Here's a rundown of what we've been up to lately here at distriqt!

New Website!

First off - we've launched our new website. The new site includes a section displaying some featured work which shows off some of the projects we're proud of creating.

As always, we are offering a full range of digital development services for projects ranging from websites, applications, games, digital installations and everything in between.

distriqt Goes Mobile

The web and mobile industry is moving at an incredible pace these days. Given the latest trends, we are now proud to offer complete mobile development services for mobile sites and applications on iPhone, iPad and Android platforms.

We've been working hard over the past year and have already created and deployed mobile apps for some of Australia's biggest bands, including The Living End, Angus & Julia Stone and many more. We also repurposed our Flash website for the fantastic Marija Ivkovic into an iPhone and iPad portfolio app.

Flash and HTML5

We'd also like to clarify that we still love Flash! The web industry has been moving away from Flash and Flex technology in many areas. Traditional web sites and microsites are no longer suited to using Flash, however Adobe is focusing the Flash runtime in exciting new directions, such as 3D gaming for desktop and mobile, and high-quality video streaming.

distriqt will continue to offer standard HTML, CSS and Javascript development for suitable projects in place of Flash, while focusing our Flash development services on new and emerging areas that fully utilise its potential.

While we're also excited about the future of HTML5 and CSS3, these technologies are not yet viable as a solution to reach a mass audience. We do love playing with shiny new things, however, so we can always offer HTML5 development for a suitable project!

That's all from us for now - we hope you're having a cracking year.

Feel free to drop us a line if you have an idea you'd like us to help you create.

- the distriqt boys

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.

This represents an exciting new direction for distriqt, and defines new areas of digital development we are now focused on.

We have developed apps for some of Australia's biggest bands, including The Living End, Angus & Julia Stone, Grinspoon, Josh Pyke, and The Getaway Plan - just to name a few.

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.

We've also launched our new ZAPPP IT YOURSELF service, which allows bands and musicians to build their own app directly through the website.


Contact us for more info, or head on over to the ZAPPP website.

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.

This project made use of 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.

Developed for the ABC Innovation department, we developed this interactive website after the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria.

The project received a fantastic response, and won two AIMIA awards in both categories it was nominated for, including:
Best Online Video
Best Classifieds, News, Media or Reference

From the press release:
"It pulls together hundreds of pieces of media – professionally produced media, official documents and records and the best user generated content – to provide a stunning insight into the fires and the people who lived through them. An interactive map and timeline allow you to explore the events through time and location, and a series of dramatic video portraits provide a moving insight into the personal experiences of some survivors."

This project was a great experience, and distriqt's first major project. We are incredibly happy with the end product. The site pulls together a heap of media data such as video, audio, imagery and news content from a multitude of sources and combines it into a great interactive experience. The Google Maps API also provided us with a really interesting way of exploring the data visually based on the time and location of every media item and story.

Thanks to:
Priscilla Davies - Producer
Bec Smith & Sarah Fawcett - Designers

The website is still up and running, however due to the transient nature of the internets, some of the content is no longer available.

Black Saturday Interactive

We developed this website for fashion designer Tali Roth.

Using Flash, we created a really interesting navigation style which allows users to seamlessly browse the catalogues and zoom to see detailed shots of the products.

Check it out at http://taliroth.com.au.

We developed this interactive portfolio site for photographer Marija Ivkovic.

Utilising Flash we created a slick, intuitive and interesting navigation system to browse through Marija's fantastic work.

We were also awarded with the Site of the Day from DesignLicks.com.

Recently, we also converted the website into a mobile application for iPhone and iPad.

You can check it out online here or in the iTunes App Store.

We developed this portfolio website for Australian designer David Hicks.

The site is built with HTML, CSS and Javascript and gave David a smooth site with a minimalist look and feel.

The site easy for users to navigate, and most importantly shows off his body of work without getting in the way.

Check it out online at http://www.davidhicks.com.

We created this interactive portfolio site for Lachlan Moore, an incredible photographer.

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

Check out the site at lachlanmoore.com.au.

We developed this interactive video mashup builder for Zoos Victoria.

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 in 2010 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.

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.

This simple Objective-C code excerpt prints the methods and arguments of a class instance using the NSLog functionality.

//
//	List the methods of the class instance "myClass"
methods = class_copyMethodList([myClass class], &methodCount);
for (int i=0; i<methodCount; i++)
{
	char buffer[256];
	SEL name = method_getName(methods[i]);
	NSLog(@"Method: %@", NSStringFromSelector(name));
	char *returnType = method_copyReturnType(methods[i]);
	NSLog(@"The return type is %s", returnType);
	free(returnType);
	// self, _cmd + any others
	unsigned int numberOfArguments = method_getNumberOfArguments(methods[i]);
	for(int j=0; j<numberOfArguments; j++)
	{
		method_getArgumentType(methods[i], j, buffer, 256);
		NSLog(@"The type of argument %d is %s", j, buffer);
	}
}
free(methods);