The nominations have been announced for the 2013 Online Media Awards and I’m pleased to see my products nominated in two categories.

First, heraldscotland.com has been nominated in the category Best Local/Regional News Site.  Stiff competition in this category including BBC News, Sky and Newsquest stablemate the Daily Echo.

Second, our Sunday Herald Life app has been nominated for Best App.  Competition here is tight too – Grazia, the Metro, Sky and the Economist all have really strong entries.

Will be interesting to see what happens… but great just to be nominated and up against such big national brands.

The full list of nominees can be found here: http://www.onlinemediaawards.net/nominations

For close to a year I’ve been working with  my colleagues at the Herald & Times Group and independent charity Nesta to bring OurTown to life.  The history of the project is documented here and here.  On Friday, Nesta kindly published a guest blog post I wrote for them outlining the successes, challenges and key learning from our first year working on this project.   Exciting!

Here’s the link… OurTown: A different take on hyperlocal

This weekend sees the launch of the Sunday Herald Life app, the first public app I’ve released based on the Adobe DPS platform.  Issue number one is available now, free of charge from iTunes: http://bit.ly/sh-life

I’ve been using Adobe DPS on and off for a couple of years now and have been really impressed with how the platform has developed.  In issue one we’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible – a little bit of video, some hyperlinks and an animation – but our plan is to make full use of the interactive elements in the coming months.

The whole Sunday Herald team has put a ton of work into the content of the app (I reckon there are at least 200 pages in the launch issue) and I’m really excited about the future direction for the app, especially as our top photographers get into dSLR video which could provide great additional content for future issues.

I’m also looking forward to using DPS for a ton of other projects. As a newspaper group we have dozens of talented InDesign users and buckets of good content waiting to be used.  Hopefully we’ll be able to pair some of those up in exciting new ways for fun and profit.

Media coverage

• All Media Scotland
• The Drum

Last summer I was given the opportunity to develop my first iPhone app.  It was for the Wee Red Book, the Evening Times football almanac that has been published since the 1920s.

Today we’re making the app completely free for the rest of the 2012-13 season.  Hit the relevant store link below to get your free copy…

• In the Apple App Store – for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad
• In the Google Play Store – for Android smartphones and tablets

If you like the app, please give it a nice rating or review in the app store.  If you don’t like it, please let me know so we can make a better version for the 2013-14 season.

Please bear in mind that the app was developed in an insanely short timescale – just me, for four weeks, developing for both iOS and Android… including the time it took to extract and database the entire contents of the print edition.

In case you’re undecided, the app includes:

• Fact files for every club in the SPL and Divisions 1-3.
• Final league tables for the past season across all main Scottish leagues.
• Scottish Cup, League Cup and Challenge Cup results dating back to 1873.
• Scotland’s international record, country by country, back to the 1870s.
• Every Scottish player capped (and every international match played) since the 1870s.
• Player of the month for the past season. Player of the year dating back to the 1950s.
• Plus dozens more tables, lists and stats.

Live data:

• Fixtures for the whole season across the SPL, Division 1-3 and Scottish Cups.
• Latest match results for the SPL, Divisions 1-3 and Scottish Cup games.
• Live league tables for SPL and Divisions 1-3.

This week, amidst one of the worst snow storms to hit the Northeast US, the Digital Street Paper project I’ve been working on with the INSP was the subject of one of the talks at the Brand Perfect Tour in New York.

The INSP’s Maree Aldam talked about the challenges that street papers face in the digital age and how our project was one attempt to react to changing reader consumption patterns.  You can see a quick video summary of Maree’s talk here on YouTube.

The full background to Maree’s New York visit and talk can be found here on the Brand Perfect site.

A couple of months ago I put together a retro arcade cabinet using our old TV, an X-Arcade Tankstank and a Mammut Children’s shelf unit from IKEA.  I’m quite pleased with the end result – I didn’t want it to look like a bulky, black 1980′s arcade cabinet, but I did want it to feel like an arcade cabinet in use.

Today I was surprised (and pleased) to see that my little invention was the current ‘featured hack’ on the front page of  IKEA Hackers.

Here’s a link to the full post with pics and all: Mammut Retro Arcade Cabinet