In addition, both myself and our Community Director, Rebecca Newton have put forward panels for SXSW 2009. These panels can be viewed, and more importantly voted for, at the SXSW interactive panel picker at the links below. Help us out by checking out our panels and giving them a vote!

Playing To Learn - Educating Kids Through Gaming, Divinia Knowles
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1335

Everything in Moderation, Socializing in Excess, Rebecca Newton
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/838

What followed is not for public viewing, there were some graphic scenes involving ribs and BBQ sauce. Above is a family friendly shot of the meat feast and some very happy Mind Candy staff.

Although no one can say that MCFC played the beautiful game particularly well (we lost pretty much every match to be honest!), it just goes to show that it is the taking part that really does count. Saying that, we hope to be back next season, fitter, stronger and more skillful than ever and maybe with a few new signings (see how far the boss’s transfer kitty goes!) we could be pushing for promotion next time!

Mind Candy FC would like to thank the refs and organisers at The Elms for the past 10 weeks.

Team: Marty “The Foreign Legion” Batten, Ryan “Chopper” Conway, Ben “Ghost-faced Thriller” Geliher, Michael “Gazelle” Smith, Chris “Guns” Hoyes, Steve “The Tank” Pocklington.

Last night was the MOO Summer Street Party, a night of free beer and wine, great food and as much MOO stuff as you could lay your hands on!

A lot of Mind Candies went to the event, held at the Vibe Bar on Brick Lane, where we met a whole range of people with similar interests.

With great weather, and a great turn out, the party was a big success and we all hope MOO will continue what is now becoming a tradition next year.

At 4pm we all sat down (well some had to stand or squish themselves round the table a bit) to a sumptuous spread of scones with clotted cream & jam, Victoria sponge and the utterly wonderful Battenberg cake. I even cut the crusts off the tuna sandwiches!

We sampled a selection of teas. The responses varied: ‘Lapsang’ - smoky, Assam - fruity and Dahjeeling - spicy, and I made everyone eat as much cake as possible! This should hopefully help everyone steam through their workload this afternoon before falling into a sugar slump later.

So, we were at @media 2008 last week. Marty and I had a couple of good days listening to a lot of very clever and interesting people talk about all sorts of things to do with design, data, communities and code libraries, to mention just a few!

Although most of the talks we went to were very informative, there were a few that stood out to me as an interface designer and developer and those were the talks from Jeff Veen (ex. Google, Adaptive Path) and James Box (Clearleft). I’ll talk about Jeff’s presentation first.

Jeff was talking about telling stories with data, about how to present reams of information in a more intelligent and useful way. This is something that was piqued my interest because in Moshi we have a lot of data present on the main HUD (and potentially it may fill up more as we add more features) so I was keen when designing the HUD to display these pieces of data in groups that would make the most sense in context. Now although Jeff was primarily speaking about visualising data from a more tabular source, the approach he talked about is still useful, because he emphasises that it’s not the raw data that’s important, it’s actually the story that data has to tell and how we as designers can help the user make sense of it.

In Moshi we’ve aimed to group related data into specific groups that should (hopefully!) makes sense to a child. As a result we have 3 main areas of interest. The top right section holds Moshi’s two core metrics in terms of your progress in the game, one being your level (based on the amount of experience earned in minigames and puzzles), the other being it’s Monstar rating, essentially how popular the monster is in the community. The side bar is all about your monster, it’s health, happiness, wealth and well-being, and you can even check out a little bit of it’s history if you click on the profile button. The final section is related to the room itself, how visitors rate it and how many visitors you’ve actually had in total. I think it’s a good start to quite a difficult problem, but as with everything in design there’s always more to do!

Talking about interface design for children, this is a major challenge we face with the design process at Mind Candy. None of us are children (well… ahem, no comment), but we have to make sure our interfaces work for them. I’m sure this is something we’ll no doubt explore at a later date on this blog, along with a bit more usability research, once we finally get a hold of a copy of Silverback!

This year saw a brilliant line up of speakers, headed up by Jeffrey Veen (Adaptive Path, Google) first thing Thursday morning chatting about designing your way through data, data visualization and how incorporating users into our practice of user experience - and yes, that is taken directly from the sessions booklet :-). Veen lead the redesign of Google Analytics and managed the web apps UX team.

Tom Cartwright and Clare Roberts took us through the new BBC homepage and spoke about various odds and ends they come across during its development. This project took 3 client side devs and 2 software engineers 3 months and is of course ongoing. One interesting thing they mentioned was that they are currently using JQuery, which is what we use here, but due to JQuery dropping support for Safari 2 they are developing their own library - Glow, so will have to keep an eye on that. They also explained how they got their static image requests more than halved by using CSS Sprites and the Sliding Door techniques - pretty simple stuff really but none the less stuff that I never thought of myself, (apart from simple rollovers) of having 1 big image containing more than a dozen separate images that are simply positioned within the CSS. Simple but very cool. You can check out the beta site here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/.

James Box from Clearleft, Brighton showcased edenbee.com - a new community for people to tackle climate change - nice looking site and up to the usual Clearleft standard.

We also attended a chat about up and coming HTML5 and all that it will offer us from James Graham and Lachlan Hunt, again this was interesting - nothing was mentioned about XHTML2 apart from: HTML5 = Evolution, XHTML2 = Revolution, but I think they will both offer good and bad things. In the end a mixture of the 2 seems a good bet. If you fancy nerding out you can read more about whats in and whats out here: http://xhtml.com/en/future/x-html-5-versus-xhtml-2/. I am going to look more into HTML5 over the next while and thanks to Opera - which I think leads in support, try a few things out!

Dan Rubin of Sidebar Creative fame took us through some design techniques - some may argue this was pretty much Photoshop 101 but it can never be a bad thing to brush up on skills. Seeing more designing with grids was also good.

Andy Clarke took it a step further with his chat “Underpants Over My Trousers” - I love hearing Andy’s talks and this was another awesome session. In this session we learnt how Andy applied his passion for comics to almost everything as well as with his design for a Puerto Rican newspaper of all things.

John Resig, author of the JQuery Javascript library gave us the run down on all the different libraries out there at the moment and features they each offer.

The first day panel was good, discussing things from design workflow, scrums and sprints and how designers fit into this space along with current trends in web design.

Overall the event this year surpassed expectations and I took a lot away from it. I’m looking forward to next year - but maybe not as many drinks on the Thursday evening ;-)

@media Flickr pool.

Andy Budd has spoken about Clearleft’s new application, Silverback - if you have not heard of Silverback, its used for usability testing. Can’t wait to see this in action - hopefully we can get our hands on it soon.

Oh, and by the way - the icon by Hicks Design is killer!

Check out the Silverback website.

We have a new widget for Facebook and Bebo which lets your monster greet friends as they visit your profile, using information from your networks to personalise things.

There is also the new ratings system where visitors to your room can give it a rating between 1 and 5 stars, boosting your Monstar Rating within the community, and hopefully nudging you one step closer to that elusive A-rating! (while we’re on the subject, my room is over here :D).

Although we’re now open to the public, we’re a long way from being completely finished, there are lots of new features on the horizon, and we’d love to hear any feedback you have!

As always, all the latest Moshi news can be found on the Daily Growl at http://www.moshimonsters.com/community/blog/, so check it out!