Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2011 Call for Entries from Rory O'Sullivan on Vimeo.

VCA 2010 RACE RUN from changoman on Vimeo.

Me and the good folks at Rethink have been presenting lots of application ideas to clients in the last year. We got sick of showing screen designs on a TV so we built a neat little app called the Realizer.

The Realizer lets you upload and link together screen designs and then put them on your iPhone and iPad to mimic the actions of a real app. It’s amazing how real the experience can feel for a client.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you about this is because after using it for a few months we decided that this was way too useful to keep to ourselves. So, today we released the Realizer as a web tool and free app download.

We hope you love using the Realizer as much as we all do!

For all of you making the yearly pilgrimage to SXSWi this year, Brad King has written the best guide I’ve seen so far. It includes loads of practical tips (wear comfortable shoes, don’t expect to find a cab, drink water) and loads of tips for getting the most out of the 5 days (do lunch with friends and strangers, don’t show up just in time, make your own party).

Here are a couple of my favourite tips:

Don’t Just Hang With Your Friends: If you spend all your time with the people you already know, you’re missing the point of South by Southwest. It’s cool to have a posse. It’s cooler to have a new posse every day.

Big Parties Are For Suckers: You think you want to go to the big parties. You hear there’s an open bar. The music will be kicking, you say. Maybe that’s true. You won’t notice though because the line is around the block. Plus, there’s no place to sit. And you can’t hear anybody. Or get back to the bar.

Home Will Be Sad: You will experience a bit of a let down when you return home. You will want to quit your job, school, life…everything, and return to South by Southwest. Take a deep breath and do what the rest of us do: get on Twitter and count down the days until it begins again.

Have fun down there and play safe. And if you are going to be in Austin, please look me up (@pema), I’d love to have lunch with ya.

One of the fun parts has been helping to design the kind of office space we want to work in. And a week ago we made the office come alive with a giant wall mural by the insanely talented artist (and Rethink art director), Carson Ting. Here is a great little ‘making of’ film Carson put together. Thanks Carson!

RethinkTO wall mural art by Chairman Ting from Chairman Ting on Vimeo.