Survival of the fittest

About 6-7 weeks ago we were given a very challenging assignment at school. We were told to update an old Darwin-online site. New design, now informational structure, new features… A new life for the website!
Revamping that website was one of the most surprising things I’ve ever had to do. I never thought a subject like Charles Darwin and his research would be that hard to lay out. Together with Fabian, we managed to give the Darwin site a new face. At least for this assignment. According to our tutors, the University of Cambridge might select one of the designs made by the students and ask to put it into production.

Along with that we had to create a conceptual touchscreen application that might be used inside the museum, allowing visitors to look up more info about Darwin and his immense research. In order to make sure we can pass our ideas along, we were ordered to create a demo video that features the use and experience of the application. I finished that demo video last night and I really wanted to share this with you!

Doodling evolved

The few people that follow me on Twitter have probably seen me tweet about an upcoming site called ‘Draw A Doodle’. I could try to explain everything about what I’m planning to do, but why bother if I could just save you 8 minutes and just show you what I want to really to create?

One of my latest school assignment was to create a site where users can create news-content. (Me being way too excited to have actually paid attention, I read users should be able to create new content… Turns out my lecturers really wanted NEWS content… ) In this assignment, I saw the perfect opportunity to create the basics of the Draw A Doodle project. So I did…

I really put in a lot of effort into detail and animations. Nearing the end of the deadline I had to cut some corners… I had to leave out the layer-rearranging system in the Doodle Creator, I didn’t get to take care of all tab-indices, I had to skip the scrollbar for the users-list and the comments-lists, etc.

Oh god… I was going to cut right through the chase and show you the project! How did I end up telling the story of my life again? Well anyway: Pictures!

Read the rest of this entry »

A Deviner’s Life

Let me just get to the point right away. No fancy little story, no boring little bla-bla.

At school I was given the assignment of creating a room in Flash that tells a story. One, and the most important, limitation was the fact that we were NOT allowed to use any Actionscript 3D libraries out there. No Papervision3D. No Away 3D. They wanted us to feel pain. We were forced to use the 2.5D capabilities of Flash Flayer 10. They’re not that bad… But I really really really (yes 3 times) prefer Papervision… And not only performance-wise.

I really put all my effort in this project and I am pretty positive about the result.

If you’re not interested in the story, feel free to stop reading and feel free to check out the site. You won’t miss anything important (I think…). (Oh btw: the site is in Dutch, but the content isn’t really that important )
If you do: (this is where the jump is ) Read the rest of this entry »

Three sixty five! Three sixty fiiiive!!!

About a week ago Dorien was talking to me about her blog. We were talking about 365-days projects. Personally, I’d love to do one myself but shooting a decent picture every day? Not gonna happen. I can’t find the discipline to take a shot using my DSLR every day. Not to mention the time invested in preparing the shot, getting it right, getting to your computer and uploading the shot… That’s (at least) a one hour job every day! During one year…

So I was thinking about a way of getting the shot wherever I want, whenever I feel like it, and upload it right away… I figured using my iPhone and some photography apps might do the trick. About an hour later I uploaded my first shot. I really like the fact that it is instantaneous. I shoot, I process, I upload it to Flickr. *magic happens* Wordpress gets the latest picture from my set on Flickr and displays it in the sidebar. Done.
It only takes a few minutes a day and I’m pretty sure that next year in September I’ll have a cool collection of pictures (which I’m planning to use in my next big project )

You can see the latest picture in the sidebar. And because I like the process so much, let me share how the workflow is like on the right. (From left to right: I take a shot, I edit it a bit and then I polarize it (and add the tag of the day)).
If you like it, check out my Flickr set which is updated daily (duh)!

If you’re interested in what iPhone apps I’m using:

• Default camera app
• Vint Green (take a shot and immediatly have it developed into a vintage green version)
• TiltShiftGen (take a shot/open an existing picture and edit colors, vignette, blur (circle/tiltshift) (I love this one)
• Polarize (convert the image to a polaroid: frame and color correction)
• QuadCamera (get 4 shots one after each other into a single picture)
• CameraBag (take a shot/open an existing picture and add one of 9 effects)

If you got any cool suggestions or ideas: just let me know

Playr 2.0 is coming!

I just wanted to update you guys on how the update for the next version of Playr is progressing.

In the past week, I’ve been pretty busy adding the finishing  touches to the features and fixing the last few bugs that popped up. Most of the last-minute changes are a result of using the class in one of my own projects.

It’s then when I realized I’m missing some key features like adding the music directory, and some properties of the PlayrEvents. I also added some ear candy like fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods.

On a more functional note: I’ve abstracted the playlist to an independent class. So now you’re provided with lots and lots of ways to customize and manage your playlists.

The shuffle mode is now smart. In English that means the playlist remembers what songs have played and which ones haven’t.

Finally I’m happy to tell you guys won’t ever have to write an XML playlist file yourself. I’ve got a PHP4 and PHP5 version of PlayrDiscovr which reads a directory and returns the corresponding XML listing the tracks and their properties.
On top of that, I’ve got some help from other people (I still need to contact you guys) who are willing to help me out with building PlayrDiscover in ASP, Ruby and Python.

Even though I’m listing all of the new features, the Playr class is still the easiest way of implementing any kind of sound-feature in any Flash/Flex/AIR application. But the simplicity shouldn’t be a limitation, which it isn’t: you’re still able to build full-feature media-playing applications.

One of the little challenges I still have to tackle is the Tween problem. I’ve implemented fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods. Those methods actually tween the volume property of the Playr instance. The problem with that is when using the Playr class in a Flex project, you get a cool error message telling you it can’t import fl.transitions (which is the class package for the Tween class and the easing package).
I still haven’t figured out how to work around this problem. If any of you have any suggestion on this problem, feel free to tell me about it.

I plan on releasing Playr 2.0 in the coming week (or 2) depending on PlayrDiscovr impementations, final changes, demo’s and site development (yes, I’m building a dedicated site for Playr ) Feel free to suggest other implementations you’d like