After 4 months of intense work, we have just launched the Weplay beta. Weplay is a sports network for children, something like Piczo meets TeamSnap. The client is a startup backed by Major League Baseball, Pequot Capital and Creative Artists Agency. By transferring our technology, and working closely with the outstanding development team at Weplay, as assembled by Luke Melia, we helped Weplay hit a very aggressive launch target.
Weplay.com is one of the biggest sites Mint has built. It includes a complex model of parent to child permissioning, a state-of-the-art UI, and a very robust security model to ensure the online safety of the children who make up the sites core demographic.
Press:
Social Site’s New Friends Are Athletes (New York Times)
Who Plays? Weplay (ABC News)
The last two days were demanding. On Thursday each team worked on the presentation of their idea.
Friday was pitching day. It ended on a high. The BBC commissioned Different and Mint to develop the “Doctor Who: In Parallel” idea.
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Yesterday Utku and I popped down to the Future of Web Design conference in West London to learn things, meet people and set off fire extinguishers.
Yet again, Carsonified put together a strong lineup of speakers covering a wide range of topics themed around where design on the web is currently heading. After the pre-conference party the night before we made a slightly slow start to the conference but soon got to hear some great talks.
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We’ve just launched the Lonely Planet Desktop Countdown.
It’s a neat little app that counts down to your holiday. Every day it offers you a local tip and tells you the weather in the place that you are travelling to.
The app is part of the promotional campaign for the Lonely Planet Encounter city guides. Over the next few weeks, the Desktop Countdown will be promoted on coffee sleeves at 14 locations in London, banners on Yahoo! Weather and on London Underground posters. The total reach of the marketing campaign will be to over 3.6 million people. We snapped this poster at Vauxhall tube, round the corner from our office.
From a technology point of view it is pretty cool. It is the first time Mint has used Adobe AIR. AIR is Adobe’s platform for creating desktop apps. It brings the web closer to our desktop. It blurs the boundary between online and offline. In short, it opens up a bunch of new possibilities.
Have a read of 6 Adobe AIR Apps to check out to see what other uses people have been making of AIR.
I’m at the BBC Innovation Labs in Yorkshire this week.
The Labs are made up of 10 teams, 5 mentors and 1 Development Producer from BBC Research & Innovation. 5 BBC commissioners arrived today.
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We have got a vacancy for someone to dream up and develop mass-participation web ideas.
More details here.
Well, a few other Mints and I are just back from Scotland on Rails and what a good time we had! First, it’s always good to be back in the homeland. Second, it was a great conference.
What made it for me was the size. It was big enough to have decent talks but small enough to get to meet everyone you wanted. Out of the talks I saw, the JRuby talk on Saturday was particularly interesting. I’ve been meaning to give this more attention for a while and this has definitely reinforced the reasons for doing so.
Jonathan Weiss gave an interesting talk on Rails patterns which crossed over with our work at Mint. It’s great to see someone else talk about ideas we’ve been playing with internally. Image processing and asset storage are things we deal with in almost every project.
We also had a great post-conf meetup in London on Tuesday. I wasn’t aware at the time but it was actually a music and Ruby hacking meet. Writing Ruby to make music anyone? Combining two things you love is always good!
Anyway, a great conference all round and I’ll be back next year (if it’s on!). Well done guys. Check out the photos.
Added by Andy Bell: Two Mints were speaking at the conference. Paul Dix was speaking on collective intelligence. Thomas was speaking on high performance rails apps (slides soon). I added the photo too, in case anyone is wondering why Thomas is posting pictures of himself.
“Prove it,” you mutter cautiously. Actually, for an entire day, the proof is right on our website—today, we’re celebrating the annual CSS Naked Day!
We’re obsessed with making great things, even the parts you don’t think about. We use modern techniques and web standards to build our sites, and that makes them more robust on new and old web browsers alike. On CSS Naked Day, you can see the results: our website stays usable and content-rich even when you strip away the styling. This is especially thoughtful for users with slow internet connections (the content loads right away, and the styling shows up later) and for visually impaired users who depend on audio screen readers, not shapes and colors.
Hundreds of forward-thinking web developers are joining in, and demonstrating that websites should work well at their most basic level—content. Among the Mints, Phil Nash’s blog and my personal site are also stripping down to promote web standards. Here’s to another year of pushing the web forward!
