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Seb Chan over at the Powerhouse Museum has been blogging up a storm as a bunch of new sites and apps roll off the production line ...

First up, there's the Sydney Design 2011 site, mobile site and app (built by Mob Labs, based on an idea by Toko, and produced by the Powerhouse), which Seb describes as the most decentralised web presence for the event yet; partners use an instance of the Powerhouse's helpdesk tool to submit events for editorial review. At the end of the post Seb observes

Mob Labs did a great job on the mobile site which has some nifty swipe interface action and geo-location in mobile browsers – give it a go on an iPhone, Android or Blackberry and see. And once the native App goes live we’ll be able to see how many iOS users choose the App over the Mobile Web version of the site.

Maybe this year will be the last time we feel we need both a mobile website and an App.

Next, there's Go Play, a site and mobile app that pulls together kids holiday events across multiple agencies. Here the Powerhouse seems to be working as a R&D lab for the NSW government, selected to solve a problem on the basis of their well demonstrated digital acuity. Seb's post outlines the need and audience for the site, as well as the development process.

Then there's the online exhibition catalogue and app for 'Love Lace', a new Powerhouse exhibition. I found Seb's post about this piece of work particularly interesting, as they've found ways to solve previous issues they had with QR codes:

To solve one of the big problems with QR codes – that people just can’t be bothered downloading a QR code reading application (or firing it up if they do have one), our internal developer Carlos Arroyo has built the exhibition iPhone and Android App with the QR code scanner built in! This means anyone who downloads the exhibition App – itself a full catalogue of the exhibition designed for in-gallery supplementary browsing now also has their QR scanner at their finger tips.

If you're not subscribed to Fresh + Newer, you really should be. Seb never posts filler or fluff; it's always useful, usable information, which often makes you think not just 'why didn't I think of that?' but 'what if we couyld do things like that?'.