There are many types of CEO’s.

The back slapping, suspender snapping, everybody’s pal, CEO
The legacy grandpa “I’m not even sure what we do anymore” CEO
The visionary CEO who will make you believe even the most unlikely corporate scenario
The greedy SOB “Gordon Gecko”, I think I need a shower, CEO
The chainsaw wielding, streamline machine, former CFO, CEO
The no nonsense hardass, you DO NOT want to tick this guy off CEO

There are more CEO archetypes…you get my point.

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I know its tough to pick an interactive agency. Here’s a list of things you should be looking for:

1)Is the person representing the agency wearing a suit and tie or jeans and a sport jacket? You want the one in jeans, because it shows that they are easy to talk to and are not trying to impress you with a fancy outfit.
2) Do they have full-time Programmers? Are those Programmers led by detail oriented user experience people?
3) Does their creative department include every person at the agency, supported by a few design savvy people that can bring an idea to life?
4)Is social media part of their culture or do they simply tell you about their social media “experts” ?
5)Have they ever won awards for the way they treat their employees or do you notice beds and cereal boxes in their offices?

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We are looking for an interface developer with about 5 years of experience. The person we are looking for is one that has extensive experience with HTML and CSS, very strong JQuery, prototype or scriptaculous skills. PHP skills are a definite asset as well. We build some very sophisticated layouts and the potential candidate needs to be able to take flat layouts and convert them into usable websites. Knowledge of open source CMS’s are a huge asset as well, particularly ModX and Wordpress.

Please send an email to iwannawork (at) indusblue.com with your resume and portfolio if you are interested.

we’ve been lucky to get to work with a variety of awesome Clients. Recently, we were able to team up with a very special client to support an important cause; Young Adults battling Cancer. Alli’s Journey is a charitable organization that seeks to help and support the lives of young adults suffering from cancer, as well as those around them. The organization is inspired by Alli Shapiro, a young woman who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 19. After noting the lack of resources and support for young adults suffering from cancer, Alli teamed up with her mother, Pam Shainhouse, with the intention of spreading the word that young people suffering from cancer are not alone.

Times have changed considerably in the last few decades. Gone are the days when we believed that diseases like cancer target only the elderly and the weak. Sadly, the tragic disease effects children, teens and young adults as well, perhaps more than we are even aware of.

However, with the changing of the times, comes new opportunities to battle these issues. In order to spread the word that young people suffering from cancer were not alone in their fight, Alli’s Journey came to us to help them with their online social media strategy. We created a blog style website, a twitter feed and youtube channel in order to help get the word out and provide support to anyone who is bravely battling cancer.

Each year, Alli’s Journey puts on a night of musical celebration entitled TAKE MY HAND; the proceeds of which go to fund Alli’s Journey projects. This year’s event is on May 27th at the Toronto Centre for the Arts. There will be a variety of performers, including Smoke and Mirror’s very own Page. Come and join us for a cause worth supporting.

In 1971, a fast talking auto industry huckster walked into the Premiers office in Fredericton, New Brunswick and pitched a besotted Premier Hatfield on building a sports car manufacturing facility. The huckster was Malcolm Bricklin and the car was a poorly designed $23 million boondoggle with gull wings and a short future.

As New Brunswick taxpayers learned the hard way, any plan to assign hard won dollars to any project should begin with getting all the right people in the room to evaluate the opportunity. Richard Hatfield (who was a bizarre individual to say the least) was sold on something shiny and cool with no concern about whether this fast talker could make good on his promises. “Gull wings?!? Look everyone, it’s got gull wings. How much money do you need”

Like most agencies, we’ve been on lots of pitches and they usually involve two types of people on the other side of the table - brand managers and digital directors. For the most part each type looks for completely different criteria to evaluate a digital agency. Brand folk often look at online advertising as an extension of brand as it appears in traditional media. They are looking for heavy design and lots of flash - the gull wings, if you will. The digital guys generally are head first into user experience and an agencies ability to turn great work around in a small window of time - the production side of it all. The difficulty is that both of these groups are seldom in the room at the same time and typically its the brand managers who get the first crack at the digital shops.The reality is that both parts of the team need to be at the table together to evaluate the competency of a digital agency. Both groups look at two equally vital components in the evaluation process and it would be a gamble to assume that just because it has gull wings, its going to be a winner.

The Bricklin was a bonefide lemon in every sense of the term. It looked great, but it was desiged for the aesthetic and nothing else. There are no shortage of lemons in the online space either. Next time you meet with a digital agency, evaluate them under the cold light of design, function and production. Get the gull wings, sure. But make sure they don’t fall off when your consumers are driving.

For a while now we have all seen how impressive the App store is and the incredible traffic its getting, so you would think that making apps are the only way to get content on the iPhone. The other way though, is making an iPhone friendly website. Now for web folks, the iPhone friendly website is far more palatable a solution that having to learn a new technology. But does that make it the right solution? Well I thought I would put down a comparison and find out:

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Hey Big Brand,

Welcome to real conversations online. This is where you get to be real, and guess what? Your audience is going to be real with you as well.
It’s refreshing to see some major brands participate in conversations on Twitter, @southwestair, @wholefoods, etc…,

Let’s face it Big Brand, you know people have been talking about you for years and now you get to hear it live and direct. It’s ok, they know you’ve got feelings and yes, believe it or not, they do care about you. Some love you and some hate you, but you knew that already. Don’t worry, everybody in the “real” world knows what you’re about. The important thing for you to remember is to stay on message. Forget the haters because like they say, “the more haters you got, the better you’re doing”.

Listen Big Brand, here’s the thing, this is where you get to connect with your people, listen to their needs and do what you can to address the most important ones. You can’t do everything. You’re not God and they (the people) know that. I guess the important thing is that no one learns anything when their mouths are moving, so sit back and listen. You’ve had decades to say your piece.

So, that was the bad news. Didn’t sound too bad, did it? It shouldn’t bother you when people say screw you, Big Brand. They’ve been talking behind your back for years. Haters suck and we all have ‘em, but stay true to yourself and what you stand for and you will be far more respected for being real.

Yours truly,

Real Consumer (who purchases products made by Big Brands and small brands)

So as promised I cleaned up the code for my ImageSequenceView class. The class extends the UIImageView class and adds 2 pieces of functionality to save a little time and code. First grab the source here.

The first piece of functionality is with the following method:

 Objective-C | 
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- (void)loadSequenceName:(NSString *)baseName imageCount:(int)count withNumberOfDigits:(int)digitCount ofType:(NSString *)type;
 

To describe how this method works think of a sequence of images that start as sequence001.png to sequence100.png. To load up this sequence you could use the following code:

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The above title simply refers to how I feel about driving stick. It’s more tedious than automatic, but at the end of the day you’re getting more satisfaction while driving. I’m not sure how many of you share my previous sentiment, but I feel the same way about writing Objective-C.

I’ll say it flat out, it is harder to code in Objective-C than it is in Actionscript 3. The syntax isn’t as verbose, memory management is a bitch, and those damn square brackets defy all logic. But for some reason I get more out of writing in Objective-C.

Like Matt said in his earlier post, Objective C is really just an object-oriented layer on top of C that uses SmallTalk-style messaging. So instead of calling a method on an object you are sending a message to the object (or receiver when you read the docs).

To help me learn this language and the Cocoa Touch API,  I decided to make a Doomsday countdown app called The End Is When. What can I say, I had just seen Watchmen. Building this app helped me learn the various aspects of iPhone development.

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As a PC guy who hates Macs but loves his iPhone, I’ve always wanted to do iPhone development, but never got into it because it wasn’t worth the trouble of using OSX. When the opportunity of doing an “iPhone week” at Indusblue came up, I decided I might as well bite the bullet and give it a shot.

The first hurdle was learning the Objective-C language. It’s basically C with some other functionality built on top, so it’s really not that different from any other of the “bracket languages”(AS3, Java, etc.). It’s syntax involves using a ton of square brackets, which were confusing at first, but I gradually got used to them. I still think they make the code look ugly.

The second hurdle was learning Cocoa Touch. Cocoa Touch is the core API for iPhone development, so it includes all of the functionality and components necessary to make apps that look and feel like Apple’s built-in applications. It’s pretty straight forward and a lot of the visual classes work in a similar way to the way that AS3’s display list works(eg. adding and removing children, etc.).

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