Chronos/The Wanted, another Fb project

Wrapping up another ‘chronos’ project for The Wanted. Not sure what to do with this app project yet, they’re so easy to do and build and work really well; just takes time to put some steam behind it to make it in to a sucessful product.

The layouts conditioned so existing fans see share options with Facebook and Twitter, and non-fans see a prominent ‘Like’ button to like the page.

I like how this one turned out though! I’m beginning to love the dark ‘Like’ buttons.

Suggestions welcome. I know i’m rubbish at page folds…

Did I rip off Reeder (iPad) for my site?

Yes, yes i did. I’m not ashamed of it though, Reeder is one of my favourite iPad apps in terms of design, the paper cut feel is gorgeous.

20110803-112305.jpg

The Wanted ‘Postagram’

This app was cool to do. We used the Instagram API to pull in The Wanted’s recent photos, then through Facebook let users pick one, write a message with it and send it to friends, sort of like a summer postcard.

Haven’t launched it at the time of writing, so i’ll include the link when it’s live. Trying to work out if we can use ‘Postagram’ legally with it, but you can see some of the word in progress.

Did the UX on this one and app production. Love Instagram!

Update: This is live now! Go have a play

 

Lipsy ‘Wall Of Fame’

Pretty simple photo upload application for Lipsy London (Clothing). Users can upload their photo to be entered on store’s ‘Wall Of Fame’. The photo also goes to a photo album on their Facebook profile.

They can share their entry on their wall, or Tweet it. The CMS allows some pretty basic filtering per store and per session.

I did production and UX on it, and the lovely designers at Lipsy did the design its self. Check it out

New Site… What do you think?

This must be the 5th personal website I’ve ever had, hello mr. indecisive!

Here is my latest digital representation of me though, and hopefully it will last longer than it’s predecessors. Building sites has become a guilty pleasure for me over the past year or 2 (this is probably the 10th theme I’ve built for WordPress). I’m not actually technically a developer or a designer, I’ve had zero training in either, but I suppose this goes to show on the world wide web, anythings possible and anythings learnable!

Anyway, hello!

Chronos

May 2011 I started putting together a new web app variant dubbed Chronos, based on the idea of rewarding Facebook page fans with content when a variable is met. This was a much simpler build than some previous frameworks i’ve worked on, and based purely on PHP and running calculations via data sourced from Open Graph.

We were initially going to just build this to reward fans of a page when it gets to a certain number of ‘Likes’. Then we realised the potential can go further and Facebook’s Graph API objects lent the app more potential.

We now have 3 core versions developed:

  • Like‘: The standard intended use of content revealing when a page gets to a certain number of ‘Likes’.
  • Checkin‘ Revealing content (a discount code for examaple) when a Place gets a certain number of checkins.
  • Counter‘ Really simple countdown timer to reveal chronological events at set times. (reduces dev requirement)

The concept is really simple, and was inspired by Battlefield 3′s Facebook page which rewarded fans with exclusive new game trailers when the page got to 1m ‘Likes’. The target was ambitious in the time scale, but the idea was simple and great. A lot of Facebook developers are trying to fly fancy builds all over the platform, but you really don’t need to. We developed this app so we can quickly (thus cheaply) serve clients great solutions, or offer it as a source licensed model to others.

Features:

The whole app is driven from 1 config file with 7 variables, which in turn programmes over 20 template objects. The Graph API also allows any objects to be pulled from the standard graph.facebook.com strings.

In general, the standard application involves:

  • A ‘Like’ button, which when clicks automatically hides. This only shows for non-fans of the page. Alternative content can be set for existing fans to incentivise sharing the page more
  • A % driven meter which displays progress in real time. This is all just CSS so can be styled however
  • Share, Tweet and Invite buttons to incentivise people to share the page and post to their wall. The information here is all determined by the config too, giving progress % data in the updates.
  • The Checkin version has a Google Map image which is automatically pinned and set via the location returns from the Graph API – no need to develop this, it generates its self as soon as you set the Place ID.

That’s pretty much it! In terms of what’s revealed when the targets reached, it can really be anything – Video, downloads, streams, discount codes, competition forms – the better the reward the more galvanised people are to collectively achieve it.

We’re just about to break Chronos’ virginity on a couple of campaigns in Beta, so we’ll see how this goes. I’m expecting it to change the world, but then it was never meant to. We developed this so it can be quickly and cost effectively deployed and just ‘work’.

Feel free to share any feedback! We have demo’s live but we’re keeping this in private testing for now.

Follow the Lucid Dev Tumblr for updated project examples.