While Steve has been finishing up development on Agora, Kevin has been busy completing the mocks for Proteus. If you have some time, we’d love some feedback on these designs.
Next step is to create the HTML mocks while we develop the backend components in parallel. A big thanks to Andrew for his valuable feedback so far. Continue reading
I want to take a quick minute to introduce another prototype we’ve been working on, Project Agora. We’ve taken a small break from Proteus to put together a quick proof of concept Facebook application for canada.com. Agora, which in Greek literally means “the gathering place” is meant to promote the sharing of content and ideas.
The application itself is fairly basic to start, and will seem somewhat familiar to those who have seen similar apps from The Washington Post or The Guardian. We do hope to try out some additional and radically unique features down the road once we get the initial prototype up and running. In particular, we’d like to see this live up to its name and really become a central point for the discussion of important topics as they relate to today’s important news events.
Kevin has put together his first set of wireframes for Project Proteus. I think they are spectacular, but that didn’t stop me from providing him with my expert advice and feedback. (Kevin is likely cursing me out loud as I write this.) For example, I want to incorporate some real-time photo streams into this and I need to see if and how that could be incorporated. Andrew too has taken the time to provide his initial thoughts and a few great recommendations.
One of my founding principles for this team to be completely open, honest, and transparent on what we’re working on. The intent is to provide an avenue for anyone who would like to contribute to our work, whether they be from within Postmedia or outside. So, without further ado I present to you the wireframes. Continue reading
We’ve decided to kick off another internal project here as we put the final touches on Timbits and get ready to start on some ideas from the various markets. In Timbits, we showed off some concept Story and Home page designs that had the ability to adapt to the device’s screen size and orientation. With this project, in order to help the team here become (more) familiar with products such as PhoneGap, I wanted to expand this a bit further and have the team build a very simple concept application with HTML5 that works across all devices, both within a browser AND as a native application. So today we kicked off project Proteus. (For those interested, Proteus is one of the Greek gods of the sea. In particular, he is known for his shape-shifting abilities, a key feature for our application.) Continue reading
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? Double your rate of failure. – thomas j watson
Only those who are asleep make no mistakes. – ingvar kamprad
As we begin to meet with our partners at the various newspapers across the Postmedia chain, a few common questions are being repeated from market to market. One of them, in a nutshell, is “So, what is it your team can do for us again?” At that point, I usually go on a spiel about how we aren’t here to complete regular project work or create new editorial sections but rather to help prototype new ideas, especially in the area of web technology. When you come up with a statement like “I wish we had” or “I wish we could” then we’re a good starting point to help grant you those wishes. That’s a pretty honest statement, but this afternoon I sat back and realized it doesn’t quite capture the essence of what I have set out to accomplish with this team. Continue reading
Over the past few months, the Postmedia Digital Innovation Team has been quite busy building a new framework for widget development. Today I wanted to take some time to tell you about this project.
Project Timbit started back in July when we first started putting the team together. Although some insiders knew of this new group, there hadn’t been any formal announcement yet and wouldn’t be for a number of weeks. The intent was to have everything fully functional by September at which point we would start engaging the various newspapers across the chain and help them prototype new ideas. So, I decided to take the summer to build, learn and prepare.
I threw some ideas together and quickly met with my boss, Peter de Groot (no relation 
) and my colleague Tom McGreevy, Director of Professional Services, to present them with following objectives for Project Timbit.
So here we are a couple of months later and we’re ready to announce to the world what we’ve come up with. We are days away from completing this leg of the race, and I thought I’d tell you a little bit of what we’ve done. Continue reading
