Gooii collaborators Tim McCourt and Wesley Louis have just won the awards for ‘Best of British’ and the ‘Audience Award for Best Film’ at this year’s highly respected ‘Canterbury Anifest’. This is great news for the director/animators and we are very excited to be working with them on an exciting short film for a new high profile client.

Congratulations to Tim and Wes. Click here to view the Canterbury Anifest website or here to view the excellent and award winning ‘Drawing Inspiration‘.

The highly respected website ‘Fun Educational Apps’ has just reviewed the first three games in the Fab-Phonics series. Highly rating the apps, they describe them as “engaging and easy to use fun learning…” saying they are “cute, simple and effective learning… the kids loved it and we are sure yours will do too”.

To read the full review and also be in with a chance of winning the apps, for either your iPhone or iPad, please visit: http://www.funeducationalapps.com

“Oh no, the road is blocked! Can you help Babybot to clear the road, tap on the missing letter to complete the words. The pictures and sounds will help you.”

Containing over 75 words, with colourful illustrations and sounds, The Fab-Phonics ‘Road Block’ is designed to aid the development of young readers. This innovative and fun app focuses on building fluency in reading and spelling CVC (Consonant Vowel Consonant) words. The app can also be used to help teach English as a foreign language, or as a tool for adults learning to read.

UPDATE: ‘Road Block’ is now the no.1 featured app in Apple Education’s ‘New and Noteworthy’ section, for both the iPhone and iPad. The app was also downloaded over 1000 times in the first day of sale, a great start for this new series.

Mac OS X Lion is sitting in my dock, winking at me, waiting to be installed. Despite the great temptation to install, I’m going to hold off for a day or so, as my current copy of Xcode, the software used to build and complile iOS apps, isn’t Lion compatible. In the meantime the Lion compatitble Xcode 4.1 is downloading on our spanking new Mac, to ensure we can code and compile effectively without interrupting our workflow. What I have seen of Lion so far looks very, very good.

Mac OS X 10.7, or Lion as it’s better known, is released today and it’s just not its weatlh of features that sets this release apart. Lion is the first operating system to be released almost exclusively as a download, as well as being one of the cheapest OS at only £20.99 (or $29.99 if you’re dollar lucky). This is compared to Microsoft Windows 7 Professional, which retails at a whopping £219.99.

So what’s OS X Lion like? I have now idea, over an hour in and my download’s still not even 25% complete.

For more infomation the Lion’s roar visit: www.apple.com/macosx

Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division skills are all put to the test as you try to crack eggs hiding a digit. Four great Primary Games combined into one cracking App. Make sure you shell out for this eggcellent game, or the yolk will be on you.

The Eggs on Legs app has been built in-house for iPhone and iPad and includes HD graphics with iPhone 4 Retina support.

Click here to download ‘Eggs on Legs’ from the Apple App Store

Respect Not Fear is one of the first of its kind in the UK. The site is aimed at young people experiencing domestic violence, whether they are the victims, perpetrators of domestic violence or know someone who is. The site is targeted at young people of, male and female, of all religious, ethnic and educational backgrounds.

The ever insightful Jeffrey Zeldman recently lectured on the skills and opportunities that should be the top of every web designer’s list. Titled ‘What Every Web Designer Should Know’, his keynote speech in Atlanta confirms the best practices we feel important here at Gooii. Great importance is placed on designing around content, my personal belief is that “content is king” but I guess in a world where the web is made up of people from many different skill sets, it’s a timely reminder for some.

One of his final points is that with the advent of HTML 5, “every website is now an application.” A great way of thinking and approach to the products we use every day, for a long time the web has no longer been about online documents and its easy to forget that a website serves a greater purpose than simply being an online presence.

Visit www.lukew.com to read LukeW’s notes from the lecture or the always excellent www.zeldman.com

Collections Connect is a fast software solution, which extracts records and media from an institution’s existing systems, such as Collections Management Systems (CMS), Digital Asset Management Systems (DAM) or even spreadsheets and presents them in a web ready form for publishing online. As Collections Connect is separate to the CMS you can use it to augment or change metadata before it is shown to web users, without changing the original curatorial records in the CMS.

“CIIM development has allowed the Museum of London to publish collections information in a flexible and reliable way. The ability to add contextual data has allowed other departments to use traditional museum collections records as the starting point for their work rather than creating parallel systems and data.” Alex Bromley – Documentation Officer

Developed in association with Knowledge Integration Ltd (k-int), Gooii designed and built the product’s user interface as well as the Collections Connect website.

This is a great story about how an app called ‘Hidden’ was used to recover a stolen MacBook. Apple has long had an app that can locate a lost iPhone or iPad but ‘Hidden’ goes one step further by taking photos from the laptop’s webcam and sending them back to the owner. In this case owner and interative designer Joshua Kaufman was able to retreive his machine after posting pictures of the machine’s “new owner” on his blog and providing police in Oakland, Canada with the information.

For more on this story visit the BBC website.