In point of fact, I’m actually the Head of Mobile Development here and one of the first people to join onto the Thereitis.com locomotive as a Software Developer (yes, terms like all of these deserve the capitalisation). The long and the short of all the above is that it’s incumbent upon me to answer for any and all of products that go out on either iOS, Android or Windows Phones – essentially meaning that I’m the person you can either douse with praise, or heap with undying scorn, depending on how our mobile products are received by the market.

My life prior to Thereitis consisted primarily of developing software, with the focus being mostly on finding various ways to have people throw away as much of their free time as possible. This was either in the form of writing games for the PS2 and XBox; my own iOS game (Helion, for those of you like being confused and getting distracted with bright colours); and being involved in the software pipeline for a few feature films here and there, such as a few Harry Potter flicks and Tomb Raider 2 (for those of you who like getting distracted with bright colours, combined with loud noises). So it’s certainly been an interesting and unusual journey to get where I am now, although it’s been curious to discover how much of my previous life is applicable to what we’re doing here.

In the near future I’ll be posting my experiences and thoughts on the various approaches that we’ve taken to our User Interface design, plus the questions that we’ve had to face along the way and changes made as a result. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably be surprised at the herculean amount of thought that goes into a well designed application.

Displaying large numbers of images in a usable interface is central to what we do. This brings upon challenges, typically in regards to performance and delivering a satisfactory user experience.

A recent feature we have added to our JavaScript API is the ability to perform simple image processing in the browser rather than relying on a server-side service to proxy the images through. This includes simple transformations such as cropping, scaling, adding rounded borders, etc.

As an initial test, we simply added a clipping path to the canvas context prior to drawing each image for every frame, though as you can imagine, this proved to be too costly and the degradation in performance was very noticeable when dealing with larger numbers of images.

In order to achieve satisfactory performance, we adopted the approach of rendering each image on it’s own canvas, performing the necessary transformations on the canvas and then discarding the original image. Each transformed canvas is then drawn to the main canvas in the rendering loop instead of the original source image. This introduced no performance penalty compared to drawing the original image, and to our surprise, actually showed an increase in performance across most browsers.

The main gains in performance we were seeing were due to scaling the images down to a size closer to what was being drawn on the canvas. The effect was most noticeable to us on iOS devices, removing the visual lag when interacting with the interface.

To compare the difference in rendering performance, I have put together a simple page that calls drawImage 1000 times every frame from a selection of 8 different images at random. The source images are 400px by 400px in size and are drawn onto the main canvas, which is 800px by 800px. Each image is drawn to a random position on the main canvas, with a random target size between 100px and 150px.

So we are basically testing three different elements passed to the drawImage method. The first is a plain DOM Image element, the second is a Canvas element of the same dimensions as the original image and the third is a Canvas element that is scaled down to 128px by 128px.

The test measures the total time taken to draw 500 frames for each method. The focus here is the relative difference for each element, not to compare performance across browsers.

As you can see, there is a trend across all browsers showing an increase in performance when using the scaled canvas element, with a minor performance increase in some browsers when using the full sized canvas element.

TL;DR — If you aren’t in control of the images that you are rendering on canvas and performance is a concern, it pays to pre-process the images by rendering them onto their own scaled down canvas to a size that is closer to that of the target.

If you are interested in seeing this in action, check out our Facebook App Spaces.

My name is Scott Christopher and according to my barcode, I am Thereitis employee #19E39AC. My main role here involves maintaining and evolving the JavaScript API and leading customer integration work.

Prior to working for Thereitis, I was predominantly producing back-end systems and middleware. As such, it has been great to get back to developing in the realm of UI, writing code that interacts directly with the end user and overcoming the challenges (both technical and psychological) associated with interacting with real life humans.

As an avid supporter of open source software and the surrounding communities, I hope to be able to use my role here to provide back to the community in some form or another where possible.

I look forward to sharing the challenges we face and the ways in which we overcome them in the future.

I would like to personally welcome you all to Thereitis.com blog. Here, we will be covering various interesting topics about technology and beyond. The whole team will be contributing valuable blog posts which will answer many of the questions about our innovations, consumer products, the latest technology trends and buzz including exciting features on the future of IT industry.

Thereitis.com has been named one of the Top 50 Cool Companies in Australia by Anthill Magazine for creating products that will positively change the way we work, play and even entertain. We will be able to share with you this ‘coolness’ by showing you through our blogs, how to implement our technology to your daily activities.

The team have some thoughts around what they’d like to blog about and this includes: “Debugging Websites in Chrome”, “Rapid Board in Greenhopper”, “Kinect SDK and Thereitis” and “Cross Platform Library Development”. We will also be touching on non-IT related topics such as “Experience as an intern” and “ The Benefits and Challenges of Virtual Assistants”.

Is there anything that you’d like us to blog about?

The Thereitis.com blog will definitely have something for everyone, techies and non-techies alike. We are more than excited to bring all of you, not just innovative products but blogs that will keep you informed and entertained at the same time.

Enjoy!

Guy Sewell
CEO

Sarah from Sarah’s Style Emporium has written a great blog post on Thereitis. We’re especially happy that whilst Sarah was able to see that our interface is fun, the future is the exciting part:

Imagine the possibilities – online shopping, where you are looking for the perfect pink peeptoe, made easy.

The URL is http://sarahsstyleemporium.onsugar.com/22700968. Make sure you visit her blog and leave a comment!

Thereitis.com Pty Ltd has been named one of Australia’s ‘Coolest’ businesses in Anthill Magazine’s Sixth Annual Cool Company Awards.

Thereitis.com Pty Ltd has scored a place among Anthill’s Top 50 in its 2011 Annual Cool Company Awards, a national program developed in 2006 to recognise Australian companies that are doing things differently to bring about positive change.

Over 700 aspiring ‘cool companies’ were nominated for the 2011 awards, making ‘The Cools’ one of Australia’s largest business awards programs. The winners will be announced at an award’s function on Thursday 24 November 2011 and published on AnthillOnline.com.

“The Cool Company Awards are extremely egalitarian,” said James Tuckerman, Editor-In-Chief, Anthill Magazine. “Previous winners have included two-person start-ups, not-for-profit social enterprises, large private companies and publicly-listed corporations.”

“Judging takes into account far more than mere business variables, such as revenue and wealth. The criteria is geared to consider other qualities, from the disruptive nature of the product or service to the culture of the organisation.”

“Applicants either nominated themselves or were nominated by peers, work colleagues, family, friends and other ‘admirers’. A field of hundreds was examined (and cross-examined) before our judges were able to isolate three Finalists for each of our seven categories.”

What are Cool Company Awards?

The Cool Company Awards was launched in 2006 as a way for Anthill Magazine to publicly acknowledge and celebrate Australian organisations that are doing things differently to bring about positive change. In its sixth year, the awards attracted nominations from over 700 organisations, making it among the largest business award programs in Australia.

What is Anthill Magazine?

AnthillOnline.com is a digital business magazine that celebrates creativity, inspiration and commercial ingenuity, providing a fresh, exciting and practical perspective on Australian business in a global world. It is among the Top 50 Business & Finance websites in Australia, as ranked by Nielsen Online Ratings, and is home to the Cool Company Awards, the 30under30 and the Smart 100. It’s where ideas and business meet.

For further information:

Guy Sewell, +61 423 364195, info@thereitis.com

We are pleased to announce another exciting step forward for thereitis.com with a $250,000 Proof of Concept grant issued by Commercialisation Australia.

“Commercialisation Australia is an initiative of the Australian Government. It is a competitive, merit-based assistance program offering funding and resources to accelerate the business building process for Australian companies, entrepreneurs, researchers and inventors. It offers a range of funding options as well as multi-layered networking opportunities to help you achieve business success. Participants in the program work with dedicated Case Managers and benefit from our Volunteer Business Mentor Network.” – Commercialisation Australia

The grant is one of the largest of its kind awarded to an SA company by Commercialisation Australia, which is not only a financial benefit but also an endorsement of Thereitis.com as a technology for the future. Being selected from a highly competitive field by the Australian Federal Government is validation that our efforts around market strategy and IP protection of the product sets us in great stead to tackle the global market of online search.

Thereitis.com will use the funding to perform new product development and move the technology onto an ever increasing range of platforms and applications.

As always. Watch this space!

Thereitis.com has been selected as one of the most innovative ICT companies in Australia, by Tech23 Industry awards.

“Tech23 2011 is THE competition for young, innovative and fast-growing Australian companies. Come along and be part of making great things happen!

Join the industry’s brightest and best-connected at Tech23 2011 where 23 young Australian companies will be selected to show off their company to the 400+ potential investors, mentors, entrepreneurs, and customers. Be amazed by some of the hottest new innovation Australia has to offer – in areas such as mobile, green, digital, health and enterprise software.”

Judged by industry heavyweights with representatives from the likes of Facebook, RedBubble, Intel and Ninemsn Tech23 means business. With over $150,000 in prizes and industry perks there’s plenty to get excited about. We’re also very proud to be the first South Australian company to be selected for the awards and hope to ruffle a few feathers in a largely Eastern States field.

Guy Sewell (Thereitis CEO) will be presenting the technology to 400+ delegates on 23rd of August. Stay tuned right here on the Thereitis blog or of course follow us on twitter or facebook.

Boomerang books is one of  Australia’s largest on-line book retailers. Thereitis and Boomerang Books are currently working together on beta integration for www.boomerangbooks.com.au

The Managing Director of Boomerang Books, Clayton Werner is confident that his customers will embrace the technology, as it will help them to find the product they are looking for faster, help to replicate the offline experience online and provide visibility of a larger selection of titles, increasing the possibility for an impulse purchase.

The technology will be live on www.boomerangbooks.com.au in mid-2011. Send us your details and we will send you an invitation to visit the site on launch day.