// labs

The Disaster Mapper - An interactive Resource for Schools is a project for the Attorney-General's Department, Australian Emergency Management Institute. The aim of the project was to provide an educational resource aimed at school students for investigating Australian natural disasters throughout history.

It was developed in 2009 but has just been released to the public.

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Holden's latest promotion for their Barina includes a game that we developed for ThinkNimble and McCann Melbourne.

The game is a Guitar Hero style game, where icons move along the road and the player has to hit the matching key as the icon moves over the hit area.

"The aim of the game is to beat the street and score as many points possible by hitting colourful icons as they race down the street! There are eight stages that get more challenging as you play. The prize? Whoever has the highest eligible score at the end of the competition period will win an all-new Holden Barina."

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We've been so busy over the last few months that we haven't had a chance to update any information on what we've been doing.

So here's the first in a series of updates.

One of our clients Marija Ivkovic, an amazing photographer, whose site I did a while ago. In order to show to power of Flash we decided to turn her site into a mobile application, by taking the exact same code base from the site and applying a few small tweaks.

The end result was actually quite surprising for a direct port of a website. We obviously added some touch and swipe based interactions, removed the "mouse over" interactions and added in a nifty little database cache process to cache images for offline access, but overall the code base remained relatively unchanged.

We were very excited to be able to supply this as an option for development. Creating an interactive web and mobile application has never been easier or more powerful.

It's available for free for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad in the App Store.

So I know this was a few weeks ago now, but I took a few weeks off afterwards to travel around Europe and now that I'm back I thought I'd put together a few little thoughts on the week.

As an Australian it's a long journey to Brighton, UK, and one that even with my passion for Flash could not be solely made for a 3 day conference. So with luck a few friends and I packed up and went off for a month to travel around France and Spain and I managed to work in the trip to Brighton for a few days.

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We've just pushed a new site live for the interior designer, David Hicks. The site is a simple gallery style site using jQuery and smarty templates.

David has had a Flash site for a long time but recent trends has made him request a new simplified html version of his site, and to reflect his new branding.

See the new site at davidhicks.com.

The Victorian Zoos Mashups site has been updated to include some new features that we had a bit of fun implementing. A couple of simpler improvements, including mashup ratings, staff picks and an updated gallery view, along with some new functionality to record from your web camera, using a Red5 installation!

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Shane and I have been busy the last few weeks putting together the Zappp applications. We're hoping to have something up in the coming weeks. We've really been surprised by the performance and ease of developing mobile applications in Flash Builder and it's getting us very excited about the future!

With all this going on I just had to share a few sneak screenshots of the apps we're building, one for Grinspoon:

And one for Josh Pyke:

As you can see we're developing a series of applications for bands. Really exciting times for us and can't wait to show you the results!

We've recently updated Lachlan's site with some new features, including an introduction slideshow, and integration with RoyaleCMS. The CMS is a powerful, rebrandable CMS for any XML driven website or web application. It's a flash/php based CMS and provides a very simple and clean interface especially good for gallery and image based websites.

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Distriqt has recently entered into a new relationship with One Meaning Communicated Differently. The new entity called Zappp will develop a mobile application platform for musicians in Australia. The project is an exciting development for us and we'll be moving quickly into large scale mobile development over the coming months.

Here's the press release:

We are very pleased to announce the launch of ZAPPP a new company that creates intuitive and engaging apps for mobile, tablet and desktop devices. We are even more pleased to announce that we will be buildings apps for some of the best Artists in Australia including Angus & Julia Stone, Josh Pyke, The Getaway Plan, Little Red, Grinspoon, Illy, Gold Fields and Icehouse(Yes, the Icehouse).

Says co-founder Jai Al-Attas “The whole point of starting ZAPPP was that we didn’t want to just create mobile versions of band websites and call them an App. We think that Apps are useless unless they provide value to both the user and the Artist, so we created the ZAPPP feature which allows the Artist to have a direct & meaningful relationship with the User by offering them exclusive incentives and rewards through the functionality of our Apps”.

Mobile Apps really took off in 2010 and they’re only going to get bigger in 2011 & beyond. At the moment 43% of the Australian population use a smart phone and worldwide they expect app downloads to go from 10 billion in 2010 to over 70 billion in 2014.

ZAPPP is a partnership between creative agency ONE MEANING COMMUNICATED DIFFERENTLY and development whizzes DISTRIQT; who between them have done work for Bands and Brands such as the ABC, Fox Interactive, Victoria Zoos, KR3W Denim, Ford, Bic Pens, V8 Supercars/Tony Hawk, Sparkadia, Bag Raiders, Little Red and Korn to name a few.

Contact us for more information or head over to the Zappp site.

I've been trying out the latest beta of Firefox (4.0b11) which is seeming nice but still has a few little issues (the old no hand cursor issue that chrome had for ages seems to be one of them).

But one thing that was making it impossible for me to work was the timeout crash on the flash player while I was trying to debug.

The default timeout for plugins is 45 seconds which can easily be changed in the about:config page:

• Type about:config
• Look for the dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs
• Set the value to -1

And be blessed with no crash reports for flash debugging. Note however this affects all plugins and operation of the browser, so it's not suggested for normal browsing.