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.

This project made use of the latest Flash technologies with the Google Maps API to provide an interactive map where users could navigate and search disaster information by time, location, disaster types and keywords.

The application uses a very simple series of navigational elements. A series of large buttons allows the user to select the disaster categories of interest and a timeline allows the user to limit the time period displayed. The disasters matching these two filters are then displayed on the map along with overview information of the selected disaster categories in the information panels on the left.

Media associated with each disaster (including images, flv, youtube, viemo, mp3 and other media types) can be viewed either in quick view in the information panels or in the detail overlay.

The system also supported and included additional data such as population, temperature, rainfall and specific high-risk disaster areas which could be overlaid on the map.

The result is a very easy-to-use, interesting website and something suitable for the target audience of school students.

Making use of some extra available time, distriqt also developed an additional component for the CMS which allowed an administrator to directly edit overlay data on top of a Google Map, using a standard data format (KML). This allowed the client to create more meaningful and suitable overlay information for the website such as risk areas, temperature, population and rainfall data.

The project was delivered on-time and on-budget, and has been well-received by the client, schools, and educators - all feedback has been very positive.

See the site here.

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."

It was created as a Facebook application to tap into the popularity of the growing social gaming market and to promote the features of the all-new Holden Barina. The game features music and sound effects from the radio adverts and TVC.

The competition is running until the end of February 2012. Play the game here

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.

The trip there was fraught with danger, so much so that my laptop had packed it in by the time I got to Brighton. A brand new MacBook Air mind you. I arrived late afternoon into Brighton and of course my first destination was the Apple store, can't survive a conference without a laptop. Thankfully it was a quick fix and I was in and out within 30 minutes. They were actually really helpful and even gave me a UK power adapter so I didn't have to use the converter I've had for years.

So I was back on track and went off to the Dome for registration.

The first day was lots of fun. Stray's talk about the brain was compelling, I went in expecting an update on my favourite framework, Robotlegs and walked away with a lesson in brain science. She had us playing memory games and doing basic maths and, Stray, I've since become a Pomodoro timer addict as well!

Rob Bateman talked on Away3D and the integration with Stage3D. Eugene showed us some really amazing image pattern matching techniques that he's working on, using Alchemy and Apparat.

The day finished off with Jon Burgerman showing us how he ended up where he is, an artist with a fun, creative illustration style and interactive passion. A interesting trip along through the life of an illustrator. Even managed to score myself a little sticker of one of his characters.

The evening I met up with Neil who I worked with at Studio Moso in Melbourne and we went out for a few drinks. He's now working at Stink Digital in London and was great to meet some of the cool flash devs from there: Ian, Phil and Thomas.

But the highlight of the evening had to be meeting the Robotlegs creator, Shaun Smith (twitter). I fear I probably acted a little star struck and came across like an adoring idiot but I hope he understood. It had been a big day of meeting people who from Australia seem far distant and almost imaginary, but they are all real and down to earth people!

Day 2 started off a little slow (mainly because of the beer from the previous evening). I took my time getting to the conference so I could wander the streets of Brighton and discover some of the much talked about street art.

Seb-lee's presentation soon kicked my brain into gear. (Or perhaps it was all that coffee. They were giving it away for free!!) He showed us a really clever way of using the audience's mobile devices, controlled by a server to create a display, each device displaying a colour at a particular time. The thing I found really interesting was his idea to locate each device in the room. He sent each device an id and got the device to transmit it by flashing the screen colour (sort of like morse code) Then using a camera he analysed the camera feed for each id and attached it to the identified location. Such a great solution to what may have initially seemed a very complex problem.

Mike Chambers followed up with a break down of the expressive web, a site set up by Adobe to show the potential of HTML5 and CSS3.

More talks, before the evening finished in the required amount of one pound beers, i.e. lots.

Day 3, more coffee, more talks, I'm being brief on the talks as I think I got more out of the conference lunch breaks and evenings than the actual talks. One I would like to mention from the last day however is one by Jared Ficklin, "Visions from the man cave". This guy was great, showing off what fun can be had with a few pieces of electronics and a great idea. From the toilets that showed not only whether the toilet was occupied but if the occupant was sitting or standing, to large scale interactive music bit sampler, and of course, playing with smoke and fire!

So as the conference came to an end, and after a few of the Stink Digital boys and me had a huge buffet dinner, it was time for me to leave Brighton.

The conference was an amazing experience, something that we just don't have in Australia, and I don't think would work even if you managed to pull together the speaker list and venue locally. The amazing thing about this conference was the people that attend. The development community in close proximity, from London, France, Germany, Netherlands, and even Russia. It really is just mind blowing the number of highly qualified developers over there.

And as I say that I think about our local community and love that it is so small. We don't need a big conference to get together, just the pub on a Friday night. Either way, I've come back inspired, excited and full of ideas for the year to come.

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!

The most interesting addition was, of course, the live streaming of your web camera to the server which you could then add into your mashup, mixing text and audio in with your recorded video. We created a simple interface, similar to the video player that included a record button.

We installed a Red5 server on the Zoos website, a procedure I detailed in a previous post.

So once the user had allowed the application access to the camera, the user could just press record to start the application streaming and recording the web camera, and press stop to complete. The user could then press play to review the video and continue to accept the video and use it in the mashup.

In addition we created a new embed functionality to simplify the process of users being able to put their video on a site. The code became a simple iframe embed code as below:

 
<iframe width="370" height="315" src="http://wild.zoo.org.au/mashups/embed.php?id=587" frameborder="0"></iframe>

This new player included the quick rating functionality and the ability to show staff/zoo picks.

The updates are live now, so check them out at the Victorian Zoos Mashups site.

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.

Previously this site integrated with a Drupal backend, but we found that ordering images in a Drupal gallery was overly complex and was becoming an issue for image management for this site. Hence we decided to try RoyaleCMS.

We had a few minor integration issues but overall it was a simple experience to get our website interfacing to the CMS. The available parser libraries definitely made it an easy experience to get the content from the CMS. Our biggest problem was the difficulty of associating a description with an image. Something that nearly every gallery site requires however it was a bit of a process (though by no means impossible) to get the CMS setup to add this simple piece of metadata.

We definitely recommend RoyaleCMS if you're looking for a simple backend to manage a flash portfolio site.

Check out the updated site at lachlanmoore.com.au.

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.