Design & Development
Insight into the development process for various projects. Includes pen/paper, digital and email brainstorms during project concept & design.
About
Newzpin is a geolocating RSS aggregator. The application subscribes to RSS feeds, scrubs the first few lines for geographic key words and "pins" the story to it's relative location on the globe.
Sidebar allows user to browse categories, turning them on/off which updates the map to show available stories in each location. Zooming in moves from globe to flat map and higher zoom reveals countries, states and eventually cities. Locations without stories are not displayed on the map.
MyPins allows user to create custom keyword searches and assign a corresponding pin color. Stories matching these terms will display on the map until removed from MyPins.
Globe Frames
At the time of development we decided the best way to allow for an interactive globe was to load individual frames and cycle relative to user's touch direction/speed. Images had to be small enough to load simultaneously in Mobile Safari (iOS 4.2) without crashing. Frames were rendered in AfterEffects and optimized as 8bit PNGs in Photoshop. Smooth shading is difficult to create with dithered 8bit graphics, so we overlayed a single 24bit PNG on all frames resulting in a very attractive interface.
Development notes
Motion Wireframes
Design wireframes for a Global media aggregator concept. Application would subscribe to various streaming media channels around the globe and user could search for streams per territory.
