A sister project for the Valemont International site was an iPhone and iPad app. This was especially exciting for me as it would be the first experience I would have developing an actual iPhone application, not just playing around with everything in XCode (It’s near impossible to come up with a good idea on your own, everybody has developed so much already!)

The iPhone app is a very simple application which allows the users to keep up with the latest stories from the Valemont site in their particular region. The app is set up to read the users settings and determine which site they should be directed to. This was tricky as the iPhone doesn’t allow you to differentiate between English (UK) and English (Australia), along with all the other versions of English and the other languages that were used more than one. In any case, it works, and the app, like the site, is completely multi-lingual.

The app reads the associated RSS feeds to display them in proper locations on the site. The look of the app makes use of the iPhone’s small resolution area (of course with the iPhone 4 now released we could have redesigned, but our assumption was that there were more people who would have the “older” versions of the iOS devices), giving us a “dark” look, to best fit the show’s dark, mysterious feel.

The big thing that you get from the app that you can’t get from the site is the Inbox. The application makes you feel like a student at Valemont, where you can get some exclusive content in your inbox. Of course, the content simply comes from another Wordpress feed that was set up on the site. Push notifications are also used to inform the user when they have a new message (note: at the time of writing this, due to some issues out of my control, push notifications have been disabled).

The iPad app is extremely similar to the iPhone application, but with a different look. Obviously the biggest screen and higher resolution made it a little more difficult, especially considering that neither of the applications had true “designs” for me to follow. As I am not a designer, I’ll be the first to admit that past the home screen, the app is a little bland. In any case however, the app works, which is the most important part. It holds all of the same properties that the iPhone version does (right down to the push notifications currently being disabled .

Will post the link to the app store once I receive it from MTV! (Update: Link now posted, but will only work in iTunes Stores that are associated with the site, so no Canada or US)

I loved working with the iPhone and iPad, and hope to have more projects for them in the near future!

… there’s something strange going on at Valemont.

Valemont is a series of webisodes that appeared on MTV’s website last year. The 35 webisodes blew up (in popularity), evidenced by the fact that there is a movie and a series coming from it. The show centers around the Students at Valemont University, which so happens to be a school for Vampires.

The show’s original website for MTV was like an ARG, where you could help the character try to find her brother. It all worked very nicely as a tie-in with the sponsorship the show had from Verizon. I was tasked with setting up a site that looked similar to the original, with some of the elements that were on the original site, but the more important part was that it was to be for MTV’s International division, meaning it was going to be delivered to 21 different regions in 14 different languages (because I assume most of my visitors are English, the link on the right is to the European home of the site).

I used Wordpress as the base of the project. For a site that would have a blog, news entries, updates and more, I felt that the ability to customize Wordpress and have a single install that could handle multiple databases was the best choice. Content was translated by MTV’s translation teams worldwide, letting me focus solely on having the site work the way it’s supposed to. Sure, there were some issues with the languages when the site was working, but with a focus on defensive programming, any issues could easily be fixed.

Another reason to choose Wordpress was that it easily let me schedule posts. I have all content in my Wordpress database tables, with stories scheduled to go live on predefined dates, so that I don’t have to worry about them. With Wordpress being so easy to extend, other pieces of content are also easy to push live on the proper date through building custom plugins and using plugins freely available for Wordpress.

The site also makes use of a Flash application I created for the campus map. I created a page template in Wordpress that would spit out XML with any relevant information I needed for the map which would be read by the Flash map and display the proper information for the proper language.

The site also uses MTV International’s “DART” implementation for serving ads. The site knows what region it is being viewed from, and from that serves up relevant ads.

The coolest part of the project for me was that I actually ended up sitting next to the Director of the webisodes by pure coincidence in late June on my trip home from Toronto (I was not there to riot, I had tickets for baseball games which were moved to Philadelphia, which is a whole other story all together). We struck up a conversation which lead to Valemont, which I had just started on the week before. I learned all about the show, got some behind the scene information and all in all, it was a very cool experience. Though I am not really a fan of the whole “Vampire” craze that’s going on right now, I am excited to finally get to watch all the webisodes now that I have the time…

Another project for the Big Nate project we did at theRedSpace for the new Big Nate book release.

At it’s core, it’s a reskin of the “Monkey Business” game I worked on at Halifax Film for the “That’s So Weird” project. Again, we had a simple game where objects were dropped from the top of the screen and the player, playing as Nate, would have to catch the objects or else he would receive a detention from his teacher, Mrs. Godfrey.

The most exciting part of this project for me wasn’t so much the building of the game. While that was fun, I was asked to come up with a concept for the game and how we could make it work. All we had to go with was that the game had to use Mrs. Godfrey. I came up with the idea of having Nate’s main nemesis in the books, Gina, trying to get Nate in trouble by throwing the objects into the air. Mrs. Godfrey would automatically blame Nate for any problems that occur during class, and while simple, the concept fit the mold of game that we were building and seemed like a fun idea. It came out very good and very fun, and it was a lot of fun to be able to put my own ideas into it, whereas a lot of the times in this business you don’t get much of a chance do so as someone on the programming side.

The game also uses AMFPHP to grab the user’s information from the Drupal install and save their scores to the highscore table.

The animations, which are awesome in my opinion, were done at World Leaders, and it was my job to implement them. I have to give them major kudos for their work on this project.

Another project for Comedy Central’s newest show “Ugly Americans” that I absolutely loved working on.

The project itself is very simple both in concept and technicality. You have a map of Manhattan (where “Ugly Americans” takes place) with markers on it that correspond to clips from episodes that have already aired.

The markers are generated by reading an XML file which the producers at Comedy can easily update.

Once users have finished watching a video, they can choose to share the map with their friends via Facebook, Twitter, or both! The application will appear on the viewer’s news feed on Facebook, a tweet on Twitter, with a link back to the application so they can browse clips themselves.

Shortly after creating the Facebook Quiz Generator for Comedy Central, they were back looking for another Facebook quiz that unfortunately wasn’t set up to be built like the quiz generator would build them.

This was going to be a quiz that would be like a “select your own adventure” type of quiz, where the answer from one question would determine your next question. The quiz in question was for the new “Ugly Americans” show which was to premiere in March 2010 on Comedy Central. The show was about beings of all sorts migrating to New York City, from Humans to Amoebas to Robots, they were all moving to Manhattan.

The quiz was the show’s “Department of Integration What Are You?” quiz, which would determine which of these beings you would be on the show.

The quiz was simple Facebook coding, but a fun project to work on, specifically because of all the characters that quiz takers could end up being. Rabbicorn and Phallusoid.

See which of the creatures you would be for yourself by taking the quiz for yourself.

The Big Nate Countdown Widget is an Adobe AIR widget I built to coincide with the launch of the latest book in the “Big Nate” series, “Big Nate In a Class by Himself”.

The widget is quite simple. It displays Nate saying just how many days are left until the day his book launched, and if the book is launched, an appropriate message will then be displayed.

The widget also displays a daily comic which users can scroll through to see the comics of days past, supplied by Comics.com.

You can download the widget for yourself by checking out the website here.

Some coworkers of mine at TeamSpace and I started working with the team from World Leaders in late January of 2010 to build a couple of sites for them. I was tasked with the Flash work for the project.

The first of these projects was a simple Fortune Cookie game that would have a user enter their name and favorite animal. Once they had entered this information, they would get some sexy animations of a spotlight randomly bouncing from cookie to cookie with a drum roll. When the drum roll ends and the gong sounds, the selected cookie will float out and crack open to reveal a random fortune to the user. This kind of defeats the purpose of the name and animal being entered, but it’s still a fun, simple application.

I’m big into social media (Facebook, Twitter), and while you’re normally taught at a young age to not talk to strangers, I have met my fair share of good contacts and characters alike on these mediums.

One of these good contacts I’ve met runs his own graphic design business. He wad having some troubles with a Flash application he was working on, and I gave him a hand. I lent him some help a couple more times when he needed help, and after that he approached me about doing some Flash work for him.

The work was not anything that seemed too difficult for me, and it was for a company I knew well. Vogue Optical is a Canadian vision company that deals with lenses, glasses, etc. I knew the name so well from their catchy jingle and thought it would be a fun project to work on.

The project itself was a map that Gravista Graphics would design. I would set up the hit areas for the map, popping up the province that a user was hovering over if there was a Vogue Optical store in their province. I built an XML file from the excel spreadsheet that he sent me listing all the stores and their info. When clicked, the Flash would send the XML data for the selected province to the page through JavaScript and would list all of the stores using jQuery.

It was a fun project to work on, and someone I look forward to working with in the future!

In the last quarter of 2009, we were contacted at theRedSpace that Nickelodeon USA wanted to implement the Cartoon Creator that had been built the year previous. What they also wanted to do was improve the fish builder, so that we would have some new features, the most radical was the inclusion of an avatar builder, where kids could visit the Spongebob site and create their own “Fish Person”, similar to the generic characters you could see on the SpongeBob television show. These “fish people” would then be loaded into the Cartoon Creator so that users could create their own cartoons with their own character inside it.

The fish people would be customizable by gender, name, color, head, as well as items that the fish people could wear, including hair, clothing, shoes, hand held items, etc.

I worked mainly on the backend of this project, as I had had experience with it in the past working on the original Cartoon Creator. My team developed the Fish Builder while I sorted out the PHP functions, the Flex administration tool and the server tweaks. I concentrated mainly on getting the new “Fish Person” assets to be customizable from the administration tool.

I also spent some time making small modifications to the Cartoon Creator and Cartoon Player flash applications that were mainly just to make a few things easier for user’s when using the application (showing the name of the current cartoon being worked on, showing the number of saved cartoons and more).

My first project upon returning to theRedSpace offices after a Christmas and New Year vacation was to build an application for Comedy Central so that they could easily build and deploy quizzes to Facebook. Specifically, these quizzes would be of the personality ilk. For example, what character from a particular television show are you, or who is your best match in this category type of quizzes.

A producer will load the program on their desktop, fill out the information for the quiz, including questions, possible results, styles, Facebook information and more. When a producer fills in information about styles, images, and anything else that could possibly be shown, it is loaded up on screen for them right then and there, so that they don’t need to worry about having a color off or an incorrect link to an image. There are also step-by-step instructions on the screen so that the producer can easily set up the Facebook application (as that cannot yet be automated).

Once a producer has finished entering all of the information about the quiz, they simply click a button and the program will generate a PHP file that makes use of Facebook’s FBML language. This file is automatically uploded to the Comedy Central servers and displays a link that the producer can copy and paste into the “Canvas Callback URL” section in the Facebook application settings. Once they have entered this, the quiz is live and can be taken by anyone. Quizzes can also be submitted to the application directory for people to find.

Producers can also set up a timer, to allow quiz takers to see the next time the show will be on, as well as set up links under the main quiz header to the show’s homepage, videos from the show, it’s Facebook fan page, and really anything else they might want to link to.

The quiz that is generated will also allow users to invite their friends to take the quiz and will give quiz takers the ability to post their results to their Facebook wall.

The application was built using the Adobe AIR platform. I used AIR because only a select group of Comedy Central producers would be using the Quiz Generator, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to take advantage of the AIR framework.