Council – Masters Games
Client: Auckland Council
Agency: Ogilvy
Technology: Air, iPad, Flash
On behalf of the Auckland Council, Ogilvy built an iPad application to pitch for the World Masters Games in 2017 be hosted in Auckland. The idea was to pitch in a modern and engaging way, and the iPad was the perfect fit for this. Including video, interactions and 274 pages of content, all displayed with easy chapter and page gesture navigation.
Five iPads were deployed with the application and flown over to be presented to the committee. The result, Auckland will host the World Masters Games in 2017 and this pitch has now become the one to beat.
Role: I was tasked with creating and deploying the iPad application for Auckland Council. Due to the massive size of the document we found a unique solution of exporting the images, generating XML, including these in the application files, and then pulling it all in dynamically into the UI. Memory was a real issue when dealing with this many bitmaps on the earlier iPad’s, so I needed to be very strict in destroying anything that was not needed at any given time.
The application relied heavily on gestures for navigation. A swipe to select the next page or chapter, pinch and scale up to open a page or chapter, pinch and scale down to close a page or chapter, etc. At the time of development there were no reliable gesture libraries in Air that I could find. The built in gestures could only work one at a time, pan, scale or rotate, not all at the same time as I needed it. In the end I had to manage the touch points myself and build in my own gestures to get all three running at once.
I used Air Packager for iPhone from Flash Professional to build the application. Due to the sensitive nature included in the document Ad Hoc deployment was used, avoiding the iTunes store and also avoiding any application approval delays.