Last Instinct

Recently, I made a Dealer Locator for Thule’s website. This is probably the biggest Javascript based project I’ve done so far. The application was made using the Google Maps Javascript API, jQuery and HTML5.

The main target was to get a faster and more flexible Dealer Locator than their previous locator. It should also easily be deployed globally to all countries they are operating in (currently 79). The application also had to meet needs of being portable to smartphones and tablets. All design and programming was done by me in this project. The hardest part was to make it as lightweight as possible and maintain decent speed in all browsers.

An interesting technical detail is that my translation system is using the new HTML5 Microdata model. In shorthand, the microdata model allows you to store custom data on all elements in your HTML. There’s no native support for it in the browsers right now, but it’s easy to work with it in jQuery. I think it has great potential and we have to see what it will be used for in the future.

At Basilicon, we were recently proud to release a dedicated video player for Thule globally. I have over some years developed a unique video technique for Basilicon which is rather cutting edge. It measures and estimates your bandwidth capabilities in 0.3 seconds and adapts the video to this.

Well, this can be done with any sophisticated streaming server, but this technique does it without the need of a streaming server, which reduces the cost and maintenance significantly. It’s done using Adobe Flash and it’s currently not possible to do in HTML5. It uses H.264 codec, which works like a charm in the latest Flash Player. Even on my old crappy laptop. It also features automatic quality control to optimize performance during playback.

Everything from video coding to player design and setting up the server was done by me. It was a bit nervous to estimate what performance we needed from the server and find a hosting partner that could deliver this for a reasonable price. I chose a cloud VPS for this, which could be upgraded with better performance when necessary. We have not needed to upgrade it yet and I am really satisfied with the performance and flexibility of our hosting. After some fine tuning it now serves 10000+ videos every day perfectly. That number will probably increase a lot later on, but the server has much more to give.