Thursday, June 26, 2008

Balloonacy
Stuff incident experienced at 01:42 on June 26th. Posted in Igor’s stuff at 10:19.
Tags: balloon race, balloonacy, balloons, code, geek, orange, poke
Balloonacy
After an intense last 10 days’ sprint spent finishing and polishing, we launched Balloonacy on Tuesday 24th with a grand total of over 30,000 balloons and 840 sites signed up and accepted into the race. Seems to be going really well; people are playing and writing nice things about it, the system’s holding up (captain), the client’s happy and, in short, we’ve made animal-shaped balloons float across Internet. Which is nice.

Friday, June 6, 2008

Play Balloonacy
Scribbled to Igor’s scrawls at 13:08
Tags: balloonacy, balloonrace, balloons, code, geek, orange, poke

Hot on the heels of Spot the Bull comes POKE’s next big campaign for Orange, Balloonacy. It’s a balloon race across Internet. No, really. It’s in its sign–up phase at the moment; the race itself starts on June 23rd.


You can launch a balloon or sign your site up to be part of the map, and if your balloon gets the furthest you can win a holiday in Ibiza.

It’s the biggest project we’ve built using our home–grown, bare–bones, remote–MVC framework, “Death Star”, and the first in which we’ve integrated it with AS3.

A lot of POKErs have been involved in this, including Iain who came up with the idea in the first place. Design is by Marc, Nicky and Dickon. In the client-side tech team, we have extreme Flash & pattern action by Dezza, with code & Papervision help from Gabes, and lovely Flash 9 sheen from POKE’s very own Caroline B. Stepping back from the Flash, we have front-end build and Death Star CMS delights from Greg; JS integration wizardry and Death Star coding from Mattias; Death Star coding, AMF services and database tomfoolery by Nilesh; system & platform architecture and team leading by mine own evil hand. Project managed by Mike who’s done his damnedest to keep us all sane. Ish.