Founded in 2004 by President and Creative Director Steve Park, Sidewalk is built on 14+ years of industry experience. Sidewalk has a solid reputation for producing innovative and high profile projects for many of Canada’s media industry leaders such as Chum Interactive, Alliance Atlantis, St. Joseph Media, Canwest, and the CBC.

The focus of this exciting new partnership is to bring best practice, innovative UI/UX to product design and application development for web, desktop & mobile.

While I’m not going to post the first, this is the second ‘Red Nose Day’ I had the pleasure of working on. As much as RND 2007 was focused on ’skinning’ their event, my work on RND 2009 was much more in the interaction design department.

Working with the team at Artez, I developed a ‘Media Viewer’ that would allow users to upload, tag, and manage both video and images. The Media Viewer had a three states:

• Admin - allowing the organization to configure how they wanted the player to behave in their event.
• Participant - allowing the user to interact with directly, grabbing favorite videos from youtube, uploading images from their computer, and adding titles and descriptions for both.
• Public - what the public would see when viewing the participants personal page.

While there were several, one of the gotchya’s we faced was that the Artez product, e2rm, is hosted in https on almost all pages. This meant that making calls to youtube directly (to display the user a preview image of the video they had just added) would generate a mixed content security error - ugh. To get around this, we wrote a server-side solution to grab the preview image from youtube, upload it to the db, and display it back to the user from the e2 domain. All of this was done single page via server-side and ajax callbacks meaning minimal wait time between interaction and no post-backs.

When I read it back, it doesn’t really sound like a big deal, but small victories can be just as rewarding.

Additional work on this project included event skinning, custom thermometer, and an enhanced search functionality.

www.rednoseday.com

Thanks to the good folks over at BraveNewCode, 4.5Lines is now viewable in ‘iPhone’ mode. Users who still want to view the regular site layout can select ‘normal view’ at the bottom of the Safari window.

Dead easy to install and some intuitive options for customization - overall killer plugin.

“Nets save lives. Right now, you can help protect a child, a family, a school or even an entire town in Africa from malaria — simply by purchasing mosquito nets.”

Still very early running as I’ve never really looked at TTS systems before, but is certainly fun to try out. Currently default to read my twitter status.

View it here

Once this happens though, I end up with a series of components that end up melded into applications or buried into sites that have various user requirements to be able to view, much less play with.

Hence “geekLab”. It’s really nothing more than a repository of ideas, code, proof of concepts - but before they get lost, mangled by a client, or inaccessible to the public.

Event Description

“Sport Relief is a nationwide campaign that harnesses the power and passion of sport to change lives for the better. By doing sport, having fun and raising money, everyone can do good and feel good.”

Event Description:

“The Calgary Ride with Lance is a scenic 100 kilometer ride from Canmore to Lake Louise via Lake Minnewanka and the 1A Highway with legendary cyclist Lance Armstrong. This fun, up-tempo yet exhilarating ride, limited to a maximum of 60 serious riders and fundraisers, culminates with an intimate and exclusive private team dinner with Lance and special guest Robin Williams at the Post Hotel in Lake Louise.”

Event Description:

“On September 6th and 7th, 2008, twelve Six Flags locations across the United States hosted the inaugural “A Walk In The Park” walk-a-thon event to raise funds in support of Cure Kids Cancer. Through these walks, we drove awareness for this vital cause while helping to provide the resources necessary for pediatric cancer patients to receive world-class treatment close to home.”

The site reads from a flat XML file to build the navigation and provide content for each of their sample videos. When one of the thumbnails is clicked, I’m using jQuery to created a new instance of the Jeroen Wijerings FLV Video Player (longtail), tell the player which FLV is being requested, and populate additional campaign details.

They wanted a simple, small interface (”didn’t want to scroll in 1024 on a macbook” :p ), and they wanted the apple feel.