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Layin’ Pipe All Spring Long…

Posted in Condiments, Work

It’s busy times these days at Relish.  We just turned 4 and are moving to a new office that we’re gutting and renovating.  Oh yeah, and we’re still doing some great work for a number of new clients!

All this adds up to us needing to add some new people to help us navigate and build out the series of tubes that make up the Internet.  As we all know, the internet is NOT a big truck.  This is not a joking matter!  We need top notch web plumbers to join our team in making nothing but the finest of HTML/CSS magic.

Sound like you?  Hmm, prove it to us.  You got these skillz? If the answer is yes, drop us a line at jobs@reli.sh.

  • Develop standards-compliant webpages using: HTML4/5, CSS
  • Strong knowledge of JavaScript, jQuery, and AJAX
  • Great working knowledge of PHP and MySQL
  • OOP methodologies
  • High level of customization experience on WordPress platform
  • Mobile development, including application creation and deployment
  • Familiarity with a range of creative design tools including: OmniGraffle Professional, Adobe Photoshop, and Illustrator
  • Strong communication skills including the ability to clearly present and defend ideas
  • Collaborative personality with the desire to iterate a solution through various inputs and feedback
  • Able to effectively manage timelines and comfortably communicate with clients through the project lifecycle
  • Desire to contribute to our culture and help shape our practices
  • Must live in or be willing to commute to Toronto

by on March 30, 2011

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Relish’s Best of 2010

Posted in Play, Thoughts

We here at Relish spend our days toiling in the vast world of the interwebs so I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that we also spend much of our downtime trolling the web as well. Being immersed in all things digital, we like to give props to those who have successfully executed cool sites or apps. Here’s a list of our favourites from 2010 (in no particular order): 

Online

  1. Ride the City – This site lets you plan your biking route and allows you to choose from the most direct to the safest route.  It also lists bike lanes, protected lanes, and greenways and can help you find the closest bike shop, bike rental, or bike share.
  2. Hipmunk – Anyone who has searched for a flight knows how awful travel websites can be. Sometimes the user experience is so offensive, we leave without even looking at the deals. However, Hipmunk shows the competition how it’s done with its clean design, intuitive user experience, comparison of different airline prices in a pretty graph, and ability to sort by price, stops, and “agony.”  The cheapest price is always highlighted in blue; a nice touch.
  3. Tourfilter - A Craiglist-ish site that shows listings for 79 major cities automatically compiled by some kind of bot and administered by (as far as we know) just one guy.  Super useful.
  4. OpenIDEO – “solving problems together, for the collective social good” - How are you making the world a better place? Not everyone can rely on their good looks being enough of a gift to the world like we can. For those of you that need another outlet, OpenIDEO provides a forum for anyone to submit questions (or challenges) for the community as a whole to contribute inspiration, ideas, creativity and solutions to “solve problems for the collective social good.” Impressive.
  5. OpeAppMkt - An alternate app store for iPhone/iPad/Android of browser-based apps that sometimes works better than their native counterparts…exhibit A: YouTube for the iPhone.
  6. Saturdays - Clean and simple, no-nonsense design gives us what we want up front. The brand is represented perfectly and those of us who in to are fashion want to buy everything.
  7. Net-a-Porter - For women who appreciate fashion, the best online window shopping is done here. Based out of NYC, Net-a-Porter has grown beyond just a website, into a full-fledged multinational corporation operating across two continents.  Beautifully curated, the merchandise options are updated multiple times a week.
  8. Grooveshark -Similar to Jango and Last.fm, Grooveshark lets you create your custom radio ‘stations’ and stream songs from different bands based on your taste. What’s great about Grooveshark is that you can search and select your own songs  and then manage them via a very user-friendly playlist.
  9. Airbnb - A site that allows users to list or search rentals listed by nightly rate. It has a beautifully clean user interface and displays price, photos, maps, street view, availability, user reviews, amenities, and similar properties. This is an ideal site for travellers or those looking to gain a bit of extra $ by renting out their space for short periods of time.
  10. 20 Things I Learned – Basic web 101 articulated in a way that won’t make you feel like an idiot. The internet is a complex thing sometimes; it can be confusing and scary for some. What we do sometimes eludes our friends, family, clients, and occasionally even us- so we happily welcome sites like this that break down the basics in a swift, 20 page, interactive storybook. Using snappy metaphors, clear language, and cute cartoons, this site finds a way to make even the most daunting topics easy to understand. We have printed it and given it to our moms.

Mobile Apps & Games

  1. Trainyard – made by our good friend Matt Rix, a delicious puzzle
  2. Osmosis – fun and beautiful
  3. TO Parking – handy
  4. Instagram – extremely handy (especially if you take photos of asian girls and cats)
  5. Astronut – fun and beautiful
  6. Wallet – handy
  7. Ride the city – handy, see website above
  8. Mint – handy
  9. Infinity Blade – incredible graphics and unique gameplay

by on March 17, 2011

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I’m a big kid now

Posted in Life, Play, Work

Time really does fly when you’re having fun. To say we’ve been remiss would be an under statement. It’s hard to believe it’s been 3 years since we last blogged about our birthday but here were are approaching the middle of March again. Like a good wine, we like to think that Relish too, gets better with age. Since our last birthday post, we’ve welcomed some new faces to the family (Steve : Jack master of all trades, Jason : iOS/Flash guru, Ella : whip-cracker, Jack : Flash/gaming master, Pepper : front/backend ass-kicker), gained a sister on the shelf (Wasabi), and added ton of new clients to the roster that make coming in every day a treat.

How’d we celebrate? Cupcakes (thanks to @theforrestry) and Tequila, of course!

And now that we’re all grown up, we’ve gone ahead and gotten ourselves a little present. It’ll be a couple of months until we can play with it but you can check out the progress here. Anyone interested in a playdate this spring can send a note to picked@reli.sh.

Happy Birthday to us!

by on March 10, 2011

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The Amazing Gift-o-Matic

Posted in Play

Being nerdy web developers, we like to exploit every opportunity to web-ify all aspects of our personal and working lives. What better time to do that than the holiday season?  Rather than send a ho-hum(bug) printed card, all of us here at Relish and our sister company Wasabi Games decided to flex our nerd muscles (i.e. mouse clicking fingers) and build a little tool that would say “Happy Holidays” and show off our creative sides. What we came up with is the amazing Gift-o-Matic!

The AMAZING Gift-o-Matic

The Gift-o-Matic is a highly technical piece of web-based software that allows small groups of friends or colleagues to easily and effortlessly organize their holiday gift exchanges.

How does it work? Well, sign in and add all of your friends’ email addresses, click the “Match” button and the amazing Gift-o-Matic takes over… performing ridiculously complex gift-giving algorithmic operations in order to arrive at a completely randomly generated list of pairings.

Don’t worry… we’ll keep the resulting matches a complete secret from even you, the organizer, unless you need to see them to re-shuffle the pairings.  A simple click of another button and your friends are notified instantly of important details like who they’re buying for, what the maximum $ is, and when and where you’re exchanging gifts.

What could be simpler?  Well, maybe a printed card but where’s the fun in that?

by on December 3, 2010

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Child labour? I’m for it.

Posted in Condiments, Life

We all know that it’s tough to find good Flash guys (let alone girls) out there. So at Relish we’ve decided to take an unorthodox approach and start grooming new employees at a younger age and lock them into exclusive, 50 year contracts. In order to attract the best talent out there we also have to give them senior positions with fancy titles.

I’m excited to announce that yesterday our first new hire of this type joined the company and was introduced via a video chat live over the interwebs. I’m pleased to introduce Jade, our new VP of Cuteness.

by on April 21, 2010

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