North Knight Software

Recently we worked with MT&L Public Relations to launch Keith's CoastCard — a promotional website for both the province of Nova Scotia and Alexander Keith's. The majority of the site's design was provided by MT&L, with North Knight Software helping out here and there. After a bit of work, the site was finished before its five day deadline was up.

The site is built on top of Google's App Engine platform. In this case, the back-end was developed in Python, and information was stored using the Datastore API. Overall, we found this platform to be a joy to use.

We also made extensive use of jQuery for this site. The library allowed us to quickly add appealing effects and friendly behaviours to the site.

Check out the Keith's CoastCard website!

North Knight Software's Jesse Rusak is going to be offering courses in Objective-C, Cocoa, and iPhone development at Splice Training during the months of July and August. If you're looking to learn more about developing for Mac OS X, or looking to break into iPhone development, these one week bootcamps will be a great way to get up and running quickly. For more information on dates and pricing, please visit Splice's summer schedule page.

North Knight Software is officially celebrating its first birthday! It's been a busy and exciting year. We've learned a lot about being in business, and have tackled many fun and challenging development projects.

Thanks go out to all of our clients. We wouldn't be here without you!

We've been extremely busy during the last few months here at North Knight Software. Among a number of other things, we've worked with MT&L Public Relations on three projects.

Mind Your Mouth — http://mindyourmouth.ca/

This site is built on a custom content management platform which allows employees of the Nova Scotia Dental Association to easily modify the site. A custom version of Google Search is integrated into the site to allow searching first based on keywords chosen by the Dental Association, and then falling back to using the answer text itself. The design elements were provided by MT&L, and markup, styling, and development were handled by North Knight Software.

The Best Thing You'll Never Do — http://www.bestthingyoullneverdo.ca/

For this project we created the "pledge form" where users can support the anti-litter campaign. When a user submits a new pledge, an email is sent off to an administrative user with a link which can be clicked to approve the pledge and post it to the website.

Tour for the Cure — http://www.tourforthecure.ca/

This project had two parts:

The website
We constructed the Tour for the Cure site from some great design elements provided by MT&L. Because we needed to get the site up and running quickly, we chose to use Drupal as its base and then wrote several custom modules. One example of this is in the Tour Stops section — each of the tour stops is maintained in a spreadsheet which is read by a script to update the custom Google Map.

The touchscreens
We were asked by MT&L to create two touchscreen survey kiosks for the bus. The idea is, once visitors have toured the bus, they can fill out a survey to gauge their experience. Because the survey is voluntary, we needed to create something very easy to use, and visually captivating.

During the creation of the touchscreen survey we worked with graphic designers from MT&L to ensure consistency with the overall Tour for the Cure design. We also added our own user interface design experience, adding a number of interesting visual effects. The end product was created on top of Mac OS X, and makes use of some fun technologies, including Core Animation and Quartz Composer.

We've finally released the first version of Hyacinth, a browser-based rogue-like game that we've been working on for quite a while now in amongst other projects. It started as a way to learn Flex but it ended up growing into somewhat more than just a demo.

It's still somewhat rough around the edges and could use a lot in terms of balancing and gameplay tweaking, but it is reasonably fun. Whether or not you're currently a fan of rogue-like games, please try it out! We'd like to hear what new players and genre veterans alike have to say about it. Let us know at games@northknight.ca.

Click here to learn more about Hyacinth

We've been busy over the past several months, and our website has been a little neglected. I've decided to remedy this, and have started by adding a new section about some featured projects we've been working on. The first one to be featured is the LaserCat project that we're working on with Dr. Donald Mitchell of Dalhousie University's Psychology Department.

Please click here to read more about LaserCat.