Giving Back

Here at Digital Unleashed, we like to share our technology rather than hoarding it as some sort of "trade secret". This serves a number of important purposes. To begin with, it allows other members of society to learn from us, and to build on our work rather than repeating it. This indirectly benefits society as a whole. Since we are also part of that society, this is a good thing for us, and our world.

But it's not all about charity and long-term goodness, of course: by letting people use our technology, we encourage them to test and enhance our tools: to point out flaws that we can fix, to fix flaws themselves, or to add new features. We invite even our direct competitors to use our tools, and, if they happen to feel inspired to contribute, we welcome that spirit of co-operation. We are not afraid to compete with others based on our work, rather than on the tools we use to do our work.

Among a number of other projects we contribute to indirectly or more peripherally, we have so far made the following tools available under Free Software licenses. "Free" here refers to freedom, of course, but the tools also happen to be free of charge. Should you have any comments on these tools, please contact us

Projects Available Now

KatchTV

KatchTV is an "Internet TV" application for KDE. It makes it easy to subscribe to "TV" channels from all over the internet in the form of podcasts, so that you can browse channels, download shows, and watch them, all from one convenient interface. To download KatchTV, click on the title link above. There is also a KatchTV Bzr repository available, for the very latest version in development.

SVGSlice

SVGSlice is a plugin for the vector graphics program, Inkscape, which allows a high-quality SVG image to be directly sliced into bitmap graphics for a website. It does this using Inkscape's built-in layers and rectangles, so that you can visually draw where you want slicing to be done, directly from within the program. A simple, but very useful tool for web developers. The older, stand-alone version of SVGSlice, which includes guide-based slicing, is also available, along with the SVGSlice bzr repository.

PeaceForge

PeaceForge is an international project based around a Wiki website. Its purpose is to provide a place where people can research behaviour patterns and historical cycles, in order to develop new, peaceful solutions to various kinds of conflict around the world.

BzrPublish

This is a simple tool for bzr, which makes it easy to create releases from a project under bzr control. Commands are provided for creating tarballs, publishing beta and official releases, and also for publishing development logs and repositories over ssh. A development log and repository for BzrPublish itself is available, as well as the release (title link, above), and the latest beta version.

AccessForm

AccessForm is a modification of PHP's PEAR QuickForms. The purpose of this modification is to allow full W3C Accessibility Compliance, up to the triple-A standard, in all generated forms. It does this by adding accesskeys and other related features, and at the same time, tries to minimise modifications in order to prevent introducing new problems to the very effective and powerful QuickForm system.

Projects Under Development

The following projects are more long-term in nature. As such, they are not yet ready, and are being developed more slowly. Nonetheless, we care about these projects deeply, and continue to work on them as time allows.

AMPU

A More Perfect Union (AMPU), is an advanced communication and organisation tool, with a lot of potential. Basically, we are developing a system which will allow organisations, large or small, to be managed online in a very democratic fashion. This is ideal for charities and other bodies which are diverse, widespread, or quickly evolving.

Eventually, we hope to make this system scale so that many individual organisations can connect together into one cohesive whole. For example, individual schools using AMPU would be able to link up to form a national education body, with seamless integration of discussions and management between national, regional, and local levels. Even different kinds of organisations will be able to link up using AMPU, so that charities could perhaps link up with industry, or funding bodies, etc.

Emoshin

A system which will provide emotions in games, not just for characters' actions, but for consequences of one's own actions and the game as a whole. No longer will games be limited to violence or puzzles or reflexes; instead, the full depth of movies or books will be available, and with it, entire new genres of games. Emoshin is also expected to be very useful in simulations and systems analysis, such as when it is necessary to predict crowd response to an emergency in a confined space.

Staff Personal Projects

Our staff have a wide variety of interests besides technical projects. Sometimes, this leads to other projects which can be made available online. We hope you find them useful.

How to Make a Seiza Bench

This is a simple guide (in PDF format) to making your own seiza bench (for meditation) with basic woodworking tools. Seiza benches are a great alternative to sitting cross-legged, allowing you to sit upright and be supported while kneeling. Seiza benches can be quite expensive, and making your own can be very rewarding.