All the Olympics Results in a Tiny Shiny Device

August 12th, 2008 2:20 pm
by Nicholas Hillier | Posted in Tech, Work

Measuring in at 300 X 250 pixels, the new CBC Olympics widget was developed to push the boundaries of information density.

This flashy little piece of real estate really packs on the pounds by delivering up to the minute reporting on all 306 Olympic events, athlete blog feeds, breaking Olympic News for all 34 sport categories, Medals Results, Video feeds and program schedule with links to live events… whew!

Of course, as you might expect in a widget, you can customize and add it to your desktop as a Mac Widget or Vista Gadget, and even embed it into your favorite weblog or social application. Check it out on my facebook page.

Some long nights went into developing this application with developer Matt Rix taking care of the chrome and front end programming, Dayton Pereira tackling design and interaction, and I handled building the data provider and results parsing. Brodie Hanbuch, our Associate Technical Director, assembled the team and put the plan into action.

The whole production was a really dynamic experience with each person playing one part toward a larger goal, and that goal was to create the best damn widget concept possible. With such a tiny space to work in, the design challenges are obvious. It had to be intuitive, easy to use, aesthetically pleasing and readable.

On the front end, you can imagine the challenge Matt had managing the interaction, animation and general presentation. And if you want to hear about the challenges getting it all to work with facebook, I suggest you send Matt an email.

And as for the back-end… well that deserves a post all by itself. Unfortunately it would be so intricate and detailed, only the most die hard code monkey would find it interesting. (If I get 5 comments asking for that description, I’ll write the post. Unfortunately for me I find it interesting…)

You can get yourself a copy of the widget by clicking the “get and share” button on the lower right-hand side, or visit http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/olympicwidget/ and do the same thing there.

For more information on embedding the widget for your specific needs, visit http://www.cbc.ca/widgets/.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Tech, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “All the Olympics Results in a Tiny Shiny Device”

  1. Dayton Says:
    August 12th, 2008 at 5:10 pm

    Yeah this has got to be line for line the most functionality we have ever packed into an application the size of a big box ad. It’s pretty cool stuff, and the team did a bang up job putting this beast together.

  2. Vlad Says:
    August 13th, 2008 at 9:51 am

    10 for development.
    0 for originality.

  3. Dayton Pereira Says:
    August 13th, 2008 at 10:07 am

    0 for originality? I think that’s a bit harsh don’t you? From a UI design perspective we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, we modeled the navigation against the iPhone, there is not disputing that, but we did it because its the best way to display a ton of list type content in a small space. If we had designed something that was too different from anything anyone had seen before, the chances of adopting a new UI would be low. I think we made a solid decision with the UI, original or not.

  4. Nicholas Hillier Says:
    August 13th, 2008 at 11:32 am

    Ah come on Vlad, that’s a little mean spirited…

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