Richie Hawtin – One City
Its pretty well known fact that the lifeforms that make up ORGANISM can be a tad bit geeky, and so the mere mention of HTML5, CSS3, geolocation, and Twitter in the same sentence is bound to cause some minor heart palpitations and even the sweats. But throw world renowned techno DJ, producer and artist, Richie Hawtin as the client, and someone going to need to call 911.
We recently launched the first phase of a collaboration with Rich that provides his fans with up to the minute information regarding his current One City world tour as well as his social activity on Twitter and more. Hawtin’s music focuses on concepts of minimalism and subtraction, so with that in mind, we set out to apply these concepts to Google’s Maps Api. Reskinning a map isn’t difficult although it can be time consuming as the One City map at the highest zoom consists of almost 5000 image tiles.
Event markers were needed to display the usual info like event name, date and location but furthermore we integrated a social element into the mix to allow for easy sharing on Twitter and Facebook links which uses deep linking concepts to ensure that a recipient will see the same event info.
Along with the event markers we also wanted to show Rich’s current location on the map along with his latest tweet. One of his team members, Bryan McDade, wrote a custom geo-location app for his iPhone that updates a database periodically with geo coordinates. We tap into this database to extract his latest location as well as displaying his latest tweet.
There is also a “live mode” where the event info window will list each track as they are played during a dj set.
As this is a multiphase project, be sure to check back and see the evolution of One City at richiehawtin.com