Flash and the HoloCube

I've been running some preliminary tests with my work 'We Are The World' running in a device called the Holocube. 

The Holocube is a fully integrated 3D projection platform. 

It is originally designed to display product presentations but you can project anything in it really.

I am using the FlashPlayer 10 3D capabilities to extrude the displayed text. 

And just a quick word of advice. 

If you want to mirror (the Holocube needs a mirrored image) a textfield in Flash do it like this:

var metrics : TextLineMetrics = _textfield.getLineMetrics(0);

_textfield.text = "Hello World";

_textfield.scaleY = -1;

_textfield.y = _textfield.textHeight + metrics.ascent + metrics.descent;

The Holocube and some of my other work will be showing at my exhibition at the Zebrastraat Art Center in Gent, Belgium. 

Opening next Thursday 07/05 @ 8:00 PM. 

You are now invited!

Muchas mega thanks to Jan and his crew at Holocube for the support!

Get your degree in Computer Sciences for free!

Do you want to become a computer scientist or engineer and be up there with the pro's?

Do you wanna see how they do it at MIT, Stanford, Harvard,...

Here's your chance and it's all for free:

http://academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science

And one the best 404 not found pages I've seen in quite some time!

MAX 2008: round up. The one with the hair & Catalyst

Sorry for this late update, but it's been busy since I got back from Milan but I have to say this year MAX was a very special one!

I lost my hair, for real.

With Boulevart we won a MAX award with our 'Rock Werchter' mobile guide and the Iphone port we did.

I made a bet with my colleagues and I lost.
You can see the result here.

It's been great and I had a lot of fun meeting up with all of the guys from The Netherlands and Belgium.

I went to a very inspiring 'agency summit meeting' we're I met up with Rick Williams from AKQA and I had a good chat with Branimir Angelov from Gugga. 

There was so much going on but what you need to remember is that Adobe is working on all different fronts (horizontal and vertical) for all web builders out there:

multi-service + multi-screen + multi-user
design + development + deployment

A new product Catalyst, previously known as Thermo, will become a key factor for developers and designers creating rich media.

Adobe is putting up a lot of effort in trying to figure out how to make everybody understand each other. The coming of Flex and Actionscript 2/3 created some confusion as in how to put up a good workflow from design over development to deployment.
Catalyst is Adobe's answer.

It is not yet fully in bloom and Adobe still has a lot of work to do before this product will be the robust tool everybody is looking for.

Production company's will have to start thinking of how the are going to organize the production process in terms of designing experience websites, rich internet applications or a combination.

Catalyst will bring developers and designers closer together but I won't work without the necessary effort of everybody involved.

For developers my guess is that within the coming years every swf out there will rely on the Flex framework. Flash CS4 is back in the game for motion designers and design in general, there is Catalyst now and Flexbuilder (Gumbo) will even be more mature than ever.

Now let's go and kick some!

Chuck Norris and Flash!

Dude, if flash is good enough for Chuck Norris’s website then it’s good enough for everyone else. If Chuck finds out your bashing his preferred web technology, then he might stopAndUnload(you).

That says it all. Great comment on a guy not liking Flash by Wes Rice in a post done by Lee Brimelow over at the FlashBlog. Read it here.

http://www.chucknorris.com

Don't forget to check out the Christian Area...

Remeber: If Flash is good enough for Chuck Norris, it is good enough for everybody!

Cuil: The new hype can't handle me...

I tried a search on myself at Cuil, the new self proclaimed hype that will make Google look like a litle choir boy (sic..). It turns out they can't handle me...

It must be that millions of people are looking for me, or they have a server problem. It must the first option for sure.

Click the picture and see for yourself...

It's good to be famous... Feel like Frank Ze now :-)

Neopets on AIR coming to you!

People over at http://www.neopets.com, owned by MTV/Nickelodeon, are doing a port of their platform to Adobe AIR.

If you watch the video, you will see this will become one of the coolest apps out there. It may remind you a bit of one of the first God games out there called Populous.

It's not released yet, but keep an eye out:



The people over at MTV seem to recognize the potential Adobe AIR has to offer their business. An application for Nickelodeon is already released at this moment.

"With Adobe AIR, we can deliver highly interactive, easy-to-use applications that Nickelodeon fans can enjoy right away. It lets us take our services and brand from the web to the desktop, keeping viewers engaged whether they are online or offline."

- Jason Root, Senior Vice President, Nick.com

I strongly believe in the power of Adobe AIR not only for business applications but also for applications in the entertainment , community & social industry's with apps directly focused on consumers.

And yes, as developer it's just fun to do :-)

A small reminder: a few screenshots of the Tamagotchi test 'Stinky Panda' and off course the Google Analytics Desktop Suite we did at Boulevart

also posted at labs.boulevart.be

Multi Mania 2008: be there or be square!

I will be doing a session at the upcoming Multi Mania conference the 23th of May.
I will be talking about Flash and Air, and how you can do some really cool stuff when you combine them. I am not talking you're average mp3 player or standard business application here people!

Multi Mania is one of the biggest multimedia events in Europe. 

With more than 30 international speakers and +800 attendees this is one not to miss! And most of all, it's free of charge!

I will be in the good company of guys and girls like: Peter Elst, Ralph Hauwert, Aral Balkan, Mario Klingemann, Stephanie Sullivan, Hoss Gifford, Bart Chanet, Seven Productions, Group94, Serge Jespers and so on...

The atmposhere will be good, there are great speakers, there is free luch and there will be a great party afterwards, so I'll see you there!

A word of thanks to everybody involved in organizing this FREE event is in place here.

Muchas gracias Multi Mania team!

Register here

Don't forget to stay in touch for the great mobile app for Multi Mania my collegue Mr. Thomas Joos is developing. Check it out here:

http://vilebody.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/multi-mania-mobile-conference-guide/

Working at Qi-ideas

Like I said before it's been very busy. I've been working on a very big project and when the time is right, read when the client say's it's ok :-), more on that. 

But in the meantime I've been in the Netherlands for some work.

2 weeks ago me and 2 of my collegue's: Raf, Indra, joined the lovely people at Qi-Ideas in Amsterdam.
We did a 'Flash rush': five days, three flash developers and lots of coffee on a project for Nivea called My Silhouette!

It's been intense but we had a great time. Everybody at Qi made us feel welcome and we were well taken care of!

Holland rules!

Thanks to everybody at Qi-Ideas and special thanks to Sander, Emily, Django and Niels.

Niels, thanks for taking us out into town. We had a great time man!

Check out:
http://www.qi-ideas.com
http://labs.qi-ideas.com/
http://nyls.blogspot.com/

1. First minute of arrival. Raf checking the WiFi...

2. Indra & Raf  and the Qi-building in the background... Impressive

3. As a Belgian, I say to you, Jean Marie Pfaff is everywhere.

Raf doing his thing...

Party at Qi (Niels on the left)

Usergroup: New Year get together ruled!

Last week-end the Belgain Adobe User group got together to celebrate the new year. And a celebration it was!

There were great speakers and sessions and we closed the place with too much wine and cigars.

1. Serge Jespers on Flexbuilder 3 and AIR.
There are now 8.000.000 downloads a day for flash player 9 and about 500.000 AIR runtime installs allready.
A great feaure in Flexbuilder 3 is the automatic creation of a project from an existing database. The setup is simple and Flexbuilder creates all your projects files and php files. You could even use this just for the creation of the php files for further use in Flash!
Don't forget about the runtime shared libraries. You can have the Flex framework cached which decreases file size dramatically.

2. James Ward on BlazeDS
Blaze Data Services is now what the Lifecycle Data Services used to be.
A lot of cool stuff for Flex.
The profiler, the messaging service in AMF and did you know that AMF already has standard compression. Check out this amazing demo about the power of AMF:
http://www.jamesward.org/census
Still a pitty to see a lot cool stuff for Flex you can not use in Flash (AMF messaging, profiler,...)

3. Christophe Herreman
Christophe talked about the Prana framework wich is quite impressive.
Prana is about Inversion of Control (IOC), learn more about it here.
It's about programming against interfaces, dependency pull, constructor injection and setter injection all controlled with a XML dialect. Although I have to admit it's not always easy to get your head around some of these concepts and to implement them in fast packed Flash projects (not Flex) it's very usefull to try familiarize yourself with them.

4. Jerome on lovelycharts.com
Lovelycharts is an online diagramming application written in flex. It's in beta now and it is impressive. As Jermo says it is easy to use, fast and does what it needs to do. Nothing more, nothing less. I think I will be throwing all Visio and OpenOffice tools to do this overboard.
Check it out here.

I especially would like to thank Koen for setting this up. It was a fun evening and I had a good time. I stayed behind with Peter, Steven, Marc, Gijs and Koen, we had more drinks, cigars (thanks Gijs!) and closed up at my place.

Here's some pictures, for more pictures check out Wouter his pictures here.

Serge doing Britney Spears


Christophe Herreman going deep


Jerome lovely


Koen, our chairman dirty dancing


The ADOBE wine!


Gijs on the run with the ADOBE wine!


Peter and Koen


Mr Dunn (the best hair in the world!)


Mister Verbruggen (thanks for lending me the money dude!)


Koen and Peter at my house


Marc and Gijs having a last cigar

Sticks ans stones

My good friend Steven passed me through 5 sticks. This means I have to reveal 5 things about myself most people don't know about me.

I know it's been a while since he asked me. Steven my deepest apologies for being so late but here they are.

* From the age of 10 till about 17 I played handball. I played with a club called Ajax in first division (at that time). I even got a national selection when I was 16. It seems they are in big trouble at the moment if you read the news at their website (dutch).

* I got my first computer at the age of 9. It was a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer model II. I sometimes cry in bed at night because I sold it...

* I played guitar for several years in a band called Janez Detd.

* I am more a Pearl Jam than a Nirvana kinda person.

* I care a lot about good hair...

BeastAnimation does Lotto

Beastanimation, co-founded by my good friend Steven De Beul, created a new commercial for Lotto.

You can view the commercial and read about it here:

http://www.lotto.be/pages/show.aspx?Culture=nl&pageid=magazine/pub/spot%20superlotto&cache=33919f2a0

Nice work Steven and Ben!

Digital wind... Better than the real thing

Check out the campaign for Lynxblow:

http://www.lynxblow.com/

Blow into the microphone or speakers and the girl will react on it.

Great video integration and very well done.
The 'I am lazy' button is a very cool feature. You don't have to set up your speakers and in return you get a nice preview of what to expect when you do find the time to set up everything.

It reminded me of this nice piece of art:
http://tampopo.kentaroyamada.com/

Cheers!

This clip is taken from the dutch show Willy's en Marjetten.

This is a fantastic one!

'Nu weten we meteen waar die syfilis van nonkel Armand vandaan komt: In Zaire'

I think that's funny!