Also beneficially, the bulk of the “heavy” work is handled by a centralised API, proving cost effective for the client as we were able to turn the port around in less than a week.

Get it on the market place now »

The question is, how do you quantify the “adventurousness” of someone’s location? We came up with an algorithm that leverages the users proximity to a growing database of landmarks like mountains, forests, lakes, swamps, etc along with the users altitude to respond with an according discount.

The app passes the users current location to our API to work the discount out and also facilitates them requesting a coupon code via email. The coupons can be redeemed at any Toyota dealer, and the customer can walk out with a brand new Rav4 at a potentially fantastic price.

For the dealers to validate the coupons, we built a responsive admin tool, allowing them to use any device (small screen or large) to enter coupon codes and find out the necessary details to validate the coupon and discount. The same admin tool provides Toyota’s marketing department with statistics on the success of the campaign, how many discounts have been issued and the total value of claimed discounts.

Both the app and the admin tool are multi-lingual, with Dutch, French and English versions available.

We’re chuffed to finally be able to talk about the app and can’t wait to start seeing people using it. Meanwhile we’ve begun work on a range of equally exciting projects for BIC, Women’s Squash, a global pharmaceutical brand and a popular milk shake. Stay tuned for more updates!

Get Adventure Discount on the App Store now.

Our goal with delivering the press office was to eleviate the load that the comms team experience when dealing with the press. Traditionally they’d receive phone or email requests and have to deliver releases and assets like photography and video manually, a laborious task that doesn’t need to exist.

So we set about creating a digital press office, where photography and video can be uploaded in their raw state, and are then trimmed and resized suitably. HD video is automatically encoded for web playback, an epic task in itself. Journalists then simply have to sign in, and can use a comprehensive range of criteria to filter assets and find whatever they need. We migrated all Sport Englands existing content too, so it really was a smooth hand over. Sport England can now add new Press Releases (which can be easily linked with related assets) and journalists can be notified via email or RSS. They can even subscribe to filtered feeds, allowing for them to only request notifications of new items matching specific tags or search queries. No phone calls or email requests necessary.

All new content is automatically pushed to their Twitter and Facebook account too, providing journalists with 2 more channels to stay up-to-date and helping Sport England garner attention. We even added powerful analytics, so SE can gauge just how effective their press assets are.

Finally, to make things even more effortless, we added in functionality for Sport England to receive and republish content coming from the governing bodies (~ 40) that they fund. This enable Sport England to more effectively showcase how their funding is being used, and also gives the NGBs a strong channel for promotion and increase in reach.

Take a look

• Dan Donald, Ben Olden, Marc Remblance, Volker Hirsch, Andrew Kirwin, Pete Cain, Andrew Doyle, ADOmedia and the guys at Matmi all made us feel super welcome on arriving at our  newly adopted home, top guys who really know their stuff!
• Everyone who came to the first and second Digital Edge (too many to name, but you know who you are!), for proving that Macclesfield has an outstanding digital community.
• Everyone at CoffeeFix for fuelling us with beautiful caffeine… Here’s to an equally epic second year Gareth!
• Tokyo Digital, Six Two, Happiness Brussels, BirdDog, Empire, 2020 and all the other agencies that have given us plenty of exciting problems to solve over the past year.
• Our fantastic ongoing clients like The Crooked Well, Swalcliffe Park School, Steve Gerrard, Magma Poetry, Spin Software and The ETTA.
• Stef Lewandowski, Spencer Gallagher, Jake Grimley, Zach Inglis, Joel Sudworth, Andy Pearson, Tom Martin, Darian Moody and Pete Coles for all the advice and critique they’ve provided the past year.
• Every single supplier that’s worked with us over the past year, nice people helping us make happy clients.
• All our Twitter friends for great and stimulating conversations.

It’s not a full list of everyone we owe thanks to, but it’s a good taste. Here’s to making 2012 amazing together!

First things first, we’ve heard that the Press Office we developed for Sport England will be going live this week. The subdomain’s not been sorted, but you can take a look here. The Sport England Media Centre is built on top of the same engine as we developed for ETTA, but made to look integral to their main website and also automatically pull in content from the Governing Bodies that they fund. We’ve already migrated all their old content, and hope that the super-easy-to-use admin will ensure the Press Office becomes a vital tool for Sport Englands comms team.

We’re currently heads down on a new Rails project for the mighty Universal Music, a project that’s seen us scraping YouTube, The Guardian and a host of other third party sources to create a connected directory of all their artists. It’s a tight deadline, but we’re up for the challenge!

We’re starting a project for BIC next week, a competition engaging student artists with the brand that’s set to be incredibly high scale and will certainly benefit from our knowledge of scaling WordPress…

Our second app for Toyota has been accepted into the iOS app store, we’re just making a bunch of tweaks to the admin system before that finally goes live. It’s a fantastic looking app with a great concept behind it, we really can’t wait to show it off.

Our beautiful site design for the cool guys at Spin Software will be launching in January, we’re just putting the finishing touches on this side of Christmas. It’s a great looking site, and makes fine use of Gill, so keep your eyes peeled!

Finally, we’re very pleased to announce that we will be redesigning the website of the Women’s Squash Association. It’s set to be another great sports lead project and should suit our skillset down to the ground.

It may be advent, but we’re certainly not winding down for the holidays just yet. Hope everyone else is enjoying this winter weather, here’s to a great end to the year.

Last week, a project we’ve been working on with Tokyo (top guys!) went live, Christmas in November for Cartoon Network. We built the API that the flash front end sits on, serving hundreds of thousands of page views and capturing tens of thousands of registrations in the first week alone! The project was rolled out across Scandinavia, so we had to quickly devise a way to efficiently roll the site out in 3 languages. We did it, seemingly effortlessly, and from start to finish, the project was turned around in less than a month. Great work by everyone involved!

We also submitted our latest app for Toyota Belgium (working with Happiness) for app store approval. This week we’ll be preparing the Android version for submission to the market place. It’s a great looking app and has some beautiful interactions, all powered by an elegant API. Coupled with a killer concept, this should be an incredibly successful campaign!

Both the Christmas in November and Cartoon Network APIs were built on a slim PHP framework we’re developing. It’s close to Sinatra in it’s approach to routing and callbacks, with great support for daemonised processes (akin to Rake), whilst being heavily focused on high data throughput. It’s working well and handling a mass of data on both projects.

Alongside that, we’re about to start a great project for Bic, providing a high scale backend build for a campaign lead by the talented guys at Empire. We really can’t wait to see the design direction for this!

Last Thursday, Chris also took a trip down to London to discuss a cool project with the guys at Fiction, alongside Six Two, for a very cool band that will hopefully be kicking off this side of Christmas. He also met with the fantastic guys at Bird Dog to discuss collaborations and we’re sure more exceptional work will come from that.

Finally… Marc and Chris met with Richard to discuss the feasibility of a hack/coworking space in Macclesfield. The discussions were hugely positive, and we’d love for anyone else interested in such a space to get in touch.

The turnout was fantastic, peaking at 35, which was a truely pleasing result, so thanks to everyone who took the time out of their Thursday evening to come down and say hi. The Snow Goose, our generous hosts, had a great buzz as people were mingling and chatting. Everyone felt friendly and approachable, and it was great to see plenty of new connections being made, as well as old friends enjoying catching up.

In the Abstraktion office, we’ve adopted the unofficial tagline “Community, not competition”, and it was great to see this transpire in real life. People were openly talking about all the great things they’re up to, and how they can involve each other in these projects. There was a wide and impressive range of skills on show and a true diversity to the group, I’m sure this will prove complimentary going forward.

We setup the Digital Edge on the hunch that Macclesfield could develop an incredibly strong digital economy, and become a destination for media startups. It has everything to offer fledgling digital and creative companies: fantastic scenery; strong commuter links with Manchester, Birmingham and London; affordable and abundant office space; some fantastic bars and cafés; All that was missing was an awareness of the wealth of talent the town holds, which is where Digital Edge has come in nicely, showcasing all the exciting digital activity in the area.

Here’s to Number 2 and the many exciting things that will come!

The project was sponsored by brand powerhouse, Turner CN Enterprises, who own Cartoon Network and big brands like Ben 10 and Dexters Laboratory. We were tasked with building a mobile version of BLEs event website, providing an easy way to access the floor plan, schedule, nearby restaurants, and other useful information on any modern smartphone (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, etc).

We think the schedule is a particular triumph, providing an overview of what’s on in, either chronological order or by location (which has proved to be very handy for conference goers!).

We chose WordPress as the CMS, with some handy custom post types and fields to make for a great “editor experience”. We also automated the news section, pulling in articles from the main website via their RSS feed. Another great example of how flexible and powerful WordPress can be in the background. We chose not to use a frontend framework like jQuery touch or Sencha, as the interface is relatively simple and we wanted to avoid overloading the frontend, making for a snappy result with minimal resource requirements.

The entire site is “responsively” designed, all dimensions are percentages based on the width/height of the viewport, ensuring future compatibility with increasing/decreasing screen sizes. The only images used are for the icons on the homepage, everything else is achieved entirely with CSS3 and Canvas, making the app much faster and ensuring compatibility across different pixel densities. This is one of many mobile web projects we’ve been/are involved in at the moment, it’s great to see the market growing rapidly and cements our approach of designing for mobile first. We’ll have more updates over the next couple of weeks, with some more great mobile web projects!

Check out the result

We recently used PhoneGap to build the Toyota Air Quality App, and I can honestly say it’s one of the handiest tools in a mobile developers toolbox.

PhoneGap essentially allows you to take HTML5 and JavaScript apps into the App Store, not just on iOS but also BlackBerry and Android. This is ideal for reasons beyond the obvious ones of monetisation and distribution. It means that our entire team are capable of maintaining mobile apps as PhoneGap eliminates (or perhaps just reduces) the need for Objective C knowledge, but without taking away the ability to dip into the Obj-C side of the app if you need (replace Obj-C with the preferred language for other platforms). It also partially brings the biggest benefit of the open web to mobile platforms, a single code base to maintain and deploy across many platforms.

I’m glad to see the Adobe acquisition in some senses, I was never certain of how sustainable Nitobi’s model would prove to be, essentially selling training to enterprise. Under Adobe’s ownership, this should provide financial security for the project. Although that’s never guaranteed, perhaps the larger questions is what does that financial security cost? Will there ever be a license fee introduced? Who will decide which future platforms garner support, will this sort of decision be subject to corporate favours?

I also am concerned about the chance that Adobe will try and converge PhoneGap with some of their existing products, like Air. The beauty of PhoneGap is it’s simplicity and relative level of abstraction, I’d hate to see it turn into another WYSIWYG-lead piece of bloatware.

TypeKit seems a whole lot more straight forward. It’s already revenue generating and the obvious tie in for Adobe will be allowing users to preview webfonts inside offline design tools like PhotoShop. Who knows, they may even be working on the fabled “perfect tool for web design”. The TypeKit acquisition really doesn’t excite me, it’s a proven product and I’m not sure Adobe could really mess it up. If anything, perhaps they’ll invest in decreasing latency in the service and adding even more foundries to the roster.

We shall see, it’s either going to prove to be exciting times, or depressing times. Fortunately with TypeKit there’s increasingly more competition, and perhaps we’ll get a few decent PhoneGap forks going before if it becomes closed source.

After soaking up some of the fantastic presentations put on in the first day, covering topics ranging from “teaching kids to code” to “how to rob a bank”, I felt inspired to give a talk myself. Wanting to give something back, I thought I’d do one on mixology and shake up some cocktails at BarCamp. Things didn’t go as smoothly as planned (omelette sour anyone?), but I hope I showed how easy it is to mix great cocktails at home. Here’s the recipe for the 3 drinks I made:

Slow Gin Sour

Whack a good double measure of slow gin, juice of half a lemon, 2-3 tea spoons of sugar and an egg white (no yolk!!!) into a shaker two thirds filled with ice, and shake until a frost forms on the outside of the shaker. Then just strain into a tumbler of ice. Make sure the egg white is the last item to go in, and shake straight after adding it, otherwise the lemon will start to cook it (not pleasant). I used Haymans Slow Gin, which is a bit fruitier and more full bodied than most so makes for a very smooth drink.

Classic Daiquiri

This was my most successful drink of the day, everyone loves a Daiquiri. I busted out the Diplomatico Reserva for this, one of my favourite rums at the moment.  I chose to use a golden rum through personal preference, along with knowing how “light” the Diplomatico is, but you’d traditionally use a White Rum. Simply shake the juice of half a lime, a double measure of the Rum and a dash of sugar syrup (add a dot of bitters if the fancy takes you) with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Magic!

El Presidente

This would be my go-to drink when I lived in Bristol and spent far too much time in Haus Bar. A heady brew of White Rum (double measure, preferably of Diplomatico’s very good blanco reserva), a measure of triple sec (or Cointreau depending on preference), a measure of Vermouth and a dash of grenadine. Stir (don’t shake) with ice, strain in a cocktail glass and sip slowly…

I actually forgot to take any Vermouth with me to BarCamp, so ended up using Slow Gin in the El Presidente. I added in a dash of Mint Bitters too, and thus the “Ian Forrester” was invented, named after the Presidente of BarCamp.