smackerel presents

A BIASED HISTORY
OF INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Way back before the dot com bubble,
even before the web, a lateral tribe of artist-programmers accidentally invented something called the New Media Industry...

SMACKEREL UPDATES

Good news / bad news

The good news is smackerel has been really busy this winter, (though we're always available to talk about your future projects.)

The bad news is, our own website needs a major spring cleaning. We promise to give it some loving attention as soon as we've hit some big deadlines in March.

Posted by Dave | THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2010 | CONTINUE READING

Blackberry wireframe stencils

As mentioned here a few weeks ago, Blackberry lacks a community of designers such as the iPhone has — people who freely share their assets and make their entire community more efficient. I made these wireframe elements in September, while working on a series of Blackberry apps. At that time I found nothing useful to help me get started; having created this work from scratch, I resolved to share what I could, in the hopes of making your process a bit less painful. I finally got around to cleaning up these stencils and making them ready to share this morning. Let me know what you think.

Click through to the next page to download and post comments.

Posted by Dave | TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2009 | CONTINUE READING

Mark Sigal on Android

If you have the budget to develop for two mobile platforms, its iPhone and what? Clients say ‘Blackberry’, because every exec is issued one on their first day. Their consultants say ‘Android’ because of charts like this one, that show only two platforms are gaining audience.

On the O'Reilly blog, Marc Sigal took a good hard look at Android, and wrote this 1800 word essay on whats good (carrier agnosticism) and what's missing (built-in media player like iTunes). Definitely worth a close read.

Posted by Dave | MONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2009 | CONTINUE READING

Blackberry versus iPhone

Last summer, iPhone’s App Store had over 50,000 apps; Blackberry’s App World had just 2000. Today, there may be 100,000 apps for iPhone. What’s behind this dominance? Are iPhones that much better?

Recently, smackerel was working on a series of mobile apps for both Blackberry and iPhone. Designing for both platforms, side by side, gave us some perspective on the 25:1 preference for Apple’s platform.

We saw that Apple is much better at nurturing a designer/developer ecosystem. Blackberry is reasonably supportive of their developer community, but they seem to have little understanding of designers. Yet designers come before developers in the product cycle, and more designers would presumably put more apps in the pipeline. RIM needs to support both developers and designers, for the sake of the quality and quantity of the app design on their platform.

Posted by Dave | WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2009 | CONTINUE READING

Rosettastone.com wins design award

Congratulations from smackerel, to our client Rosetta Stone, and their marketing agency HZDG. From over 1,400 entries, the Rosetta Stone website won Best Web Design (Non-Flash) in the semi-annual American Design Awards. We're thrilled to have a firm like HZDG helping to tell our client's story! Visit www.americandesignawards.com to learn more about this honour.

Posted by Kevin | TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2009 | CONTINUE READING

CONTACT SMACKEREL
We'd love to talk about your next interactive project!
email Dave: dave@smackerel.net
phone Dave: 647-202-2316
Dave on Linkedin
email Kevin: kevin@smackerel.net
phone Kevin: 416-532-0039
Kevin on Linkedin
your comments: post them here!