The Bradley Renaissance and Me
A journey through life, love, and really sweet iPod webApps.
There is no doubting that apple’s SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch is a fantastic bit of software that will usher in a new age in mobile computing, but until they release the ability for users to download and run the content on their precious hand-helds there is nothing to be done but design for the web.
This is what I did for Bradley University’s Renaissance Gala event with the help of my trust instructor Steve Merrill. This is the first of two posts. This post will have my thoughts and the Gala itself and the other will have my experience developing a webApp for the iPhone.
For us in the Multimedia program, the Gala was meant to be, and succeeded in being, a fantastic display of what the combined powers of traditional video, flash, and text message technology can do in an interactive event. The production featured such interesting elements as a quiz that could be taken real-time by participating tables using text messages, as well as a system where Bradley’s guests could text in their memories of the university and have them be displayed on the massive high definition projectors we had set up in the room. Also pictures of the event were taken and loaded wirelessly to be displayed near the end of the production.
The real elements that I was interested in were text message features. There was always some worry over the idea that the age group most of our guests fell in to might not be able to, or know how to send a text message. Our fears were misplaced as, much to our delight, over a thousand text messages came in. The server was swamped, but performed admirably. Harry Williams and Steve could barely approve the messages fast enough through the Drupal/Flash interface that they had built. The audience really adopted the idea of texting in their thoughts to be displayed quite easily and soon whatever ice was left at the Gala was broken.
The quiz performed wonderfully as well with over half the 102 tables registering, a wonderful thing since we were mentally prepared for the reality that there might be something like 6 tables. The crowed was cheering through the whole thing.
Tags: Bradley, iPhone, iPod Touch, Multimedia, renaissance