Well it seems strange that the last blog post written here (nearly 2yrs ago) was all about moving because once again thats what this one is about. Our nomadic notions kicked in again but this time involved a significantly bigger mission than moving over a few websites between servers.We decided to make the big move from South Africa to Canada to introduce Aurora to her Canadian family and explore what opportunities may exist north of the equator for us.
But first let me fill you in on some developments since the last blog post written here oh so long ago. With the arrival of little Aurora there was joyful chaos that made all night creative sessions and crazy deadlines that much harder to achieve.
We kicked off 2009 with an awesome theatre project called “Tree Boy” that called for some quite complex multi projector animated visuals and a shiny new poster. The show was written by my brother Neil and he was quite a perfectionist which made for many late (but fun) nights.The show ran at the Natal Playhouse and we were very proud of the results and will post a full case study soon. The video above gives a taste and there are more visuals over at designindaba.com/news-snippet/animation-meets-theatre.
I was offered the position of Web Producer for Design Indaba and I happily spent the next 14 months working for Interactive Africa on this high profile website.”It was a great experience and I have a huge amount of respect for Ravi & Leshni Naidoo and their talented team. I will post a case study of the site and write more about the experience soon. You can view the result that was created in drupal at designindaba.com.
Angella continued to fly the iaminawe flag high with new album art and packaging for Goldfish and their remixes album, some awesome identities, a few epic posters and a beautiful book cover, all that will be featured soon on our new site currently in development.
Nearly 2 months ago, Angella, Aurora and I tearfully said goodbye to our epic view and creative haven of 8 years perched on the Fish Hoek mountainside overlooking the sea near Cape Town in South Africa. We had many happy years at that house and it was sad to say goodbye to so many friends and memories. We sold off our stuff, spent a month with family in Durban, enjoyed 2 weeks of World Cup and then headed for Vancouver via London.We spent 10 days in Vancouver exploring the city before moving over to Edmonton to visit family and to get settled for a few months. The first day we were in Edmonton we saw an app building competition called Apps4Edmonton being advertised in the newspaper and we decided to put our first month in Canada towards building a web and iphone app to start making some contacts.
The city released open data feeds for developers to access and we decided to build a web/phone app for the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre festival, North America’s longest running and biggest theatre festival that just kicked off today.
We used a combination of open source tools including Drupal to pull the data feeds and build the web app at Fringefest.ca and then Titanium to code and compile the i-phone app to interact with it. The web and mobile app allow visitors to the Fringe to view a full schedule and directory of shows and allows them to rated and reviewed by the community. They are also packed with interactive maps, useful info, contact info and tools to monitor the festival buzz. The app is available for iphone for $1.99 on the AppStore.
We won the Official Fringe Special Distinction Award with our entry and the right to use the official wordmark on our application which was awesome. Our app is also in the running for some of the $50 000 worth of cash prizes being awarded at the end of the main competition at the end of the month. Please help us in the competition by filling out this simple registration form and then voting on the app. We dont know many people in Edmonton yet so are hoping that you the internet can help us out 
Its been getting some great coverage with a radio interview on CBC yesterday, an article in the Edmonton Journal covering our story and another on the app
There is a TV interview with Global HD a little later today and its great to see the exposure starting to take its effect on site traffic and app sales.
Lastly its worth mentioning that we have been busy working on a new iaminawe site in Drupal. Its taken a while to migrate all the old stuff off this blog and we are aiming for a mid September launch date with all the work completed over the last 2 years being added. It will replace this rather dated blog.
Follow me on twitter @skabenga or Angella @angellaiaminawe to keep up to date with our news and future releases.
Published by August 14th, 2010 in Streams, Theatre, Web and travel. 1 Comment
