much too time consuming to create the remaining 14 books from scratch.

As the Fflic a Fflac books we were adding are from the same pack, a lot of the detail in them was identical, such as layout, dimensions and descriptions. What would any good developer do? Write an application to take out the repetition!

Taking in minimal input from the user, my program took the images and audio and generated the files necessary to create an epub. It also zipped the files into an epub ready to copy over to our development iPad. The books worked exactly as we’d hoped.

Like Columbo, just one more thing

Next step: uploading the books to Apple. Seeing as one of Apple’s most famous slogans is “It just works”, I expected this to be a simple task. Unfortunately not.

Apple is very particular with the epubs they accept. Despite our epubs all displaying correctly on our iPad and validating perfectly using the official IDPF validator, Apple’s own validator threw up some minor errors. Fortunately, they really were minor errors and a small tweak had us finally ready to upload to Apple.

But once again, we had to fill in a lot of repetitive data. Not only that, but a large amount of the data had already been used in the creation of the epubs. Filling in this data is incredibly time consuming. Perhaps it’s something that Apple could consider streamlining in the future?

The publishing tool Apple provides allows you to save your progress before uploading as a folder with a predictable name. In this folder, we have our epub, a cover image and an xml file which holds all the data that Apple need from us. With a small addition to the application I wrote earlier, it also pulls in the high-res cover image and generates the xml file ready for upload.

The time saved was significant and we should be able to reuse the application for the other Fflic a Fflac packs and more. We’ve learned a lot about ebooks and the iBook store thanks to this project. Now that we’ve streamlined the process, look out for digital versions of many more Tinopolis Interactive books!

Visit the Apple iBookstore to view and download the Fflic a Fflac books.

Alex Wilks, Developer

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A new way to teach Welsh in the digital age.

Tinopolis Interactive is proud to be the very first organisation to publish a series of children’s iBooks in Welsh.

Fifteen books from our successful Fflic a Fflac series are now in the Apple iBook store.

Tinopolis have successfully negotiated with Apple to add Welsh as a language to their store. Until now, books could only be added as English and described as bilingual or Welsh.

The Fflic a Fflac series has already proved popular with foundation phase pupils in Wales and we will be publishing further series of Fflic a Fflac adventures over the next few months.

We hope that the digital versions, which include an audio option on each page, will be a hit with both schools who are increasingly using iPads as a teaching tool, and with parents who wish to encourage their children's reading skills in Welsh. It’s a new way to teach Welsh in the digital age. Watch this space!

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Mae Tinopolis Interactive yn falch iawn mai nhw yw’r sefydliad cyntaf i gyhoeddi cyfres o lyfrau plant ar ffurf iBooks yn Gymraeg.

Mae pymtheg llyfr o’n cyfres lwyddiannus ni, Fflic a Fflac nawr ar gael yn iBookstore Apple.

Yn dilyn trafodaeth gydag Apple, llwyddodd Tinopolis i’w cymell nhw i ychwanegu’r Gymraeg fel iaith ar ei gwasanaeth. Hyd yma, dim ond yn Saesneg yr oedd modd ychwanegu llyfrau, gyda’r dewis i’w disgrifio nhw fel rhai dwyieithog neu Gymraeg.

Mae’r gyfres Fflic a Fflac wedi ennill ei lle yng nghalonnau disgyblion y Cyfnod Sylfaen yng Nghymru eisoes, a byddwn ni’n cyhoeddi mwy o anturiaethau Fflic a Fflac dros y misoedd nesaf.

Ein gobatih yw gweld y fersiynau digidol, sydd â sain ddewisol ar bob tudalen, yn ennill eu plwyf mewn ysgolion sy’n defnyddio mwy ar yr iPad fel offer addysgu, ac hefyd gyda rhieni sy’n dymuno anog sgiliau darllen Cymraeg eu plant. Dyma ffordd newydd o ddysgu Cymraeg yn yr oes ddigidol. Cadwch lygaid amdanyn nhw!

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Who thought that a techie like me would be so interested in the Olympics?!

Like all companies that are both content producers and video delivery partners, we are constantly kept on our toes. We need to provide video content through various formats and technologies, whilst being both cost effective and high quality.

With both the explosion of tablets and increasing use of HTML5, we can’t avoid using a multitude of formats and protocols. This has propelled my surprising interest in this year’s Olympics.

Adaptive HTTP Streaming

Adaptive HTTP Streaming is a fairly new streaming protocol that is meant to take the best features of RTMP/RTSP (bandwidth efficiency and quality by stream switching) and Progressive Download (no special protocols required, open for more devices, cheaper bandwidth/hosting costs).

However, its lack of standardisation is a big issue for our industry. Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have created their own proprietary versions of the protocol. Whilst Apple’s HLS has the most support, none of them are supported by HTML5. To make matters worse, not only do we have to use different formats and protocols to support all devices, Adaptive Streaming implementations don’t work with regular MP4 files. Each version has to be converted into a specific fragmented format.

In the past year there has been a joint effort by powerful and influential companies to standardise adaptive http streaming with the MPEG consortium. This is named DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). These companies include Microsoft, Adobe, Harmonic, Irdeto, Wowza, Broadcast International, Fraunhofer Laboratories and Netflix to name a few.

Unfortunately, one key player isn’t getting involved; they want to stick to their own proprietary solution. As long as Apple continues to take this lone stance, the protocol arena will never be unified because Apple devices are so widely used.

What's going on during the Olympics?

Harmonic, Elemental, and Media Excel are powering the first public MPEG-DASH trial during 2012 London Olympics. This is great news for the working standard. Its success over this period will be key to the future success and adaption of the standard. The Belgian public broadcaster VRT, with support from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), is offering its audience the chance to experience the Olympic Games broadcast on their laptops, smartphones, and tablets using this new advanced adaptive bitrate streaming protocol. The EBU strongly support the development of MPEG-DASH. It will enable broadcasters to use a single file and streaming format to deliver content to multiple devices on multiple platforms.

Let’s hope that the first public MPEG-DASH trial taking place during the Olympics will put further pressure on Apple to keep to their vision of open technologies that Steve Jobs wrote about in his famous “open” letter on Adobe’s Flash products. The standardisation of the technology will help both us and our clients to keep operational costs under control, whilst maintaining the expectations of current and potential viewers of the content we either create or deliver. (It will also undoubtedly help us keep our sanity too!) We have a very interesting 12 months ahead of us and I will continue to watch in anticipation to see how this landscape evolves.

Orig Jones, Senior Developer

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With Windows 8 being released around October, we joined other geeks from British Airways, Skype and many others for Microsoft’s DevCamp at their Victoria Office in London.

Alex and I were introduced to the development of Metro apps for Microsoft's new operating system as well as having a hands-on lab session with Mike Taulty, Andrew Spooner, and Martin Beeby, three of Microsoft's developers.

The new version of Windows will be the same on all devices from PC to tablet, with Windows Phone 8 slightly different. We were really impressed at the efforts that have been made to simplify their development. With the option of either building through HTML5 and JavaScript or in C#, it will allow us either to adapt existing HTML 5 based sites or to port our applications across.

Our day was split into two sections, the morning based on presentations and demos of how to code and make the most of the features we can hook into, and the afternoon being spent on labs. We can’t forget to mention the lunch from Microsoft - our packed lunches went down a treat! The view from their canteen made me wish it was our offices.

Now inspired and ready to code, we’re getting our heads together to think of a great new app to build for Windows Metro and join Microsoft again in the App Excellence Labs in September.

It will also be a great excuse to get the new Samsung Slate with Windows 8 when released, although I can see it making a few others in the office green with envy!

Orig Jones, Senior Developer

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Ac mae’r tywydd wedi troi, jyst fel ‘na, a nawr mae ychydig mwy o liw ar bopeth. Tra bo’r haul yn tywynu arnom – mae’n teimlo’n naturiol eich cyflwyno chi i’n app a’n gwefan Tywydd S4C newydd ni.

Mae gwefan newydd Tywydd S4C yn rhoi’r rhagolygon ar gyfer ardal o 1 cilometr sgwâr – chewch chi ddim rhagolygon mwy manwl na hynny!

Nawr, mae’r wefan yn cefnogi HTML5 felly gallwch dderbyn rhagolygon manwl tra’ch bod chi o gwmpas yn gwneud eich gweithgareddau dyddiol, boed hynny’n defnyddio’ch iPad, iPhone neu’ch Android.

Mae’r app Tywydd S4C ar gael i Android neu iPhone, gan felly roi’r rhagolygon diweddaraf i chi’n syth.

Felly, os ydych chi’n bwriadu mynd am bicnic neu’n penderfynu mynd am dro, mi fyddwch chi’n barod am ba beth bynnag sydd gan y tywydd i’w gynnig i chi.

Ydych chi’n un sy’n hoffi dilyn y tywydd? Rydyn ni hefyd wedi cyflwyno blog Cofnodion y Gwylwyr, felly, cysylltwch gyda thîm y Tywydd a rhannwch eich lluniau a’ch gwybodaeth.

P’un ai eu bod nhw’n dangos y tywydd braf rydych chi’n ei brofi, neu’r Haf dwl rydyn ni wedi’i gael hyd yma, ebostiwch nhw i tywydd@s4c.co.uk.

Mae Tywydd S4C ar gael yn Gymraeg neu’n Saesneg. Mwynhewch y tywydd, ble bynnag ydych chi!

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