North Knight Software

The website

We constructed the Tour for the Cure site from some great design elements provided by MT&L Public Relations. 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. We developed the site in a way to easily manage bilingual content, and the site is available in both French and English.

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.

Working with MT&L Public Relations, we launched 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.

Chromo is an iPhone-based painting game. Finger-paint to achieve goals so that you can advance through the levels. Chromo features realistic pigment mixing and brush strokes, and has been optimized extensively so that it will run on the relatively slow iPhone.

This is a physics-based example game which was created by Shamus using the LÖVE game engine. The game was created over the course of two days. It was developed to after we helped with the Best Thing You'll Never Do website to show other possible interactive elements which could be added.

To Play
This game works best with a three-button mouse. Use the left mouse button to grab trash and put it into the trash can. The middle mouse button will create a gravity vortex which sucks up surrounding trash. The right mouse button will create small explosions to send trash flying.

Simon Ship is a game/experiment currently under development for Dr. Ray Klein in Dal's Psychology department. It is designed to be an engaging and fun test of the simon effect. You steer your ship down a blood vessel with a wheel, and your radar alerts you to incoming viruses. When you fire to destroy them, the relative position of the virus and your hands on the wheel is expected to show the simon effect.

Working with Dalhousie University's Dr. Donald Mitchell, we provided project planning, consulting on hardware purchase, as well as custom software and hardware development. In the end we provided Dr. Mitchell with a computer-controlled laser "turret" robot, and a process for analysing a cat's gaze as it followed laser light.

A drum machine program for Mac OS X. Using short sound files you can create multiple tracks of music. Tracks can be shared and manipulated over a local network so multiple people can play together.

Play Hyacinth now!

Hyacinth is an in-browser Flash game, in a traditional rogue-like style. Explore randomly generated dungeons full of monsters and treasure, all represented as letters and punctuation.

North Knight Software was hired by Dr. Beverly Butler to create a series of specific psychomotor tests. After looking over her requirements we realized that each of the tests she specified shared commonalities with many other tests used in psychological research. Because of this, we constructed a flexible framework for creating future psychomotor tests: DalCAB, or the Dalhousie Computerized Attention Battery.