On Wednesday I went to the Appside event, Publishing Apps: What’s The Story? 

The great and the good from the book and App publishing world were gathered in a fight to the death/discussion about where we've been, where are we going, and how is everybody feeling about it.

Cogapp recently worked closely with the ICA to produce an online exhibition called SOUNDWORKS. This presents a series of sound works by a hundred artists from around the world, online and in the Galleries.

The ICA wanted this to be an online exhibition space which would be a delight to use, but would not distract from the works themselves. 

Cogapp worked with the ICA to build a Web App that is optimised across Desktop, Tablet and Mobile.

This is how we did it. 
 

Last week saw the second in the series of networking events for senior charity digital executives we have been co-hosting with CharityComms. The topic for discussion this time was digital fundraising.

Anyone with any experience of the sector will know that this is a subject that creates much angst: charities on the whole will say that they are struggling to realise the potential income that digital seems to promise. It’s a subject that I have my own views on, and which I have written about in the Guardian Voluntary Sector Network blog.

Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp, and for us outside the tech team, it remains something of a mystery. Japanese food arrives and the team disappear to discuss all manner of technical trivia. Every now and again, Tristan opens up Tech Tuesday to the whole Cogapp team as part of his Tech Tuesday Outreach Programme (TTOP) where we can learn a little bit more about what goes on in this mysterious world. His previous TTOP sessions have seen us developing mobile applications and thinking about uses for telekinesis technology.

A few years ago, Cogapp was part of a project under the auspices of the Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), looking at using CDWA Lite to share data about museum collections, over the OAI PMH harvesting protocol.  OCLC contributed modifications to OAICatMuseum software which implements that protocol; and Cogapp built a framework around our COBOAT software - which was built for manipulating and transmitting collections information - to help museum generate CDWA Lite format data, especially from the TMS collections management system but adaptable for use with others.

In digital design we often rely heavily on the accepted forms of navigation and interaction metaphors. A few simple interactions like scrolling are wonderful if treated correctly, and some such as cover flow - I just don't get on well with. Just because I can swipe, it doesn’t mean I want to do it again and again.

Recently I’ve been having a Drupalish time with conferences – first it was DrupalCon London, and now DrupalCampUK has come to Brighton. Whilst on a smaller scale, it's just (if not more) exciting to meet people from local agencies who share our love for Drupal.

The judging for the D&AD 2012 awards is now over for another year. This year, I was privileged to be on the 
Digital Design jury - a new discipline for the awards. D&AD celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Hard to believe that in 1962 a group of creatives came together to raise the standards in the design and art direction industry. The group included David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Alan Fletcher, Bob Gill and many others, but there's more on Bob Gill and the judging week later.

One of the things that I really love about working in the digital sector is that still, after more than 12 years, I have regular moments of surprise and delight where something unexpected happens and I am once again reminded why I do what I do.

No, not the conference, which was a most enjoyable three days in San Diego last week. This was the title of the plenary session in which five brave volunteers came onto the podium and told us all about their projects that flopped. A sympathetic audience (with no access to wifi and with a promise not to tweet) played ‘epic fail bingo’ as we competed to identify nine common reasons for project failure.