There is more competition than ever in this space, with some truly exceptional products, so to be recognised in the ‘Best Non-Fiction App’ category is a real honour. The awards night kicked off New York’s Digital Book World conference which, through showcasing some of the best in digital publishing and thinking, was proof (if any were needed) that publishing’s best days are ahead.

This accolade joins last year’s commendation in the FutureBook Innovation Awards and, hot off the press, being voted Best Coffee Table Book App (iOS) in the 2011 Best App Ever Awards.

Download The Magic of Reality for iPad.

Read in depth the production process behind The Magic of Reality for iPad.

For the second year running we’ve worked with Company Pictures, the creators of Skins, to bring the characters to life online.

For Series 6 we took on a more challenging task—to extend the Skins experience into what jargon-lovers might call ‘transmedia storytelling.’

The core success of Skins is simple: authentic storytelling. And we had to make that true on all platforms.

We started with the characters and their online lives—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube.

But how do we use these platforms to tell stories? Well, if we are going to undertake “authentic storytelling” in these places, obviously in this case it means the characters must have lives between the broadcast of the episodes … stories emerge in real-time, at the right time of day, and of course, audiences can interact with the world of Skins in new ways. All of this means some logistical, creative and technical challenges. Which we love.

As well as telling stories on the platforms our characters would actually use, we also created something sexay. It’s called ”Skins: Lock-In“  — a place where the audience can “follow the stories between the stories.”

In short: each blog post, Facebook update, YouTube clip is part of a bigger story. A story that might be on-air, but might not be.

Each storyline in the Skins: Lock-in takes the audience on a journey. They can follow the characters on all platforms, or they can just pop in and check what’s been going on.

We are very biased but think it’s some of the best storytelling UX out there (which we should blog about soon) … for example, we know people don’t watch episodes in order all the time. So there’s a cool ‘spoiler filter’ which you can use to make sure you’re just getting stories that don’t spoil the current state of play on TV.

We’re recruiting for a Head of Production to oversee the quality, smooth-running and budgeting of all our output. You’ll have experience of creating content across numerous platforms. You should be highly efficient and have good legal knowledge for talent, supplier and client contracts. You’ll be expected to contribute to the creative ideas, client liaison, budgeting and contracting for our biggest interactive, radio and filming projects.

Most importantly we’ll be looking for you to bring firm but friendly project leadership to all our major productions, as well as overseeing a team of production and project managers that you’ll recruit as needs require.

Our future is digital so if you’re only interested in TV, you’re not the person for us!

Please send your CV to our Managing Director Steve Ackerman here by Monday 6th February 2012.

On top of that, we’ve got our video and radio crews preparing to head down at the event at the O2 in February, to provide all the backstage video footage for the website, and syndicate BRITs radio content across the UK and the world.

Follow the official Twitter and Facebook feeds – run by us – to stay up to date with everything that’s happening at the UK’s biggest music bash.

The wonderful people at Tate liked one of our ideas a lot, namely turning the history of modern art into a (slightly bonkers) platform game, and as of RIGHT NOW we’re delighted to announce that Race Against Time is available in iOS App Stores worldwide. Hurrah!

You play as a wily chameleon, travelling through the history of modern art in order to defeat evil Dr Greyscale’s plan to remove all the colour from the world. As you race through time from 1890 back to the present day, the background, platforms and enemies change to reflect major art movements and works from the last 121 years of modern art. And if you play the game AT the Tate you can activate ‘turbo mode’, supercharging your jump and unlocking a mighty tongue-attack for zapping baddies.

Our unfairly talented in-house post-production team have also created a bespoke soundtrack for the game, giving each decade a stylistic variant of a main theme using instruments and processing appropriate to the particular era. Phew.

It’s also free, so you don’t have to spend any monet (sorry). It will work beautifully on all iDevices running up-to-date software, but particularly shines on 4th gen iPhone and iPod Touch (retina display).

If you’re in the UK, download Race Against Time here.

Good luck!

Back in August Last.fm came to us with a very interesting brief—to create a web application to navigate and share 2 million emerging artists’ tracks. We had to deliver it in a rich, immersive and unique fashion, using HTML5 and CS3 technology wherever we could. 

We stuck it into the @VoiceOfSE user-centred design process, and eventually hit on a design that seemed to tick the boxes. It was textured, playful and original (and not the same old music player)—but could we build it?

Creating an HTML5 app (or rather using rich technologies umbrella’d under HTML5) was an exciting prospect. HTML5 offers much promise in the direction the web is taking. The lines between native desktop application and the web are blurring quickly. With improved browsers and system specs why should the application stop at the door of the internet? Last.fm Discover is part of the great push toward a more sophisticated web. How that world will look exactly is still up for grabs, but if more companies like Last.fm continue to test the possibilities and support innovation, we might get to a good place sooner rather than later.

However HTML5 is not without drawbacks. The API implementations are varied, disparate and often buggy. A large portion of web users are still using antiquated browser software, unwittingly holding back advancement. A single-page asynchronous application, with full screen textured animations and multiple dynamic user journeys was going to be a massive challenge.

We started with Backbone. One of many developing frameworks for Javascript, it seemed like the best match. It has excellent built-in methods to manage your data requests, good data structures and nice integration with underscore templates. It would help us keep things in order with a tried-and-tested MCV style setup.

The next challenge was animation. We tried a few different techniques: Javascript animation; canvas animations; CSS3 transitions … Our first animation tests were promising, but as we scaled things up it started to get shaky. Safari started to glitch out. Chrome decided it didn’t want to redraw the page any more and went on holiday. Firefox took one look at the animation and passed out. Explorer just shrugged it’s shoulders at us and said ‘no’.

Hmmm. 

CSS3 transforms caused the least amount of issues so we pursued this route. We started on Safari. It turns out that if the animated element was over a certain pixel size it would have redraw issues, exposing ugly blocks of nothing where there should have been lovely green hills. We over came this with tiles. Instead of using a regular CSS repeating background for the hills, we inserted a series of image tiles. Problem solved. Except this made things 10 times worse in all the other browsers. Sigh!

Chrome had serious problems. Elements would just disappear from screen never to be seen again. The issue turned out to be two-fold. Firstly our animations had to be much leaner and precise to avoid redraw memory issues. We reworked the animations to only move elements visible on screen, anything else was hidden or remove. Secondly the problems seemed to be CSS z-index related. Chrome was having trouble redrawing objects that had been forced in front by z-index. This was a major hassle. We had to completely re-order the flow of the html file to make items appear in the correct layered order without forcing the z-index. Whew! 

Now Firefox. Wake up Firefox! Wake up! … This was bad.

Animations were horribly jumpy and random. For a long time it looked like a lost cause. But some of the animation efficiencies we made were helping. Then we discovered that the CSS scaling was causing animation position problems. It seems that when you requested an element position in Firefox, it wasn’t including the CSS scaled offset amount. This caused hills to randomly shoot off screen in all directions. So a little bit of custom calculating for Firefox and things started to move. Without hardware acceleration in Firefox, we were never able to get it to perform as well as the other browsers, but it was functioning, which was a long way from where it was.

And then there was Internet Explorer. Now, this may come as a surprise to anyone that has dealt with the Microsoft browser legacy, but IE9 gave us the least issues. There was some extra work involved in IE9′s lack of CSS transitions, but after we sorted that with a few javascript plugins, things started to work. And I’m not just saying this because they part sponsored the project. It was a bulldozer. It didn’t care what we threw at it. It just ploughed on. I was as surprised as you are.

But wait, we are forgetting something! What self respecting HTML5 project would not include support for iPhones and iPads. Let’s fire it up a take a look. Oh, it crashed. Let’s try again. Oh dear. iOS devices are amazing gadgets, but they live on a knife edge of system resources and you do have to treat them delicately. So we had to take the pruning scissors to the Discover hills to help them out. 50% less moving stuff equal 100% less crash. Not a bad trade for such an important consumer of HTML5 apps.

And so Last.fm Discover limped, hobbled and then sprung to life. A sophisticated, rich, immersive HTML5 web app beaten into existence through gritted teeth, determination and a patient Last.fm. I can hear Flash developers laughing. Why use HTML5 at all? Why bother when there are existing technologies to do what we have done quicker and easier? Well, HTML5 is more than a buzz word. It’s the hope of an open rich online world. It’s lean, clever and untethered. It’s unrestricted by OS, corporation or device. I’ll admit that HTML5 still has a long way to go, but Last.fm Discover is just one of many exciting projects that are emerging and will emerge to help to blur the boundaries of what the internet is. Yes the native desktop app is currently king. It’s mature, has excellent financial models and good purchasing outlets. The conception of the ‘app store’ has secured the native apps position. This is great! I say if we can get paid to develop native apps, lets pursue that model for as long as we can. At the end of the day developers have to put food on their computer desks like everybody else. But keep one eye on HTML5. Keep and eye on the ‘web app’. Because one day soon all the cool kids (nerdy developers) will be writing HTML5 applications, making millions and selling stuffed toy merchandise like it’s Angry Birds all over again.

And most importantly without a tool like Last.fm Discover, I would never have found my new favourite music genre “Nerd Core”. That was worth the pain.

Do you want to make the next web, not the last one, in a place that would genuinely value you?

The sexy HTML5 application we just launched for Last FM is about as close as we get to building “web sites” — that is, not very close at all. We’re looking for people that understand this perspective, and to help us build beautiful user-centred content systems, applications and services which make rich media work the way it needs to in the 21st Century.

If you think you could do even better than these, we’d REALLY like to talk to you:

www.last.fm/discover
www.nightmarehigh.com

We need more fantastic web developer-engineer-programmers, who cross all and every client-side technical discipline. If you’re iconoclastic, mellow, have super-powers, care about standards-based technologies and are ideally interested in how rich media / content and connected screens work together we’re interested.

Here’s the litany:

Excellent knowledge of:
HTML
CSS(2/3)
Javascript
jQuery

Prefer experience with:
Asynchronous web applications
Ajax
JSON
Working with back-end devs/MCV frameworks (Python/Django or similar)
Templates

You don’t have to be perfect at all of this — but a desire to be.

NO AGENCIES. If you pimp us CSD’s after this, we’ll blacklist you.

Drop Michelle Feuerlicht a line (our exec producer in the digital department)

The deadline for current applications is 1st February 2012. Beyond that date we will not receive or review any applications until we next open up the process later in 2012.

Here’s the trailer with that mesmerising Benedict Cumberbatch voice again:

Britain’s most famous front door was unlocked to young people as part of Olympic legacy project somewhereto_.  10 young people looking for somewhere to free run, perform spoken word and practice boxing were given free rein to use Number 10 Downing Street as a space to showcase their passions – and we were there to capture it in film.

Please watch the film on somewhereto_’s YouTube channel.

The incredible day was captured by Somethin’ Else’s cameras.  Callum Harris (17) and Jack Curtis (20) from Accrington Stanley alongside Chima Akenzua (22) and Karol Michta (17) from London leaped over the grand staircase, past faces of Prime Ministers new and old, before back flipping through the hallway out to the garden. Boxers Wesley Washington (17) and Ryan Hutchings (16) from Royston made the most of the Pillared State Drawing Room’s open space, while Rubix Collective – Bridget Minamore (19), Deanna Rodger (22), Sean Mahoney (23) and Ayesha Badat (17) from London – bounced inspiring words across the State Dining Room.

The film was shown to the Prime Minister, who said “somewhereto__ is a fantastic initiative to help young people find the space they need to develop their passions. This is a great example of the Big Society – connecting businesses that have space they can spare with people in their community who have a dream they can use it for.

“If 10 Downing Street can open its doors to something as adventurous as free running I hope it will inspire other people to see what their building could be used for.”

Since having seen the film, the Prime Minister has decided to play it to the Conservative party conference ahead of his address today at 2.30pm.