Sooo, figured it out, yet? No, well the answer is pretty cool: Check it out!

So what do you need?

• 2 plastic bottles
• duct tape
• water
• soap
• Lots of towels… You’ll need them.. Believe you me.

Cool eh? Here’s Lyntje making one too.

As we were having so much fun, we made some more photos!

If you want to see more pictures, hit this link to view the full set on Flickr.
Feel free to do the same and post some pictures too!

All photos were made with iPhones using Hipstamatic, Quadcamera and CrossProcess. The video’s were shot using the 8mm Vintage Camera app.

It took a little over a year, but it’s finally here: Dooodl 1.1.0 1.1.1 is a fact!
What has been done?

• You can now manage the Dooodl’s that were submitted to your blog.
• I even went one better: There’s now an option that enables you to first approve Dooodls before they appear on the site.
• You can choose to get an email everytime a new Dooodl is submitted (with links to approve, disapprove or delete the new Dooodl)
• Your blog, your style: You can make the Flash Gallery and the HTML gallery look exactly the way you want (well, you can choose the colors )
• What’s better than choosing the colors of the gallery? Being able to completely edit the look of the widget so it fits into your theme perfectly!
• Don’t like the Flash gallery? Disable it in the Dooodl settings. Hurray for Flash-haters!
• Previous versions would load all Dooodls at once. That is now history: I added endless scrolling to the HTML version: People with lots of Dooodls will have less trouble showing the HTML version from now on.

I’m really excited about this release because Dooodl has now finally grown up. It’s able to fit in to your theme using the different options.
It finally fits your philosophy too as from now on you can choose to moderate them!

If you haven’t got Dooodl yet, but this release sparks some love for a fun plugin, I’d say: Go get it! It’s free and it will be a good laugh. More than 4200 downloads can’t be wrong!

Oh and by the way: I wanted to take a moment and thank every single one of you guys for downloading and installing the plugin! Seeing that many people use something I created really excites me to make things even better! Thanks for the continuous support and suggestions! You guys rock!

And as always, if you have problems, suggestions, questions: Go crazy in the comments! Drop me a line if you like it! I’d love to see how it looks/works on your site!

Enjoy!

[Update]

A few people commented they didn’t get the widget to show up in the sidebar automatically. That’s because you need to add it to the sidebar yourself. But don’t worry: It’s easy!

• Go to the WP-admin
• Go to the Appearance panel
• Select the Widgets-submenu
• Drag the Dooodl-widget into your sidebar
• Done. Ready. Finito. Party!!!

If you don’t see a sidebar in your widget-manager, it means your theme is not widget ready. In that case you can use the Dooodl PHP template tags, somewhere in your theme (yes I really thought of everything!) where you’d like the widget to show up. Use this code:

<? if (function_exists("Dooodl_widget")) Dooodl_widget(); ?>

There you go! Good luck!

This is what came out this morning at 6:46AM

Near the end of June, I started a little experiment, just for fun, which would just immitate fridge magnets. I wanted to make it a multi-user experience. So everybody hitting the page would see the changes that are being made realtime. I built the first version and was quite happy.

But a few days ago, it struck me: I can just use the code I used for that experiment and port it to the iPad using the iPhone Packager (which comes with Flash CS5). So I did!

Although I had to change some of the code (loading settings files, etc), I was actually able to build this application rather quickly. I also added a multi-room feature, so everybody can have their own fridge with magnets
So you can now actually leave your boy/girlfriend a message on a virtual fridge (with no food in it) and then mail him/her the link! He/She can then rearrange the letters and leave you a message in return; Fridge-magnet style! That’s geeky, right!?

About the application

‘Spread the word’ is both an iPad and a browser application.
The clients are built using Flash Builder (for the browser app) and Flash CS5 (iPad app). The multi-user support is a Red5 application.

‘Spread the word’ online

You can view the application in the browser by hitting the following URL:

http://spreadtheword.nocreativity.com

If you want to have your own fridge, just add ‘?myOwnFridge’ (replace ‘myOwnFridge‘ with a name of your choice). For example

• http://spreadtheword.nocreativity.com?test
• http://spreadtheword.nocreativity.com?mySecretRoom
• http://spreadtheword.nocreativity.com?imOnAHorse

‘Spread the word’ for iPad

Currently the iPad application is only available though my Cydia repo. I will however be trying to get it into the Apple App Store (I know about 3.3.1, I’m still giving it a shot ). The app also supports rooms, so feel free to go crazy (but be nice, there’s kids on the internet )

If you want to install the iPad application you need a jailbroken iPad. If you haven’t added my repository to your Cydia sources yet, follow these instructions:

1. Open Cydia on your jailbroken iPad
2. Go to the ‘Manage’ tab
3. Tap ‘Sources’
4. Tap ‘Edit’ in the upper right corner
5. Tap ‘Add’ in the upper left corner
6. Fill in the following URL: ‘http://nocreativity.com/cydia’
7. Tap ‘Add source’
8. You’re done!

To install Spread The Word for iPad, do this:

1. Open Cydia on your jailbroken iPad
2. Go to the ‘Sections’ tab
3. Find the ‘noCreativity’ section
4. Tap on the application (there’s only one in that list right now, so you can’t do anything wrong from this point on )
5. Tap ‘install’ in the upper right corner
6. Tap ‘Confirm’ in the upper right corner
7. When the installation is done, exit Cydia. Spread the word should be installed now. Have fun!

Credits

Eventhough I created this app myself, I owe a big thank you to Eugenia Furman for letting me use her beautiful letters. Those are actually real letters, which she created herself. They’re for sale on Etsy. They’re really awesome. Make sure you go and check out her other work. I totally love it!

I went out for a shoot at the well known bridge-spot in Kortrijk and by accident I made 2 great color-discoveries. A mighty blue shot and a horrifying red one… I love ‘m both.
I wanted to do some post-editing but after some feedback it turns out I shouldn’t tamper with the originals after all. I also recorded 2 timelapse shots, featuring the same awesome colors. Yesterday was an amazing day.

But it’s still an independent application hacked into WordPress using basic widget.  That means I can’t just share the code so you can use it too on your website (since you’ll have to set up a database, fill in config files, etc… Boring stuff). So yesterday I decided to compact this into a handy WordPress plugin.
And this is what I did: I give you Dooodl!

[UPDATE] Mark asked me to share the source of the Dooodl Creator App, so I did Feel free to send me links to your own creator. I might add different creators to the plugin, and let you choose in the WP-admin which one you’d like your visitors to use

Plugin page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/dooodl
Direct download: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/dooodl.zip
Dooodl Creator source (Flash Builder Beta): Click

If you install it, feel free to drop me a line. Feel free to post the url to your blog as well. I’d be happy to see who’s using it and what people are drawing

(And yes: If you find any bugs, do post them as comment underneath )

Have fun!

I have been thinking about this for some time. A few weeks ago I was browsing Kris‘ site and found the answer to this guestbook-problem in the sidebar: A Doodle-wall. He allows his visitors to draw a little doodle and save it to the sidebar. Better yet: He built a history-browser too which allows you to browse all doodles through time.

I loved the idea and the philosophy behind this and went to build my own. I just finished the first part of Dooodl (this is the name of the official WordPress plugin coming out sometime soon ) and it’s already running in the sidebar! Feel free to test it and save some doodles! If you run into any kind of bugs or unpleasant problems, let me know!
Feel free to drop me a line, whatever the reason might be: Bugreport, suggestions or the good old ‘I iz serious cat! I can haz hamburger, not guestb00k!‘

Links:
Draw your own: Click!
View all of them using the (temporary) History Viewer: Click!

During the conference I attended Joshua Davis‘ session which really inspired me. I’ve never seen Joshua Davis present, nor did I know his work. Let me be as crystal clear about this as I can be: The man is a freakin’ genius!
During his session he showed a few demo’s of bezier animated stuff. I felt like trying that myself, and this is what I came up with.

The basic concept is to create a bezier in Actionscript and animating movieclips using the bezier as its motion path.

• Basic principle (this is actually just a basic pentool (without the option of adding new points ))

The following versions use the same concept as this one, except instead of fixed anchor points, they all use random points defined in 2 planes. This makes a bit of variety possible allthough the main animation stays the same and that’s absolutely cool!

• Animation fun
• Animation fun V2

I added a few keyboard controls to give you some control of what is happening

• spacebar = show the handles
• r = clear the bitmap
• p = pause the animation
• n = randomize handles
• b = blur more

Okay, let’s just start right from the beginning. At first I didn’t really feel quite comfortable about the ‘online room’ concept. I remember having these meetings in Connect rooms, and believe me: those are horrible memories. Fact is: When I entered a room, 2 attendees were already there and they were having this conversation…

Attendee 1: Hmz, aren’t we kinda early?
Attendee 2: Yea… True… Oh well, at least we’ve got good seats, right?

It kinda made me smile and I realized how much fun this would become. A few minutes later the first session started. Tom Hughes-Croucher was about to start his session about Making your web service behave like the web, but he had to deal with some audio issues. By the end of the first session everything went smoothly. The crew had done a great job fixing all kinds of stuff. Very impressive.

After 2 more sessions people in the chatrooms started to know each other a bit. That changed about everything. There started to be a very cosy atmosphere which caused a lot of fun during the sessions and in between.

The cool thing about this completely new concept is that every attendee is in direct contact with the speaker. That puts you in a pretty cool position, because you get to ask any question you like without interrupting the speaker. Better yet: the speaker can get to these questions immediately, or chose to answer those questions later on.
The same thing can be said about the Q&A at the end of every session: Everyone got to ask his quesions, and most speakers tried to answer all of them. I’d say that was one of the best things of <head>.

The 3 days of this magnificent conference went by way too fast. I learned so much about how Youtube works, about Red5, about Papervision3D and so many other things. And the fact that I could just skip a session and go out to my usual restaurant with my girlfriend, and come back home to watch the next session made it even more complete. I had some bad luck at one point which caused me to miss a session about visualizing sound.
But nothing to be worried about: As we speak, some of the recorded sessions are already online! So everyone who missed out on something, can just tune in to those recordings.

I really have to say: Aral and his crew did an awesome job organizing this conference, and making it a very streamlined experience. I mean: this was an online event. About 70 speakers all around the world were coördinated at the same time, during 3 days. Some people might not know, but that’s an incredible job!

Only bad thing about <head>: 8 hours straight of high-end sessions on a computer screen is too much. At some point I really felt the need of having a lunchbreak halfway the ‘day’.
Something else I missed was the social contact with the speakers: Even though you got to speak to them during the session, it was not the same as if you were in the room talking to them.

Even though Flash Media Server totally rocks, Adobe Connect is far from perfect and sure could use some more work. One of the things I really missed were user profiles with social web integration (like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc), so attendees could easily stay in touch by just clicking the according buttons instead of posting your Twitter profile all the time. I think the out of the box functionality of Adobe Connect just doesn’t do justice to the rest of the conference.

Last thing (and this really disappointed me): There were no local hubs in Belgium. Why not? Lots of people in Belgium were attending the conference. I would’ve loved to meet some new people at a local hub, and see some community speakers.

Let’s be clear about this: <head> 2008 was a success, not to mention the fact that this was the first edition. I’m sure the <head> team got tons of feedback which will make the 2009 edition even better. I’m already looking forward to it, because this might become one of the coolest events of the year.

Good job guys, and good luck for the upcoming edition.
And to everyone I met at the conference: I hope to see you guys again next year!

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