October 31st, 2008 by Gruden
After much anticipation, Gruden has launched a full version of their website in Chinese.
A big thank you to Wenjie, Shun, Feng and James who have helped to translate and setup the site.
Check it out at http://www.gruden.cn/ or http://www.gruden.com.cn/ and test your Chinese translation skills!
October 30th, 2008 by Gruden
Gruden was excited to announce the launch of the new Business Events Sydney (BESydney) website and Flex application earlier this week.
Business Events Sydney (BESydney) bids to host meetings and congresses in Sydney. They help with conference bidding, provide free assistance and non-biased advice to anyone considering or planning an event or incentive in New South Wales (NSW), and are responsible for marketing Sydney and NSW as a leading business events destination.
Primary users of the site include meeting/event planners with confirmed events in Sydney and NSW and BESydney members. The general objectives of BESydney in the refresh of their site were to:
Increase use of the website as a preferred information source by meeting/event planners choosing Sydney or NSW as their location to hold an event, conference, incentive, corporate meeting or exhibition
Increase the use of the website by meeting/event planners who already have a confirmed event for Sydney or NSW as their information source for finding suppliers and using the BESydney’s services
Increase use of the website by BESydney members in advertising their own venue or services, learning more about the BESydney, their membership and events won for Sydney and NSW
Develop the BESydney’s existing email communication program and execute customised online communications to introduce BESydney and to promote Sydney to international and Australian associations and corporates and incentive markets in Asia, particularly in China, Taiwan and Korea.
As well as redesigning the site, Gruden custom-built a cutting edge Flex application which allows users to log on and request an online proposal. Check out the new site here.
October 30th, 2008 by Gruden
Escape into some of the greatest stories ever written and experience a revolutionary new reading platform, only for iPhone and iPod Touch. Check it out here.
October 30th, 2008 by Gruden
This week, Gruden and Disney Channel Australia celebrate the release of their latest online user-generated game, the Hannah Montana Cover Styler.
Disney approached Gruden with the concept of building a sustainable campaign to raise and maintain awareness for Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana TV show and movie through an online experience that is unique to the Disney Channel website, while being flexible enough to carry across other brand identities.
Children can log on to the Disney Channel site and create their own magazine cover featuring Hannah Montana, or alternatively, themselves, with the opportunity to feature in the Top 20 Gallery and have their magazine cover rated by other users.
The application was developed with full object-oriented design approach and extensibility in mind. The front-end application was built using ActionScript 3 for Flash Player 9 while the back-end application was built using ColdFusion mainly exposing CFC remote methods that are consumed directly by the front-end application.
Using Gaia Framework for Adobe Flash, the front-end application was built rapidly to handle inter-page navigation and deep-linking (a method that allows browsers to track navigation history within Flash). As a result, users can easily bookmark a page within the Flash application and navigate directly to a page, i.e. the Gallery or Top 20 section, without having to load the introduction screen.
The front-end application was built on a custom MVC framework based on the publisher-subscriber design pattern, which provides flexibility when handling various events and user interactions. The framework enables process separation between programmers and designers when working on the same Flash components, which was a very important aspect given the evolving nature of the application in terms of functionality and visual design.
This is a great showcase for Disney Channel Australia as it is the first Australian commissioned and produced application that will go global for Disney Channel. Consider yourself magazine cover material? Upload your photo and start creating your masterpiece here.
October 24th, 2008 by Gruden
Today, Grudenites are sad to say a big farewell to one of our favourite PMs, Bernie.
Bernie has been an integral member of the Project Management Team for some time, and will be sorely missed.
Bye Bear! Good luck with your future endeavours.
October 15th, 2008 by Gruden
If, like a relationship gone stale, you have found yourself falling out of love with your current one lettered programming language (B, C, D), fear not.
The ever thinking, creative folks at Microsoft are set to announce a new language for building textual domain-specific languages, and to add further one lettered confusion to this already packed marketplace, the new offering is set to be named ‘M’.
The new language is to be a part of Microsoft’s new Oslo development and service-oriented strategy, incorporating features from XAML while being textual and domain-specific. M is to be used directly with 2 other components to be released with M along with Visual Studio 2010: Quadrant, a tool for building models visually, and a repository for storing and viewing models in an SQL database.
Want to know more? Read up here.
If you like this idea so much that you feel compelled to dress Steve Balmer in a tutu, or simply have a fetish for dressing fat balding men, waste a few office hours and click here.
October 13th, 2008 by Gruden
Wow, what a conference! It’s taken a couple of weeks for it to all sink in. So many great speakers. So many delegates from such diverse backgrounds. Above all else Web Directions South offers a fascinating snap shot of the web industry down under in 2008.
Such a large event could not go off without some inspired organisation from John, Maxine and the rest of the WDS08 crew; well done, it ran like clock work.
If you want to get a sense of the event, check out the photos on Flickr. Or if you are interested in the content there are lots of slides and podcasts online, especially recommended is Jeffery Veen’s Designing our way through data.
The closing night drinks, sponsored by 99Designs and Gruden, were great. The drink tickets ended up being plentiful, the winning design looked great and lots of fun was had handing them out.
There was a moment in the closing keynote that captured the whole vibe of the conference perfectly – when the Twitter backchannel was put front and center to great comic effect. To understand the significance you’ll probably need to check out the keynote itself, or maybe you just had to be there.
Thanks again John & Maxine and thanks to everyone who came!
October 11th, 2008 by Gruden
We’ve recently been working on a Coldfusion upgrade for some of our clients, moving serveral servers from version 7 to 8. We’ve known for some time that CF8 runs much faster than CF7 and earlier versions (see the ColdFusion 8 performance whitepaper for details), but Coldfusion 8 in it’s default configuration has been held back from it’s potential full speed because of a bug in the default Sun 1.6 JVM. The problem mostly affects start up time, but can periodically impact the a running application.
The accepted approach to this problem was to roll back the JVM to version 1.5, however Sun recently released update 10 to the 1.6 JVM (as a release candidate) and this has solved the problem.
If you are running Coldfusion 8, or thinking about moving to it in the near future, make sure you update your JVM.
October 9th, 2008 by Gruden
Gruden has designed and developed the new site for The Newspaper Works, a new information-based website for media and creative agencies to use when researching newspaper advertising.
The site has been more than 15 months in development and the process has been aided by two panels established by The Newspaper Works, a media planning advisory panel and a media implementation advisory panel held, comprising media strategic planners and traders, to determine their needs and ideas for the site.
The Newspaper Works was formed by the five major publishers to represent the national, metropolitan and regional newspapers in Australia, with the aim of increasing newspaper’s share of national advertising spend.
In 2007, they initiated a study amongst more than 100 key media professionals to identify how the newspaper industry could help the media planning and buying process.
“The key finding from our research was that the newspaper industry is fragmented and complicated, so we adopted a consultative approach with media planners and traders to make sure our new website addressed those frustrations,” The Newspaper Works CEO Tony Hale said.
“The site includes a newspaper locator, an online schedule generator and has also been designed to inspire and stimulate thinking through creative use of space.”
The website provides an update of the latest in newspaper advertising from around Australia in the Breaking campaigns section; plus it features a research and insights section, market information charts, masthead logo downloads, fact sheets on key national, metropolitan and regional newspaper titles and case studies from around the world to prove newspapers’ effectiveness.
Check out the new site here.
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June 19th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
i love hannah