Icelab

Before it gets too late, let’s look back at what Icelab did in 2012, since it was definitely a year worth remembering.

First up, the most important bit. We shipped a lot of work:

• A brand new site and publishing system for The Thousands
• The Museum of Australian Democracy’s Election Speeches
• The University of Melbourne Course Search
• Also for the University of Melbourne, their Events site
• A touchscreen interactive for the National Museum of Australia’s Convict Tokens collection
• The Australian National University’s ANU Quest app for iPhone & iPad, Android and also the mobile web.
• Youcamp, for helping you find amazing camping experience on private land
• E-ticket support for Ticketscout
• A mobile-optimised treasure map of Canberra for the city’s centenary
• A responsive web design update for the Museum of Australian Democracy’s home page
• The 2012 edition of MoAD’s Behind the Lines
• And a design facelift for MoAD’s Dismissed
• A cute online quiz for the Rosie Project
• A custom interactive map explorer for the Strathfield LEP
• A new website for Indigenous Community Volunteers
• And a new design for Renew Newcastle

We did all of this with a more distributed team than ever:

We started the year with Max working from Melbourne, and within twelve months we gained a whole team there, along with a raft of great clients and an office in Fitzroy. Thanks to our friends at Inventive Labs for making this possible, and thanks to Narinda, Toby and Ally for their contributions in Melbourne. Wrangling all those people and projects isn’t trivial, so we hired Melissa in August.

Back in Canberra we also had David join the team, and right before Christmas we moved into a newer, more spacious studio in Hobart Place.

Our activities weren’t just limited to Australia. We had Ally work from Berlin for several months, and Tim contributed from afar for most of the year: 6 months in the Philippines and 2 in Hong Kong.

We also had a chance to travel to events. In February, we got nearly everyone down to NZ for Webstock, and in May Hugh and Tim hit up Singapore for RedDotRubyConf. We capped off the year with all our developers heading to Tasmania for RailsCamp 12.

And that’s not all we did. Here are a few more assorted highlights:

• Along with the rest of the world, our JavaScript usage continued to increase, but we kept things anchored with projects like the Convict Tokens interactive, where we rendered the same set of JavaScript templates with both Backbone and Rails.
• Hugh also made a very nice framework for such interactives, allowing a full Rails app to be used as the CMS, with an automated static site export for each in situ installation and update.
• Max spoke at Web Directions Code about HTML 5 drag and drop APIs.
• Tim scratched an itch and shipped gentlyremind.me as a side-project. Your Twitter favourites were never more valuable.
• Hugh helped reboot the Canberra Ruby Crew, and kicked it off with a talk on Rails Responders.
• Tim got serious with RubyMotion, giving introductory talks at both the Canberra Ruby Crew and RailsCamp.
• We saw another 2,000 reviews pile into Decaf Sucks.

Talk to us in 2013

Our team is ready to make great things. This year’s already off to a flying start, but we’d love to talk to you about making your big idea a well-executed reality. Talk to us.