Based on a project done by my colleague at Yahoo!, Simon Jobling, who created World Cup KickOff two years ago, I joined him as a developer to create a follow-up project for the upcoming Euro 2008 football championship in Austria (my home country) and Switzerland. Being quite a football fan myself, I thought this can only be good. And it is.
What is it about?
Euro KickOff lets you download all or individually selected fixtures into your favourite calendar application, whether it is Microsoft Outlook or iCal. You visit the Fixtures page and select whether you would like to follow your favourite team, get all the games of a specific group or stage of the tournament, or even from a particular venue or on a particular date. All that is left for you to do is hit the download button and import the generated file into your calendar application or it might even do it automatically (depending on which application/system you use). You will then have the fixtures in your calendar which will remind you when it is time to meet your friends and watch some football.
Backstage
For the techies amongst my readers, this is for you. The header of the site uses the Paralax effect demonstrated on Clearleft‘s Silverback App page. Just adjust the width of your browser window and you will see what I mean by that. A nice effect which also incorporates the flair of the hosting countries.
We are using hackable URLs, so you are able to access particular fixtures using, for example:
- http://www.eurokickoff.com/en/fixtures/ (for all fixtures)
- http://www.eurokickoff.com/en/fixtures/austria (for a particular team)
- http://www.eurokickoff.com/en/fixtures/vienna (for a specific venue)
The awesome design was put together by Gareth Brown, whereas the script behind the generation of the calendar files is courtesy of Brian Suda. Just before the weekend we are planning to put in translations for German and hopefully some more languages before the actual start of the tournament on June 7.
After all, it has been great fun working on this project and I am glad and happy how it turned out in the end. Even if you are not a huge football fan, I encourage you to try it out and provide feedback. Thanks!