Orange Tentacle Christmas Card

Merry Christmas to all from Orange Tentacle.

Billed Under Client Code “Frosty”

Dear client,

my apologies for not being diligently working as I probably should have been today. If you were not aware, it’s been snowing the past few days and being the rather large kid that I am, I decided that we were unable to get to the office (despite it being eight steps from my bedroom).

To compensate for this, I did something much more productive. It’s a prototype implementation of a Briggs inspired solution to the classic winter design problem:

Yep, I engineered a freakin’ snowman. He’s 5ft 8in tall, a few feet across the shoulders and should hopefully last at least a few days.

Normal service will resume tomorrow.

Masque Mobile: The fencing ref’s Android friend.

Orange Tentacle have just released their latest Android application: Masque Mobile. Masque Mobile is a fencing referee’s friend designed to take the pain out of juggling scores, times and cards.

The UI has been built, and rebuilt around the ideal of a clean interface designed to minimise potential mistakes. The referee is presented with a clean UI, with only the score counters, cards and time on screen. A large button with haptic feedback means the timer can be started and stopped with the eyes away from the device.

If a penalty occurs during a bout, the referee can action a card by selecting the appropriate card outline. Optionally a full screen card can be presented to the offending party. The interface will keep track of the number of cards awarded and can also award hits to opponents.

Other features are cleverly hidden away. Priority resets, and breaks are all actioned from the menu, and preferences to define period length, and the amount and kinds of feedback the application provide can all be set from the preferences dialog.

This is the first “paid for” app released by Orange Tentacle (at a very modest 99p), and while we’re not expecting it to be proving Porsches for Christmas, we hope the fencing community will appreciate the amount of time that has gone into developing this little application.