edit: Updated link to the City’s award web page.
Just a quick update to announce that we have been awarded the “Award of Excellence” for 444 Highcroft Ave. from the City of Ottawa as part of the Ottawa Architectural Conservation Awards. I have blogged about this project previously here. You can also view the case study page here.
We are quite pleased about the recognition and are proud to have worked with such great client. A considerable amount of credit should go to the contractor Vincent DeBeer, who really raised the bar on quality.

I’m still waiting for my credentials to come thru from Apple before I can officially upload this to the iTunes store. What you see are screenshots of the app running in the iPhone emulator on my desktop.
This app is a bare bones RSS reader for one of my clients. I’ve been thinking  for a while now, that it would be nice to have a standalone application that would let me pull the content from a blog site without having to launch and navigate to the website…and then zoom and pan to read the page. This app pulls the feed content from the site and displays it in an optimized format for the device.
There was minimal coding for this project, the bulk of the heavy lifting was done using the WYSIWIG tools provide by Xcode and Dashcode. It was then all wrapped up with the Phonegap SDK to “iPhonize” it. This was pretty much a “Hello World” project, but I like to think that I added some decent UI design to it. Can’t say it was easy, since it involved a bit of trial and error, but the end result appears to be stable and useful. Once I get my full developer credentials, I can test it on my new iPhone (legitamizing its business use) and deploy it to the store. I have a bunch of ideas for more involved and interesting apps…and can’t wait to get started on them.

Just a quick update to this post.
The owner of the new Manhut has sent along a couple of photos of his now completed shed. This version of the manhut has a radiant heat floor. By all accounts, it remains warm and cozy despite the frigid temperatures we’ve been experiencing lately.

Its interesting to read the various comments he’s generating on Facebook. It seems that people cannot wrap their head around the concept of  an “office” in a shed. With some diligent detailing, this manhut is every bit as efficient as any addition to the main house would have been. The bonus in this case is that the owner can take it with him, should he ever need to relocate. The exterior finish is the hard wearing Hardie Panel in the standard dark grey. The seams are finished with a standard galvanized sheet metal. The panels are capped with a mill finish corrugated sheet metal. What I love about this version of the Manhut (as opposed to mine) is the way the landing is articulated as a cantilever.