Facebook is getting saturated with various apps, the majority either mindless variants of farm, pet or city growing, or tiresome surveys/quizzes.
That’s why we jumped at the opportunity to create an application that can have impact in the real world. ”Giving Nature a Voice” is a Facebook based multi-petition application for Forest & Bird New Zealand. Their first petition was to encourage people to speak up and help prevent more mining of our conservation areas:
There are existing Facebook petition apps about (eg; Causes), but they are all bloated with unnecessary extra features and weren’t able to be branded as tightly as Forest and Bird required. A custom solution was the best course forward, not only as we could design as we saw fit, but so we could learn what makes Facebook apps tick.
We regularly have the need to share assets with our clients - videos, images, mock-ups, documents, etc.
Instead of clogging up inboxes with huge files that can’t be easily found, or resorting to third parties such as yousendit we created a simple, clean online Client Area.
It is extremely easy to use - it simply maps our local folders and files to a tasty interface.
Got a new client? Just create a new folder with their name, and paste your assets into it.
Then just send your client the nicely formatted URL to their project.
Videos are recognised automatically and wrapped into a custom player (with timecode).
For security, folders are easily locked by a password.
Momentum enjoyed the opportunity to redevelop the McDonald Real Estate site (http://www.eieio.co.nz/) from the ground up.
A real estate site is a great technical challenge - hundreds of listings and thousands of photos changing daily, as well as complex searches and regular content changes.
We decided to use a free, open source CMS called Silverstripe.
I was fortunate enough to attend the first Wordpress Wordcamp NZ last weekend.
It was an energised, fun packed weekend with speakers and participants from a diverse range of backgrounds - lawyers, teachers, journalists, authors, designers, developers and geeks. All were passionate about their blog/CMS of choice - Wordpress.
Having rarely blogged or used Wordpress before, I was shown its power, flexibility and the huge range of plugins available. As a developer, its important for me to get under the hood, so I will be spending some time with digital wrench in hand.
Two typographers ( Pierre & Damien) and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car.
The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman
Hi, just a post to introduce myself, I’m Daniel Pickering, and I’m the latest addition to the Momentum Studios crew. I’m a web developer, and very excited to be working with such a talented and diverse team. I’m proud to call myself a geek, and love playing around with the latest technologies. I’ve recently delved into Linux, and have been using Ubuntu as the main OS on my laptop.
I’ve just discovered Xenocode (http://xenocode.com) , a sexy application virtualization system that allows you to launch Windows applications direct from the web with no installation (apart from a one time plugin).
As an excellent and useful example, they have a browser sandbox that allows you to launch any of the main market share browsers. Once they’re downloaded and cached, they start up very quickly.
This means you can run IE6, IE7 and IE8 all at the same time - great for testing.
As a geeky bonus, look in C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR PROFILE\Local Settings\Application Data\Spoon\Cache
Each folder contains the cached version of the app that you can launch directly, eg; ie6.exe, ie7.exe (ensure you’ve cached it correctly by launching it from the web at least once)
I was fortunate enough to attend the first Wordpress Wordcamp NZ last weekend.