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.

We've put up a site for Melbourne based photographer, Lachlan Moore. He is a great photographer and I've found myself wasting a lot of time looking through his portfolio. My favourites have to be some his landscapes of New Zealand.

Check it out here.

Our first major project, ABC Black Saturday Interactive, went live yesterday!

"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 has been a great experience, and we're really 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.

Huge thanks go to the ABC Innovation Department, the producer Priscilla Davies, designers Bec Smith and Sarah Fawcett, and everyone else who contributed to the project - it was a great team to work with.

We're really proud to see this online so please go and check it out and explore the site!

Black Saturday Interactive

We developed a website for a customer but unfortunate circumstances meant it was never deployed. So we're offering it up cheap.

It's a full xml driven photo gallery website, designed for a photographer. We even linked it into a drupal CMS install with some custom php, to pull the images from the galleries allowing the site to be easily updated by the client.

We are really disappointed this site never went live, so if you have any interest in putting a photo based website up this may be for you.

Have a look at some screen shots below:

And if you're interested in the website drop us an email and we'll setup a preview of the site for you.