Results

A few months ago we teamed up with our good friends at FITC to organize a local industry mixer for the Ottawa area. With FITC only a few weeks away, we thought it would be a good opportunity to get people together to meet, greet and see just how much talent we have within our community. Rather than invite everyone to a typical user group meeting where the focus leans towards instruction and learning, we decided to do a mixer where people could network, make new friends and see some old faces. We like to think we achieved this goal – with over 70 people turning out the event at the Mercury Lounge on April 8th.

We seeked out the students from Carleton’s BIT program and asked a few of them to attend and show off their inspiring physical computing projects that included a screen installation and a touchtable.  We raffled off some prizes including some O’Reilly books, a few FITC tickets, a James White print and up to $2000 dollars of Adobe software thanks to our generous supporters – O’Reilly, James White of www.signalnoise.com and the Ottawa Flash Platform Group. FITC generously sponsored the bar – so attendees had a drink, mingled and enjoyed the vocal stylings of Alyssa Munaretto.

The night ended up being a success – new students met potential employers, some old friends caught up, some new friends were made and all in all, it left everyone with a pretty warm fuzzy feeling that wasn’t entirely because of the alcohol. We would like to thank everyone for coming out, and hope to see you at future events and user groups.Check out some of the pictures that our own Ian Shaw took of the event on our Flickr.

Today we have decided to make our iPhone game Sayback free to all. If you haven’t tried it yet, then now there’s no excuse. Have at it, and let us know what you think!

Well, so far 2010 has really started of with a bang and our office is starting to get busier than we can handle. We have had our heads down, working hard on a few Adobe AIR apps, some pretty cool Flash development on embedded devices, as well as some mobile development for the iPhone. It’s time to take a look around and see if we can get some more hands on deck.

Right now, we are looking for someone new to join our development team! That someone will have to be able to demonstrate intermediate to expert level skills using Flash, Flex and Actionscript. Experience developing for the iPhone, other mobile devices, and building interfaces using HTML5/Ajax will be of major benefit to anyone that applies.

We are passionate about user experience design here at Teknision, and we love developers that have a passion for design and clear communication. If you have formal training in design, or have worked in teams with designers before, you’re exactly the type of person we’re looking for.

We really need someone that can work closely with our core team in-house at our studio in Ottawa, Canada. If you think you have what it takes, please contact us at careers@teknision.com. Send us your resume, and point us at examples of great work you have produced or have been involved in producing.

In October of last year, I hosted a small panel presentation on mobile development platforms and their future at Adobe MAX. At the event, I was introduced to Dom Sagolla(@dom) who joined me on the panel as an expert on development for the iPhone. Since MAX, I have kept in touch with Dom and got the chance to read his upcoming book (140 Characters) . I really enjoyed it, and thought I would share my impressions:

Nothing frustrates me more than those that accuse SMS, instant messaging, and tweeting of bringing about the decline of language. It is even more annoying that this type of commentary often comes from people with little or no experience with online social networking. How many times have you heard statements like the following:

“I don’t want to spend time keeping up with what people are having for lunch”

“Most of the stuff on Twitter is just people talking about crap”

“I’ve just heard so much trivial, superficial, shallow hype attached to it, I find myself not wanting to jump into that pool.”

People with this view see the message as being tidally locked to the medium in a downward spiral. The assumption is that the constraints of the short form are so severe that quality writing is unachievable.

Dom challenges this perspective in his first book 140 Characters – A Style Guide For The Short Form. He takes off his software developer hat and turns back to his days as an English major. He sets out to explore the history of the short form of writing and it’s dramatic resurgence due to the rise of modern day social networking.

The main body of the book draws out all of the most cherished literary devices in writing and reexamines them for use in the short form. Dom urges writers to spend more time distilling the essence of meaning and emotion from their thoughts. Select tweets are used as examples, showing wonderful invocations of irony, sarcasm, suspense, awe, and humor. The mechanics of poetry are even explored in detail, with suggestions on how they can be applied to the short form.

Younger generations are growing up with the short form as the primary communication format in their lives. I would certainly recommend this book to English teachers for use in high school level curricula as a way to explore creative writing in a way that is useful, relevant, and engaging for modern students.

For all of us Twitter and Facebook users, this book is a refreshing change of pace from the usual social networking “expert” discourse on things like:

• Strategies for obtaining new followers
• How to get Retweeted
• How brands can leverage social networking

Technical tips on all of the above are valuable but tend to generate a lot of noise on the network. In contrast, those that take the advice in this book, will quickly find themselves focused on generating a more engaging and meaningful signal.

Tony MacDonell (@tmtek)

One of our pet projects this year, Konductor, has been nominated amongst some great applications in the InsideRIA’s poll : What are the best RIAs of 2009. Take a minute to check out the solid list of applications in the poll including Aviary and Creately  – and perhaps show your love by throwing Konductor a vote.

We’re excited to announce that another of our recent projects, ‘What’s the Bzz’, has gone live today. ‘What’s the Bzz’ is a data visualization piece that illustrates the real time activity of the BzzAgent network and how BzzAgents are talking about and engaging with the brands, products and websites that they care about. Check out the data visualization over at the BzzAgent site.

We’ve been busy on a variety of projects in the shop the past couple months with one major effort being the new educational interactive platform for Digital-Tutors. Who is Digital-Tutors? Digital-Tutors has been an innovator and leader in creating and releasing project-based training that provides artists internationally with award-winning educational solutions and services developed by a high-qualified team of experienced educators and industry professionals.

The new interactive platform enhances the learning experience by transforming what is traditionally presented and considered a passive video online experience, to a fully interactive and engaging one.  Users can choose between course playlists created for a wide variety of software topics, or have the option to create and customize their own personal playlist from any of the over 7000 videos in the Digital-Tutors library. Users can easily remember important sections by marking up a video with notes, tags or even by creating and definining a clip of a video.

Digital-Tutors has just released the new platform to the public and users can take it for a free test run. They have also created a fantastic  video about it to announce its launch that describes in greater detail the features, benefits and challenges of creating such a unique platform.

Gabor was recently interviewed by Geof Harries from Subvert.ca. Get the inside scoop on what Gabor had to say about such tough topics as development process, business lessons and project preference over at Subvert’s blog.

Sometimes folders get passed around liberally amongst a team of people working on a project that contain SVN data. This can be a pain because some team members may not be fully aware of this invisible data, and more often than not they can end up getting checked back into a repository causing conflicts.

We whipped up a simple little Adobe AIR app to handle this issue. Simply drop a folder onto it and it will clear out all of these invisible files recursively.

CleanSVN (Adobe AIR app)