Day 1

I thought it would be a good day to keep my habits going in Amsterdam, so I turned up 15 minutes late for the beginning of the first day. Happily I didn’t miss much new stuff. In fact, I didn’t miss a single thing.

Ever since I started going to conferences, they always began with the Adobe Keynote. Today would be no different. Adobe would come on stage and talk about their latest numbers and how fast the latest version of the Flash Player is spreading among the internet’s users. 2 years ago, I would listen with full attention and be amazed by all those details. However on monday: I couldn’t be bothered. It’s great how fast the player is spreading but it’s really not worth half of the duration of the Keynote…
The rest of the keynote would be about the Flash Player on mobile devices. I think it’s a great step forward and I’m looking forward to future development on that aspect of the platform but the guys on stage just couldn’t interest me. So I left the keynote early.

Weirdly for the first time in Ronny-history, the second session of an event would not be Aral Balkan-branded… Which was odd to me. I kinda took it for granted he would be there… Which he wasn’t.

At this point of writing I realize I could just summarize the whole event and while most people might want me to do exactly that… I don’t think it’s worth it.

While being there, watching the sessions, I realized that in fact conferences/festivals have changed. Or at least my vision on this has changed. I ended up going from session to session and listen to various people talk about their past projects. And while some of those sessions really dazzled me, most of them didn’t. In fact I got bored a few times (and as a result I left the session and I honestly think that’s pretty rude of me for the speaker at hand).

I didn’t come to Amsterdam to watch you show me all your work of 5 years ago, which were just a few images taken from your portfoio. I did come here to see new stuff. New ideas. Your latest revelations. Your ‘best of 2009′ so to speak.
At some point I was sitting in a session, listening to somebody talk about ‘what he liked 10 years ago’. Not to be rude, (because this CAN be interesting): I don’t care. What does interest me is: Why did you like that 10 years ago? Have you changed your mind ever since? What did it do to your life as an artist? How does that inspiration reflect in your work? But those questions weren’t answered.

I can see all kinds of stuff on the internet. What I’m here to see is what nobody knew! Everybody can see your portfolio on the web. But now you’re on stage, talking to the very people that came from far away to listen to you. Make sure it’s worth the journey. Inspire us, educated us, challenge us. Do anything but to make me realize that this is a talking portfolio.

So I stopped going to the sessions that looked interesting to me (since I made all the wrong choices to that point) and ended up going to sessions that -at first hand- didn’t look all that fascinating. I ended up having my jaw dropped to the floor multiple times.

Talks that really did the trick

Hoss Gifford – Things I’ve learned
I first met Hoss in Kortrijk, a few years ago, at Multi-Mania where he talked about the narrative of an application. And while the subject was really interesting, Hoss kind of went over the top and labeled himself with ‘bad presenter‘ and ‘boring‘ for years. I would not go to his sessions because of what happened that day in Kortrijk.
However being there and making different choices, I decided to go to his session anyway. And god, did he make a comeback. Hoss turned up all relaxed with very simple slides. He talked about the things he learned. And not in a very enthousiast and screaming way most of us expected. He was all serious and personal during the complete session. It wasn’t boring, but it wasn’t entertaining. It was something deeper. It seemed as if he tried to teach us about how important life is. He didn’t mess about. He was very mysterious and yet completely open… It’s pretty difficult to express how great his session was. If you have the chance to attend his talk anytime soon: Please do. You’ll end up feeling like a better person. And for that I’m grateful, Hoss.

Ralph Hauwert – Skunkworks
I’ve been to Ralph’s sessions before. Last year he talked about PapervisionX and how he experimented with Alchemy and Pixelbender to get the best out of it. Since experimentation and exploration is really my cup of tea, I just had to go. And just like last year, Ralph didn’t disappoint. He revealed a few secret tricks (the most interesting one being how he did his Bloom part) and one of his latest experiments. He really went a long way explaining a lot of cool and interesting stuff to show his final demo and with that to conclude his session.
One thing I adore about Ralph is how he knows the exact amount of time to keep you looking at something boring before blowing your mind with the real shit. That’s exactly what he did during the last few minutes of his session: He started the final demo, good music came out of the speakers, but the visuals weren’t all that mindblowing. We were seeing some kind of 3D lightmaps (I think those should serve for raytracing, but I can’t really remember. I’m not all that great with 3D… Don’t hate me for not exactly remembering it, Ralph), which didn’t look very special. After some time (the exact time before you would get bored), the real magic kicked in… And with that the entire room echoed a sudden bang that sounded a lot like dropping jaws. Really dope stuff, Ralph (no, really! ‘Wow’ is all I can say). Looking forward to seeing where you’re heading with this.

Jared Tarbell – The strangest things I’ve seen
Another session I went to, which normally I wouldn’t. And again: Golden. Jared is a very different man when comparing to most speakers at FITC. Most people would blow your mind with insanity in a box. Jared makes you look around and realize how amazing life is. As a relatively young man with lots of bad experiences, I am grateful for the fact that I ended up having a very good live with lots of possibilities and opportunities. Jared emphasized that feeling in the blink of an eye. Sometimes you have to be told how great something is, before you see it yourself. That’s exactly what Jared did. And he’s amazingly good at it. Jared is the kind of man that takes grace in every single thing he encounters. He seems to be easily delighted by life. To me , Jared’s facial expression seemed to be what ‘happiness’ would look like if you could see it. Afterwards, I walked away from that session, wondering why I never looked at life the way he did. I felt a different person.

MK12 – From DIY to 007
Never having heard of MK12, and having misinterpreted the title of the session, I sat down hoping to see a few cool DIY tricks that would look as if the results were taken from a 007 movie. As it turns out, I was completely wrong. But I ended up having a great time. Shaun Hamontree would talk about past projects and reveal how they did it. Quickly after that, he told us the story about how they fought their way into the latest Bond-movie.

For the longest time I’ve been taking on projects with only one mindset: “If I can think it, I can make it“. Turns out the people over at MK12 believe in something similar. They were determined to be part of that movie and they pushed every little opportunity to the envelope. They went through a great deal of hard work to only get opportunities… And it resulted in headshots. 1 chance, 1 victory. What started as a little project (that had yet to be selected by the directors of the movie) ended up as the main movie Bond-credits-intro and the interactive computer walls in the movie.

MK12 proves the concept of “If you really want to make something happen, you can“. I have great respect for that.

GMUNK – Munko’s grip
I knew about GMUNK, and how they create awesome motion graphics and other cool shit. I didn’t go to any of his sessions yet. However this seemed to be a great opportunity to give it a shot. So I did. GMUNK showed off his latest projects and talked about the process to make it happen. It’s great to see a man really involve himself in his work. He talked about how he loved doing anti-smoking campaigns and how he didn’t want to create visuals for a car he didn’t even remotely like. I respect people that put love and soul in their work. It sets them apart from the people that only enjoy the money (and believe you me! They are out there!). GMUNK proved talent and dedication and made me realize that we were pretty similar (only does he rock where as I totally don’t )

The Cool shit hour
The session title kinda says it all. 60 minutes of cool shit. A few members of the community were asked to show off something cool they made. So they did! The 2 topics that really caught my attention were Star Wars Trench Run and a Demo-invitation.
The demo invitation was actually about going retro using Actionscript. The presenter (which right now turns out to be nameless to me… Somebody help me out here, please) Peter Nitsch showed a few experiments using Alchemy and ASCII-art and ended with the mindblowing Actionscript based animation he created. I loved his presentation because of the spontaneous approach. He didn’t go into boring details and sticked to fun stuff instead.
The other part I really liked was Chris Allen showing Infrared5’s latest creation: Brass Monkey! Brass Monkey is framework that enables multiple devices to connect to eachother over WIFI and talk to eachoter with no servers involved (I can’t remember if Brass Monkey is written in Objective-C or another language).
To show off this cool part of technology they updated their existing Star Wars Trench Run game (both the web and the iPhone game). The result was the iPhone connecting to the laptop (over WIFI) and turning the iPhone into a game-pad for the in-browser game: A full game experience for less than 5$ (3,99$ for the iPhone game, 0,99$ for the game-pad update). He was looking for a volunteer to proof it’s really responsible. Seen as nobody seemed to be up for the challenge, I decided I’d use the force and give it a run. I had the greatest time, standing in front of a 400 people audience, playing a browser game on a big screen projection over WIFI using an iPhone game-pad. How cool is that!? I’m really looking forward to see more cool stuff like this! This is what I call ‘creating better experiences‘!

Personally I think the combo of Brass Monkey, iPhone Dev and Unity3D could become a (small) rival for the Wii. The graphics are great, the responsiveness is perfect and the production cost is way lower. Not to mention the low buy-in cost for the consumer (buy the iPhone application to enable the game pad on your device for a few bucks and start having fun).

FITC Amsterdam 2010 was pretty great. I did miss a few great names like Joshua Davis, Aral Balkan and Keith Peters. And the parties (oh yes, I really enjoyed those last year!). But altogether I had a great time. I met so many new people, I saw so many cool things and I really felt inspired again. It was really fabulous!
I am already looking forward to FITC Amsterdam 2011 (and I secretly hope it will be a bit hotter than this year). See you in 349 days all!

I lied! I actually did! I lied when I told you everbody was going down. Because ever since I said so, the server has been up without going down at all. The server has been up for 3 days now, which is about 3 times longer as the longest uptime before that.

I think it’s safe to assume that the issues have been resolved at this point. The question that many people might want to see answered: What was the cause of all this? A hacked script.

BBclone to be exact. BBclone is a great script to keep count of your statistics. It’s free, it’s PHP based (so it doesn’t matter whether your visitors have Javascript enabled or not), it can be included using .htaccess rules, it’s simple to use, etc. Basically it’s a good script to show you basic statistics of your website. However it’s vulnerable: People can access a modified script URL to include a personal (and probably hostile) scripts (RFI exploit).

That happened to a client of mine who ended up with a nasty script residing in the BBclone folder. That script added cron jobs that ran some other nasty stuff… Very uncool as you can tell from my unstable server.

I removed those cron jobs, got rid of the hostile files, deleted BBclone and did some other (minor) stuff… The server has been up ever since.

I want to thank everyone who helped out and suggested what to look for. It would’ve taken me ages to figure out those things myself. Seen as everything is running smoothly, I can get on with what I really wanted to do: New stuff!

In short:
I’m having trouble keeping my server up as it randomly starts spawning tons of PHP processes for no reason whatsoever. There’s a screenshot of this a bit down. The result is in fact simple: The server dies and needs a reboot. The issue is still ongoing and I’m still trying to fix it. So if you end up seeing my site (or any site hosted on this VPS for that matter) go 404, feel free to ping me, so I can reboot the box

In long:
I have been looking into the issue together with friends and even my hosting provider, but nobody was able to figure out was going on. I keep monitoring the server as long as possible but at some point the server just goes berserk and starts spawning PHP processes which consume all of my memory. The next thing is the OOM-killer killing every other process in the server to free up memory, which results in an unresponsive server… The last thing my Terminal window can show me is the insanity going on before the SSH daemon is sacrificed in order to free up some more memory (to no avail I might add).

If you have any clue how I can find out what is causing this: Feel free to mail (i-at-noCreativity.com) me, Twitter @reply / DM me, call me on my cellphone (if you’ve got my number), or even break in into my home and leave me a note with the solution on the table, because this has been going on for almost a week now and I’m desperate for a solution!

I have been Googling along all week. There are a few people out there having the same issues, but nobody seems to be able to actually solve it.
Having said that: Sorry for the inconvenience (if any) and I hope to fix this soon (because I want to share more cool shit with you guys & gals!)

• Interactive: I want the user to be able to control what is happening. The user should always be part of the application. The user should actively be engaging with the application. Whatever happens should happen either because of the user or for the user to get an even better experience.
• Experience: I don’t want them to just click a few buttons. I want my users to like the application. I want them to like it so much, that they start missing it once they’ve closed the browser window.
• Designer: Although most of you know me as a developer, I want to make a point here: I don’t develop. I create.
  I write code in order to create a visual masterpiece, either in interaction or experience; not in code; not in application architecture; none of those non-Ronny words.

That last point is really the reason of why I’m writing this. Having said the above, it should be clear Actionscript has enabled me to create cool stuff. Actionscript has enabled me to create whatever I could think off. But now at this point, I’m eager to go beyond my current limits, and I want to go there fast!

Only a few minutes ago, I was thinking about how I’d start creating this new (experimental) application. And before I even got to actually start building the whole thing, I lost motivation. It is SO MUCH WORK to only setup the application without  the actual features I wanted to build in the first place. How am I supposed to have fun?!

I came to realize how much I miss the AS2 coding style where you just created. You would just have pointed at a movieclip, and run a loadMovie(). It doesn’t get any quicker than that.
Even worse: I missed the loosely typed, old fashioned JavaScript style of getting straight down to business. My guess is: You don’t understand what I’m trying to say here. Let’s show you a simple example: Load an image and add it to a sprite on the stage.

This looks pretty straight forward, right? Create a loader, add the eventlisteners for completion and error, handle them, and remove the listeners. This is as straight forward as it gets.
Well even though this is as basic as it get’s: It’s too much! This should be easier! Shorter! Hell: it should be more fun!

If loading this image is your application, then this is not that much of a problem. If loading 3 images is only a small (and almost not important) part of your test-application, then all of this code is way too much effort to focus on what you actually wanted to do: Test something completely different!

You might think I’m exaggerating here, but I’m not. When I think of a cool little experiment, I don’t want to spend all day starting to create it, only to end with 10 minutes of writing the actual test code. I don’t want to write 300 lines of code in order to just test something that consists of 10 lines.

I’m not asking Adobe to make AS4 shorter-handed, I’m not calling anybody out to create a framework that enables me to have fun, I’m not asking anybody something. I’m just getting tired of having to write bullshit JAVA-assed best practice code in tiny-experimental-proof-of-concept-test-applications.

I don’t feel like I’m using ActionScript anymore… I feel like I’m subjecting myself to it. I’m not in control. Actionscript is. If I don’t agree with that close minded language, it’s not going to cooperate in any way… I have to talk to it very genly, and choose my words wisely… What the f###? It’s a computer! Now bend over and do as your told!

When writing test-applications (which is basically what I do 90% of the time), I want to get the job done. I don’t want the code to look good. In fact, when creating this test builds that are a kick in the teeth for every best practice rule in the universe, I couldn’t be bothered in a lifetime about coding conventions… I just want my freaking app to start working!

Now what is this Beautiful blogger award?
It’s something that’s been around for about the same amount of time as sunlight, so I can’t really tell who was the first to give it away, but he/she was the one to make the rules, so here goes:

• Thank the person that nominated you
• Put the award up on your blog
• Post a link to the person that nominated you
• Share 7 interesting facts about yourself
• Finally, nominate 7 other people you think deserve the award

Lyntje, being a good girl, did all of this… And that last bullet point is why I’m writing this blogpost: She nominated me, using the following words:

Ronny, because he’s very talented and should just realize that once time! (Yes, it’s true!) Absolutely one of my best friends!

Now, there’s no disagreeing that Lyntje is a close friend of mine, but I still think she’s exaggerating when it gets to the ‘talented’ part of the mention. But it pleases me to hear that anyway, so thank you for that

So: This is where I tell you 7 interesting things about myself…

1. I love challenges. In fact, I love challenges so much it kind of is one of my big weaknesses. If somebody tells me I won’t be able (or dare) to do something, I’ll make it my mission to prove him/her/them wrong! Even if it’s not that important. Even if it doesn’t change anything. Even if it is super time consuming. I believe in the fact that if I can think it, I can make it. And as far as I can remember it has always applied.
2. I’ve had a pretty rough youth. Lots of things went wrong and I did quite some stupid things. I thought they would make me happier… If I think back about it now, I can’t stop wondering what I was thinking… However, being here, right at this point in my life and having learned my lessons, I think that whatever happened back then made me a better person. I appreciate life more than ever. If at my age (23) there’s anything that I could teach you about life, it would be that you should never make compromises with yourself. You only live once: Make it count.
3. For more than 3 years now, I have been in love with my amazing girlfriend, Dorien. She’s really amazing and let me tell you why. First off: She’s beautiful, she’s funny, she likes lingerie (and so do I ), but most importantly: She’s so supportive! If you happen to be the boyfriend/girlfriend of an artist, you probably know what kind of insanity she’s facing every day. And at good last: She makes me feel like I could do anything. I love her.
4. When I was little I had all kinds of ideas of what I wanted to become when I’m a grown up. I wanted to be a dentist, a formula 1 pilot (in fact, I’d still like the job, so if you are somehow connected to Ferrari or Mercedes, do let me know if they’re looking for some crazy person), a rockstar, I wanted to become Micheal Jackson (yes it IS a profession!), a professional skater and the one thing I wanted to be that actually started to make sense: I wanted to help developing Linux and make lots of money doing that… At the age of 8 I didn’t know Linux was open-source, or what open-source means… However: Looking where I am now, that last one got pretty close to reality: I am a developer, I do work on open-source projects and I love it!
5. Most people say ‘in order to know where you’re going, you have to know where you came from‘ referring to knowing your family roots and (maybe) knowing a bit more about yourself. I tend to disagree: I have never known my real parents, therefor I don’t know what to expect from life at all. It’s out there, waiting for me… And I’m eager to go out there and discover all of it. What good is living for 70-80 years and missing all of the big surprises?
6. I can’t play a single instrument! But I’d love to be able to do so! However I think learning to play the piano, the saxophone or drums is  more time consuming and more difficult than I’d like, so I probably won’t master playing any of them, ever. Instead, when listening to music, you’ll often see me play some imaginary drums floating in the air and then jump up and down the very next second (if you tilt your head a bit, it might look like dancing). Yes, I am a very crazy person.
7. I’d like to see the world. This thing beneath our feet is the legacy of time. Whatever happened during the history of Life (mind the capital L) left us this: Our planet. Our world. And I want to see as much of it as I can.

So, with that done… No, wait. Let me tell you this before I go on: Having to tell 7 interesting things about yourself is exceptionally hard! You should try it… You’ll be surprised.

Back to business: Next up are the 7 nominees for the Beautifull Blogger Award!

1. Mark Knol: Mark is a creative web artist who currently is doing a lot of magic creating generative art using AS3. He’s definitely closing in on Erik Natzke. He posts his experiments and results on his blog and his Flickr stream. Make sure to check it out!
2. Peter Elst: Peter is an Adobe community expert. The cool thing is: He’s close enough to Adobe to really love the platform, but not close enough to have lost an honest opinion. That makes Peter a great blogger and a very passionate community member. He’s also a very interesting person to talk with. If you ever meet him at a community event, make sure to go over and talk to him (He’s on his way to India as we speak, so if you’re not over there right now, it might take some time before you see him again )
3. Keith Peters: Definitely one of the most inspiring Actionscript developers I’ve met. Do check out his blog and don’t forget to bookmark it!
4. Aral Balkan: Aral is probably the person that had the biggest impact on my life as an Actionscript developer. When I met him for the first time at Multi-Mania in 2007, he was presenting SWX and made jokes about me liking XML (in AS2). That enormously funny presentation was my first impression of Aral. It was a good one. In fact it was so good that I went to  see that same session 3 times! He blogs about whatever is on his mind at a given point and doesn’t mind a little discussion.
5. Kris Temmerman: Kris is an awesome Actionscript Designer (‘developer’ sounds too boring for what Kris actually does) who experiments and creates. Most of his experiments end up as blogposts featuring the sourcecode. So not only does he blow your mind with one blogpost at a time, he actually shows you how he does that ( = blowing your mind).
6. Lee Brimelow: Although he works for Adobe, I think his opinions are mostly his own. He writes about experiments, answers Adobe related questions, posts tutorials… And he basically is still a skater. How is that not cool?
7. Matt Brett: Matt is Wordpress developer and designer. He’s a freelancer located in Canada. I’ve been reading his blog for 2 years and he never bores me. He writes about the things he encounters in life as a freelancer, a gamer, a webdesigner and a father.

So that’s it! A month worth of reading material! Seen as I just wrote a blogpost that turns out to be longer than the average book, I think it ’s okay to just stop talking

It was really great to see how Playr popped up on different blogs; Sometimes mentioned as part of a project/experiment, sometimes mentioned in lists of handy AS3 classes. That really made me happy and it inspired me to add even more features, and make it even more useful. But those are to yet to be built

For now I just fixed a few bugs and I added a pretty important feature which wasn’t there yet: the debug property. Set debug to true and Playr will trace any errors that occur without breaking your app, without you having to listen to these errorEvents.

I also changed the shuffle internals (I still wonder what I was thinking when I wrote a ’setShuffle’ instead of simple getters/setters…) and as far as I know: Nothing seems broken after updating old projects using Playr to the new Playr version (but I’ve been wrong before…).

And the last thing I want to mention: I changed the way Playr handles stream errors. The old version would just skip the track, and try again later. However I think the new implementation is better: The ‘broken’ track just gets removed from the playlist before proceeding to the next track.

So there you go: It’s online, it’s free, it’s open-source, it’s for you to use and save time!
(And it’s created by me, so you’ll probably find bugs sooner or later: Do tell me about them and I’ll look into fixing them )

Happy playing!

Playr Site: Playr.noCreativity.com
Download Playr: Click
Playr Documentation: Playr.noCreativity.com/docs

The iPad. Doesn't it look like it were a stretched version of the iPhone?(Picture taken from Engadget.com )

So: to the point. If you haven’t heard about Apple’s last new big thing, you probably lived on another planet for the past couple of weeks. Yes, I’m talking about the amazing iPad! I could start by talking about what a great piece of engineering this probably is (that thing is pretty thin, and it has a pretty big display so my guess is that this wasn’t easy) but that just wouldn’t do justice at all.

I mean… Did you see the thing?! It’s a big iPhone (actually iPod Touch)! No bullshit. It really is just a magnified version of the iPhone and its OS.

They didn’t take the courtesy of creating an OS from scratch for this device and they really should have. That’s just complete bullocks. Why even bother…?

If anybody at Apple is reading this (I’m 100% sure nobody is, so this is actually more like making a statement): What the FUCK (yea, uncensored) where you guys smoking when you decided it would be a good idea to actually go on and create this thing?

I remember when the first fake mockups appeared. They all looked exactly like the real thing: Just a big iPhone. And everytime I saw one of them I said to myself: ‘This ain’t the real deal… Apple is smarter than this. If they come up with a tablet PC, they’ll innovate and create a new experience that will actually make sense for a tablet computer‘.
You just have to agree: Apple knows how to innovate things and create new experiences. There might be a slight discussion here about who invented the wheel and who started selling it only years later, but that’s not the point. They actually come up with new ideas and eventually will push the envelope and in the end: they create an experience that just works.

With the iPad (what an annoying name… ) they really didn’t! It really is just an oversized iPhone!
You think I’m exaggerating?  Well let’s compare…

1. What physical buttons does the device have?
   • iPhone: Home button, sleep button, volume control, silenced mode
   • iPad: Home button, sleep button, volume control, silenced mode
2. How do you unlock the device?
   • iPhone: You slide the bottom of the screen from left to right.
   • iPad: You slide the bottom of the screen from (center) left to (center) right
3. How does the home screen look?
   • iPhone: 4 rows, 4 columns of applications. 1 dock with 4 applications.
   • iPad: 5/6/7 (?) rows, 4 columns of applications. 1 dock with 4 applications.
4. Does the statusbar do anything special?
   • iPhone: No. Carrier/wifi signal, clock, battery status.
   • iPad: No. Carrier/wifi signal, clock, battery status.
5. Is there a camera?
   • iPhone: Yes, but not facing the user.
   • iPad: No. None. (Wtf??)
6. Can you run different applications at the same time?
   • iPhone: No.
   • iPad: No.
7. Can it run Flash in the browser?
   • iPhone: No.
   • iPad: No.
8. How much does the cheapest version cost?
   • iPhone: 475€ (Belgium, factory unlocked)
   • iPad: 499$ (current price announced on the Apple site)

So what am I missing? How is this device different besides a few changes to the calendar, mail, iBooks and a faster CPU? (Don’t you even think about ‘it runs iWorks’. It’s a tablet PC! Any Windows tablet device can run the latest Microsoft Office package. Being able to run this is just plain basics and common sense… Nothing worth drooling over).

But hey: Again, this is Apple. They really innovate things and keep the coolest stuff for the end. The really cool feature about this is the following. Ladies and gentlemen. Steve Jobs gives you…

Nothing

I read somewhere Steve Jobs said this is the most significant thing, he had done in his life.
I beg to differ. I really respect the man a lot. He has done a great deal of amazing things, and he has inspired me to do certain things with my life, which otherwise I wouldn’t have thought about. But this must be embarrassing to him and probably the people working at Apple.

So: the round up is: You get a device that looks ridiculous, that doesn’t run Flash, allows no multitasking, doesn’t do ANYTHING – NOT ONE THING – special at all, with no camera, no microphone (?),  and no dedicated OS.

What have they been working on all those years? This really is nothing more than taking the existing iPhone/iTouch technology to a bigger size without ANY kind of innovation. And it’s not even as cheap as it looks. This is totally un-Apple.

When the rumors became certain that Apple would release a tablet to the world, I expected a masterpiece of innovation, that really takes advantage of tablet computing. But this time, Apple really disappointed. They took their iPhone hardware, magnified it by 200%, put almost the same (LIMITED) OS on it and released it as if it were a completely new world opening up. But it isn’t.

It just an oversized iPhone. An even more compact Macbook Air with the same boring and unimpressive iPhone OS on it. I am not impressed.

Not one bit.

I wanted to capture startrails. Startrails are basically the same as trailing lights from a passing car at night. The only difference is that the trailing light is coming from about 7 million lightyears (or any random that makes it sound more dramatic) away and it takes about 15 minutes to actually spot movement.

I went out twice in one night just to shoot some pictures. Once, just to be sure I actually would be able to capture startrails and once for the money-shot. The result?

Personally my favorite is the second one because it show so much more than just the stars. Although I’d prefer to actually capture a longer timeframe next time. Unfortunately right now it’s impossible to do so because it’s cloudy all day, so if the weather gods would please do me a favor: Summer please, 28°C, no clouds and piss off. Thank you very much!

Once I get my head around this a bit more I’ll probably write down the outlines on how I actually did this… I won’t right now because it just felt like I was doing it all wrong and got very lucky to get this kind of promising results

Let me know what you think, and which one you like best!

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!

This is probably the biggest and most exciting project I have done for school. It consists of 84 dedicated classes (meaning I don’t count open source libs like TweenLite or my util classes). That’s a total of 5 120 lines of code or 384 kb of class files. Those are numbers that actually blew my mind once I realized what I actually did. I think this is the biggest thing I’ve created so far… And it turned out to be a way better project than I expected. I’m really proud of the result so far. I’ll be working on this over the coming weeks in order to finally launch the actual site at DrawADoodle.be.

I have some great plans on integration with the existing Wordpress plugin, Dooodl. I’m really looking forward to sharing that with you.
If you feel like giving the current pre-alpha version a run, go right ahead and let me know what you think: Click!

In the past 2 years there have been numerous times when people expected (and were insanely excited about) a full in-browser Flash Player on the iPhone and while I was one of the people hoping it would happen only a few months ago, I’m not so certain anymore.

Everybody is saying that once Flash Player 10.1 will run in the browser on the iPhone, you will be enabled to have a ‘full web browsing’ experience. But how do you expect the ‘full experience’ on a mobile device (in this case the iPhone)?

Do you remember the insane intro’s without a ’skip intro’ button?
Do you know about blogs embedding autoplay-enabled videos from Youtube and siblings?
Haven’t you ever run into sites starting to play annoying jingles in the background?
Don’t you ever think about battery usage (read: battery-mass-destruction) due to the countless (and sometimes intense) ENTER_FRAME events that will most likely look like a slideshow, rather than a slick animation?
Have you heard about the thing they call Papervision3D?
Ever considered screen-size and proportions (Just read this post concerning screen-sizes on different devices by Aral Balkan)?

Seriously: all that on a little device, serving the web from a (rather) slow (and to most of us limited) 3G connection that handles itself like a Pentium 3 on speedballs… Personally: I’m not looking forward to it at this point.

I do look forward to being able to compile IPA files from the Flash IDE. And not because I’d be able to create Flash Applications on the iPhone, but because I can create applications on the iPhone. The fact that I can create it in Flash only is appealing to me because at this point I just don’t have the time to get my head around Objective-C yet, and that is a completely different topic!

There, I’ve said it.