Crimson Blog

On my plate right now I am designing two websites for family and redesigning Crimson Haven. One project is And I’m happy for them all. Doug Watson Digital is the one for my uncle by the name of, you guessed it, Doug Watson. If you happen to be interested in employing an extremely talented artist for teaching, composting, video game art, or whatever you should definitely check out his site and give him an email.

For an entirely different crowd there is Splitpin Engineering Services which is the website for my dad, Dave Watson. At this very second it’s just a fancy online business card, but come the weekend there will be a new feature added, a digital parts manual. We came up with this idea while my dad was complaining that one of the most time consuming parts of his job was when somebody called his antique aircraft spare parts business saying something to the effect of "I need the whatchyamacallit that fits between the fiddly thing and that other gidget. My original plan was to  just make one simple database and have a page where you could pick a manual, pick an item of interest from the manual and be given a diagram. Then you type in a number from the diagram and you get a part number complete with name and description. It all seemed so simple, till my friend Roo decided to have a day long conversation with me about the benefits of having a nice relational database. Which, to this day, I am not using any of the benefits he listed to me. But hey, how could I turn down an opportunity to try something needlessly complicated in the hopes that I’ll be glad for the practice in the future.

In return for doing these two sites I’ve managed to lay my hands on some very nice software and a touch of hardware which I most certainly could not afford if I were not a student.

Since Flash is still nothing but a dream for the iPhone/iPod Touch brothers it leaves advanced web development somewhat up a creek. Luckily, the Mobile Safari performs admirably in all other interactive fields, including JavaScript, allowing you to make use of some of the fun features revolving around AJAX and JSON to make a really sweet webApp. The adventure of building an application that would work with the memory and quiz features of the Bradley University Renaissance Gala taught me a great deal about using the web features of the iPhone/iPod touch.

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.