XHTML/CSS - Get a job

July 27, 2007 at 2:22 pm · Filed under Programming, RIA, Information Architecture, Visual Design, User Interface, User Experience

Terralever is currently hiring for several positions at our Tempe, Arizona office.  Here’s the job posting that was added to our career’s section today:

Terralever is on the lookout for a passionate, creative, standards compliant front end architect. We’re not going to bore you with the regular “must know CSS, XHTML, yada, yada”.The right candidate yearns for new learning experiences and has an exquisite passion and drive to be on the bleeding edge of technological revolutions. This candidate will have validation in life through amazing work and the W3C, a pixel-perfect attention to detail, an insatiable desire to be creative, and an ownership to their work that it’s the best. And a rockin’ iPod playlist doesn’t hurt.Terralever is located on Mill Avenue in the heart of downtown Tempe, offering our employees a hip, creative atmosphere. We have a team centric work environment which allows our staff to interact with all aspects of a project. We have amazing award-winning work for national brands, but we pride ourselves more for the extraordinary group of people that make it possible.If this sounds like you and a company you’d like to work for e-mail jobs@terralever.com with your resume and some sweet samples. 

The original posting is located on the careers section on the Terralever web site along with additional job postings for the roles of Senior Interactive Designer, Flash Production Artist, Senior Interactive (Flash) Developer, Interactive Project Manager, and .NET Web Applications Developer.We’re also always looking for best-of-breed candidates in search marketing (SEO and PPC) and viral marketing.

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Red Bull Flugtag online and off

June 21, 2007 at 9:22 am · Filed under Online Marketing, Social Networking, Games

I’m getting ready to head to Tennessee for Flugtag Nashville, the latest U.S. “flying day” put on by Red Bull. Terralever has been working on some cool interactive tie-ins to the event, and we fortunately need some boots on the ground to do some coordination. If you’re in Nashville on Saturday (23rd of June) stop by—it’s free! Directions and entry information is on the Flugtag USA site, on the page for the Nashville event.

The team has also updated the wildly popular Flugtag Game. It now features:

• Multiplayer support (Tournament style)
• A Chat window for Multiplayer games
• Three crafts to choose from
• Five Flugtag locations to choose from
• New crash sequences and in-flight antics

If you have previously installed the game on your MySpace page, it will be updated automatically to the new version. If you haven’t put it on your MySpace page, but are curious how to do so, just go to the game page—there is a button to install it right below the game.

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From the Facebook Platform Launch

May 24, 2007 at 11:51 am · Filed under Events, Programming, Social Networking

Well, the cat is out of the bag… I’m at the Facebook Platform announcement and hack-a-thon in San Francisco. Terralever was invited to develop with the platform prior to its release. For the past ten days or so, we’ve been test driving the platform and created a few applications.

Applications? Let me back up. Facebook, previously a ‘closed’ site doing all its own development, has made the switch to being an ‘open’ site with the release of the Facebook Platform. The platform allows developers to leverage the power of the rapidly growing social network combined with application functionality of their own.

The Facebook Platform offers two key pieces which, when combined, make the sky the limit for development. The first piece is set of API’s which exposes various pieces of information from the Facebook network. Processing is handled on the developer’s server, so applications can mingle the information received from the API calls with whatever programming the developer provides. The second piece, a markup language called FBML (yeah, it stands for Facebook markup language) allows some processing to occur, and some information to be viewed, once processed by the Facebook server prior to rendering. You also have HTML available to you, of course, as well as Flash and Silverlight. JavaScript—not so much; there is a (very) limited amount of AJAX that is available, however.

Facebook applications are granted real estate on users’ profile pages, in both the narrow and wide columns, as well as their own “Canvas”—basically an entire page which is framed by the Facebook navigation.

Monetization? You bet. Facebook’s take: $0.00. How? On the canvas page, Facebook is allowing outside applications to place their own advertising. Additionally—and this is the one that really surprised me—you can do commerce transactions without leaving the Facebook site. And, again, Facebook’s take isn’t a dime.

The platform isn’t live to the public yet, but the powers that be are telling us that it will be rolled out to the public tonight. Our applications are called “stuffCLOUD” (a visualization of things that an individual, their friends, and the entire Facebook universe like) and “Flipbook” which is a photo flip-book which leverages albums in the Facebook user’s profile. I’ll blog more about the apps themselves later and how they are received.

This is just the beginning…

Read the Terralever Facebook Platform Press Release.

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Microsoft: WPF/e = Silverlight

April 16, 2007 at 11:19 am · Filed under RIA, Video, User Interface, User Experience

Microsoft announced the public release name for the technology/plug-in previously known by its code name “WPF/e” (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) today as “Silverlight.” Although Microsoft has preferred that the technology not be compared with Adobe’s (formerly Macromedia) ubiquitous Flash plug-in, it’s hard not to make the comparison. Both plug-ins leverage vector based graphics and scripting languages to allow the delivery of richer-than-HTML multimedia experiences, and both have a focus on the delivery of video content.

I worked at Microsoft last year for a few months prior to returning to my post at Terralever. While there, I participated in a program in which Microsoft brought in multimedia designers to put Silverlight through its paces. They were working on a version of the plug-in that was still in development and were working without documentation. Even with those limitations, the resulting demos did show promise in the hands of the highly qualified multimedia designers.

But, who would consider Silverlight over Flash? Here’s some thoughts on Silverlight:

• For designer-developers who are more fluent in JavaScript (or AJAX) Silverlight may be easier to transition to than Flash
• For RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications) that involve communication between an HTML page and multimedia content housed within it, Silverlight may prove to be a more seamless solution as the Silverlight object is a part of the DOM
• This is a v1 product for Microsoft, who usually starts firing on all cylinders around v3, and, Microsoft seem serious about its movement into this space
• Video is the hot topic on the web right now. Flash is currently able to stream a maximum of 576 lines (per Ars Technica) whereas video encoded with Microsoft’s VC-1 codec can be streamed at 720 lines. Silverlight also handles scaling video while it is being viewed beautifully.

Silverlight’s biggest hurdle? Gaining the mind share of multimedia designers—and doing so with a PC-only development ecosystem (Microsoft Expression).

The cross-browser plug-in is currently available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox on the PC as well as Safari and Firefox on the Macintosh.

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Red Bull Flugtag game for your MySpace page

April 5, 2007 at 4:22 pm · Filed under Games

Red Bull has just posted code on their Flugtag USA website allowing the Flugtag Game to be embedded on MySpace pages. If you’ve been to a Flugtag before, the game will make sense to you. Visit the Flugtag USA Game web page, then click on the “MAKE YOUR GAME CODE” button just below the game.

If you haven’t here’s some information about Flugtag from the site:

1991 - The First Flugtag
The first Red Bull Flugtag took place in Vienna, Austria, in 1991. Since then, more than 35 Flugtags have been held around the world — from Ireland to San Francisco — attracting up to 300,000 spectators. The record for the farthest flight-to-date currently stands at 195 feet set in 2000 at Flugtag Austria. The U.S. record stands at 78 feet set in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2004.

Teams are judged on three criteria: distance, creativity and showmanship. What constitutes a craft is purely up to the imagination of the participating teams. Past Red Bull Flugtag entries have included a pregnant cow, a diaper-delivering stork, a pimped-out Cadillac, a giant Oompa Loompa, and yes folks — a lobster named Larry.

As far as the game goes, it is Flash-based, and when inserted onto a MySpace page, that individual posting of the game has its own high score tracking for that MySpace page.

Disclaimer: The game was created by Terralever (my employer) in conjunction with The Barbarian Group out of New York.

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