Last year we developed an application for the University of Melbourne, Ultrasound Education Group, Heartweb. The application is a file browsing, support and synchronisation utility for students enrolled in the Ultrasound Education Group's courses.

The group had a large amount of course material that traditionally was distributed on media (such as DVDs) to the students. The material was all being protected via Livecycle PDF security policy but they requested a simpler method of distributing and updating the materials.

Users' of the application log in and then are presented with a list of material that their policy allows them access to. The content was all moved to the Livecycle server and access was only available through custom developed secure API.

The application allows the user to select material for synchronisation keeping a directory, or individual files, "up-to-date" with the most recent updates to course material. As they browse through the material, files can be viewed or located on the local machine in the default system viewers or in the application where applicable.

Additionally links and other information can be passed to the students via the application allowing the course organisers to supply the students with important information through a single application portal.

A web browsing function was included so they could display content from the Heartweb website directly in the application. We used the StageWebView class functionality to achieve this end.

The application is written completely in Adobe AIR, allowing us to deploy across the multiple different platforms that the students used. We used the built in application updating techniques to provide application updates to the students.

Unfortunately, unless you want to sign up to the Heartweb course to get access to the materials, the application is unavailable, but it was a great experience in integrating file synchronisation with a secure document-based internet distribution process.

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.

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.

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.

We've produced a series of games for ABC Kids around the "Giggle and Hoot" TV program. The games were simple "hide and seek" and "dress up" games aimed at young children.

Check out the games here.

Also as part of the ABC Kids site we developed a player that would load games and media from the back catalogue of ABC developed games, audio and video. The player was used to provide parents the ability to assemble a "list" of games and media that their child can watch and play through.

It is used extensively across the ABC for Kids website.

There was also an augmented reality game produced, which will hopefully be live soon! We'll post more when we have a link.

One of our latest projects, the 'Sportsgirl Virtual Style Studio', has gone live this week!

Working with Citrus, we developed an augmented reality Flash app which features interactive video scenes showing off the Sportsgirl range.

You can print out the marker from the page, and if you don't have a webcam, you can play through and watch the video scenes all the same.

Check it out here.

Our latest project for Zoos Victoria has gone live. Part of the FUSE (Find, Use, Share, Educate) portal that supports kids to explore and solve complex issues facing our society through the use of digital technology. Designed for school aged children to create a conservation based mashup video from a series of resources from the FUSE portal.

The site was released yesterday by the Victorian Education Minister, Hon. Bronwyn Pike MP.

Unsustainable palm oil production in SE Asia is pushing orang-utans to extinction through loss of habitat. At the current rate of clearing the Orang-utan could be extinct within ten years. Kids can access a collection of video clips and images and use an online tool to ‘mash up' their own video to support the Zoo's Don't Palm us Off campaign. They can share videos in an online gallery.

Check out one of the user's mashups below:

The site was all built in AS3 using Flash Builder and integrated with a custom build of our content management system (a Flex and PHP-based XMLRPC server). The CMS provided a simple interface for the administrator to preview and approve the submitted mashups. It also included an AIR application build for desktop use, and a standalone version of the mashup player (as used above to show the mashup).

Check it out here.