As freelance, I clearly noticed a shift from the market and my expectations are that flash developers will become less focused on Actionscript and will add other programming skills such as Javascript/HTML5, Android and iOS.

To get prepared to move forward, I started to dive into Java for Android a couple of months ago.
Unfortunately, I was lacking time and I could not build thorough knowledge.

I was actually, a lot busy with Flash projects until now – mainly for the game industry.

Regarding Javascript, I must confess that I got confused with all the resources that were available and it was difficult to get started. Over the years, I relied on a couple of framework and “best practices” to set up my projects, using low-coupling, and MVC architecture. I could not really find my way with that the Javascript community could offer.

In September 2011, Nicolas Cannasse introduced the haXe plugin for FDT at the Flash on the Beach conference.
As a long-time user of Flashdevelop, I could already enjoy an IDE with a great integration of haXe, but the new thing was the enthusiasm of the Flash community towards haXe development.

I recently found some time to get started with NME – “an easy-to-use, cross-platform framework” – build with haXe.
I am still very new with mobile and web platforms, but so far, my experiments are promising and fun.

* First of all, NME’s API is very similar to AS3 and the learning curse is quasi null.
* The FD crew are constantly improving the ease for developing/compiling NME with project templates that are intuitive to use.
(I am currently testing the capabilities of my setup with a single project that I compile for Android (native 2.1), Flash and HTML5 at once, using the pre-build and post-build command from FD’s project properties, and its awesome!!)
I am not owning a Mac at the moment, therefore I could not yet try the iOS target, but I will definitely add it to my up-coming experiments.
* One other strong point is the forum and the mailing-list of NME and haXe where people are active and helpful.

Looks like I know better where to head now and I am really excited by the all new possibilities that are yet to explore.
I will try to post some of my experiments in the up-coming weeks/months (depending of the time I will have in my hands)

Stay tuned

Main Goal: Meeting every month and sharing our enthusiasm and ideas regarding the use and/or the production of Data.
Our meetings take place in the in the beautiful City of Leiden.

From the start, we were joined by a couple of friends and connections interested in the topic.

In early January 2012, our group counted 27 people, including programmers, designers, academics, students, bloggers and semantics architects.
Few links of our members:

• CLEVER°FRANKE | Design for complexity
• TULP Interactive | Data visualization
• GRAUS.NU | Weblog. Semantic data.
• Openframeworks Playground | Weblog of Roxlu
• Biologie / Data | Weblog of Ward Weistra

In the up-coming months, we will focus on the creation of a project based in Leiden and linked to its history and to its population. You can read more about this project and its development on our Google-list.

Our Google group is open to anyone who would like to join. Do not hesitate to add yourself.

What do we do?

“We get together every month to discuss programming tactics, industry standards, cutting edge developments and team opportunities.

We’re not a company, yet we work like one on projects for agencies and production studios. We help each other on projects when deadlines get tight or when cutting edge needs a push. We refer to each other and can blindly attest to the skills of our fellow developers. We are individual freelancers with the backup and knowledge base of an entire team.”

Eric-Paul

Today I am proud to introduce to you the website of our group.
It was designed by Timo Kuilder and it was built by Jankees van Woezik and Patrick Brouwer.
The guys created nice Javascript’s animations, you can browse directly the website on http://www.biggerboat.nl.

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Screenshot:
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Each 10 Euro purchase was rewarded with one free Gogo’s packet – there were no points to be collected. In parallel, the Gogo’s collectibles were advertised on children’s channels, billboards, in-store materials and on the C1000 websites.

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The on-line campaign was developed by the agency NOISE in Amsterdam.
The production of the Gogo’s website, the Youtube’s channel and the Hyves’s page were realized by NoProtocol.
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This campaign targeted mainly the kids, offering them tools to create video clips with the Gogo’s characters.
The clips could be produced alone or with friends.
3 predefined clips would set the backgrounds and the music but the kids could also upload their own.
At the end, the video clip could be exported it directly to the Gogo’s Youtube channel.

I was in charge of the programming for the video editor.
It was built with Robotlegs, using Spritesheets for the Gogo’s in order to synchronize the moves with more flexibility, and to allow us to re-built the sequences on the server’s side.
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Video capture of the clip editor:
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Landing page of the website (designed by Tino Nooten):
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The easiest way to solve this issue is to split the binary file and to upload it in pieces.
You will not be able to monitor the progress, but you can update a progress bar when the upload of each chunk is completed.
It will also solve problems related to the max_file_size upload.

I could not find any resource online, so I decided to share mine.
You can download a zip with the source files (php + as) here.

I will be attending the OFFF event in Barcelona next week! I cannot wait to be there!
This will be my first time at this event, but I was hoping to make it since a long time.

About OFFF:

OFFF is an entity in continuous transformation, alive and evolutionary. More than a decade ago, it was born as a post-digital culture festival; a meeting place to host contemporary creation through an in depth programme of conferences, workshops and performances by the most relevant artists of our time.

These days, OFFF keeps being a reference event throughout the world. A festival hosted in Barcelona, New York, Lisbon and Paris which has featured renowned artists such as Joshua Davis, Stefan Sagmeister, John Maeda, Neville Brody, Kyle Cooper, The Mill, Digital Kitchen, Ben Fry & Casey Reas, Golan Levin, Chris Milk, Rob Chiu, Julien Vallée, Paula Scher, Rick Poynor, Erik Spiekermann, Dvein, Erik Natzke, Vincent Moon, Ze Frank, Alex Trochut, among others…The festival where a new generation of artists has originated and developed. All of them started attending OFFF as spectators. Today, they take up its main stage.

The OFFF phenomenon has also produced the creation of an extensive international network of artists, developers, theorists and even more importantly, people who love art in all its multiple expressions: students, fans, professionals and the curious. People who want to show what they do, to discover what others do and, above all to share their knowledge and their desires to inspire and to be inspired.

Additionally, the OFFF network includes a teaching centre, OFFF Atelier, a continuous presence in the web 2.0 and a permanent group of artists, organizers and producers ready to host OFFF events wherever they are in demand.

More than a decade ago, OFFF was born as a festival. Today, OFFF is a way of understanding art. A way of life. Evolving and transforming.

Extracted from the official website

OFFF Campaign, Teaser by Ignore, Sound Design by Hecq:
BARCELONA YEAR ZERO, Teaser 1 from OFFF, let’s feed the future on Vimeo.

BARCELONA YEAR ZERO, Teaser 1 from OFFF, let's feed the future on Vimeo.

Contents:

The festival is divided into seven major sections: Roots, Openroom, Workshops, Showplace, Mercadillo, Cinexin & Chillax.

ROOTS – OFFF’s heart: Artists in the most contemporary sense of the word –designers, inventors, moviemakers, illustrators, developers-, capable of turning a conference into a creative event as inspired as inspiring.
OPENROOM – The rising talents scene: New artists are given the chance to make a name for themselves in front of their natural audience.
WORKSHOPS – The interactive learning: Engage attendees in a process of interactive learning.
SHOWPLACE – The exhibition area: A space where you can enjoy interactive installations, generative art pieces, immersive environments of sound, video and graphic work.
CINEXIN – The screening room: A cosy place where you can enjoy some of the best productions of the season and even contrast opinions with the rest of the attendees.

I did not make my schedule yet, but I will try to attend the presentation from:

Information is beautiful
Falk’n Sun
Multitouch
SlashThree
Dentsu London
Han Hoogerbrugge
Julien Valley
Joshua Davis
Stefan Sagmeister

You can check the Featured artists here.

“There’s loads of data available nowadays. What to do with it? How to present it on a useful and interesting way? Which tools to use to achieve all this? That’s what we will be doing at this BarCamp. Join us!”

Speakers
• James Bryan Graves – “Welcome to BarCamp”
• Dan Brickley – “Goals & collaboration”
• Steven Pemberton – “Why visualization?”


Other lightning talk topics:
• Government data
• Visual Design
• Working with big data
• Europeana project
• Pure Data


Example ideas
• Turning data into useful APIs
• Processing
• Augmented Reality view in Junaio, Layar or any other mobile app


Vote / ideas
Vote for existing ideas or suggest a new one here.

Information and registration
Registration is open to everybody, but ideally you have one or more of the following skills: Visual and / or interface design, data-mining, statistics, business intelligence, or front-end web development.
Please RSVP if you want to participate. Participation is free.
The Barcamp takes place in Mediamatic BANK, Vijzelstraat 68, Amsterdam from 11.00 hours till 22.00 hours.
For questions about the content of the Barcamp you can contact Zoja Bajbutovic-Brickley. For general Mediamatic related questions you can contact Deborah Meibergen.

extracted from the official website

Last winter, Loes Vrielink and I participated to the “Apps for Development” competition – a contest launched by the World Bank.

Our project – Get a life – embraces the high potential that serious game and social network combined have to offer.
To do so, it mixes together data-visualization, the graphical language of games and the use of social networking.
Our main motivation was that games with the ability to entertain and to inform people could facilitate our understanding of the world and help for a smoother transition to the Globalization.

The 10th of January was the deadline for the contest, and a few months later to our great surprise we heard we were nominated for a prize and were invited to demonstrate the prototype in Washington DC.

On the 14th of April 2011, we were awarded with an “honorable mention” for our submission at the competition and we received our prize, handed out by the World Bank’s president – Robert Zoellick – official press release.

World Bank – Interview:

What motivated you to enter the Applications for Development Contest?

Two years ago, in October 2009, I was employed by a games company in Amsterdam called Virtual Fairground.
There I was in a collaboration to develop a business strategy game for the intranet of Deloitte http://www.blog.elimak.com/2010/02/deloitte-game/. It was at that time that I started exploring the possibilities of including real data into a game environment, but soon realized that there was no API available for that.

A few months later, in spring 2010, I noticed that the UN had released an API with 30 sets of data. I requested a key, and did a few experiments with this resource. I was looking for a new set of data to be released when I discovered the API from the World Bank in September 2010. I was amazed by the quality and the quantity of the information supplied and knew right away that I would spend my spare time exploring this, looking for its application in multimedia.

When I heard of this competition, after having started my own company in spring 2010, I decided to dedicate some of my time to participating. As a developer, I really needed to be assisted by a skilled designer in order to get my ideas visualized and decided to contact a friend and former colleague at Virtual Fairground called Loes Vrielijk. She accepted and together we embarked on this journey that has now taken us further than we ever anticipated it would.

Why do you think that your application is unique?

What makes our application unique is the combination of data-visualization, the graphical language of the games and the use of the social network platform. Facebook, for example, has exploded in the past 3 years and opened up new ways of global communication in an extraordinary way. This also applies for gaming, which is one of the main activities on the web. We were therefore looking for ways to bring this statistical data into the social platform in an entertaining way.

Another possible extension of our experiment would be to use personal data from a Facebook profile to calculate that person’s “virtual score”. This could be generated by the games engine, putting virtual life and real life side by side.

What sort of change will happen because of your application?

We hope that more institution and corporation will embrace the high potential that serious game and social network combined have to offer.
According to AllFacebook, Feb. 2011:
53% of Facebook users play games.
69% of gamers are women.
20% have paid cash for in-game benefits.
56 million people play daily.
Average time spent per month on Facebook is above 7 hours.
Facebook has 500+ million users.

Games with the ability to entertain and to inform people could change the way we look at the world and help for a smoother transition to the Globalisation.
According to research, the virtual goods market will reach $2.1 billion in 2011 in the US alone. We do believe that games could help us solving issues and create more that awareness.

Since I received several requests to publish a new example using Adobe’s recent resource, I decided to create this tutorial.

Few things before starting:

• You need to deploy your compiled swf on a server – I would recommend that you setup a localhost server on your computer if you do not have one.
• Since you can create as many applications as you want on “Facebook Developer” – You can create 2 projects: 1 for your localhost and 1 for your live deployment (We will see in detail how to make them later in this tutorial)
• http://localhost/ will not be accepted by Facebook, but you can change your host file so your deployment will occur on http://localhost.local/ instead.
• I included the source of the project in my post. It uses FlashDevelop.

The tutorial will show you how to:

• Logging in / logging out.
• Reading/writing a post on your wall including attachment such as picture, Youtube video and interactive SWF.
• Uploading a picture using BitmapData.

A – Create your Facebook Applications (local/live)

1 – Install the developer application

Go to Facebook Developer.
When your application is installed -> “set up a new App”


2 – Create your local and live Apps:

Give a name to your App and set the site URL and the site domain under the “Web Site” tab. The other settings can stay as default.
This is what you should get when your App is ready
Local:


Live:


B – Prepare your local deployment:

1 – Update your Host file so http://localhost/ becomes http://localhost.local/

Find your hosts file. On a Windows computer the host file is under “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc”.
Open it and add this line at the end:
127.0.0.1 localhost.local

2 – Update your index.html file with your Facebook App ID:

You index.html will pass the App ID to your swf file. By externalizing this key, you will facilitate your migration from local to live environment.
Note that your index.html contains several lines that are required for Facebook to callback your requests.


C – Test your application directly on your local server:

1 – Compile settings on FlashDevelop:
You can output your swf directly on your local server and target your index.html when you compile.


Final notes:

I did not use any framework to architecture my code source intentionally. You will find all the Facebook requests on the “FacebookTutorial.as” and the use of the objects received inside the views under com/elimak/views/tabs.
I would recommend that you use a debugger to trace and explore your received objects in order to have a better look on their properties and structure. The MonsterDebugger will do that very well.

I hope you enjoyed this resource. Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions.

]]> http://www.blog.elimak.com/2011/03/connect-flash-with-facebook-using-the-adobe-sdk-for-facebook/feed/ 17 http://www.blog.elimak.com/2011/02/get-a-life-with-oddz-apps-for-development-software-competition/ http://www.blog.elimak.com/2011/02/get-a-life-with-oddz-apps-for-development-software-competition/#comments Thu, 10 Feb 2011 10:11:18 +0000 elimak http://www.blog.elimak.com/?p=1075

On October 7th 2010 the World Bank kicked off the “Apps for Development” software competition to challenge the developer community to create tools, applications, and mash-ups using World Bank data..

Concerned by global issues and experienced in interactive development, I teamed up with Loes Vrielink and we developed the demo of a game aiming to combine data-visualization with social gaming.

We believe that using the graphical language of games to expose real data and inviting the user to “play & learn” has more impact than showing raw statistics, graphs, or charts. Our project mainly focused on disseminating demographical information and issues related to the Millennium Development Goals.

Please note:
This is more of a proof of concept than a real game as we had little time and zero budget to prototype and develop the whole concept .

We are competing, we would be really thankful if you could support us with your vote.

We are hoping that the competition will give us new opportunities in partnerships and/or for raising fundings.
This is a non-commercial project in wich we invested a lot of time and energy.
By voting you are really participating to our effort.

The public vote will be open until the end of February 2011.

ABOUT THE SUBMISSION


“Survive 3 levels, while creating 9 virtual lives in total. See how your households and countries score against other countries around the world. Collect as many jokers as possible to cope with the situation when your virtual life doesn’t meet the criteria for the Millennium Development Goals”

We wanted to see if it was possible to translate the information from the World Bank datasets into a playable game. We wanted to create awareness of different countries and communicate the goals of the Millennium Development Project, while also keeping it accessible for children, encouraging them to play and learn at the same time.
As well as being a social gaming in the truest sense, it also offers an alternative perspective of the wider world compared to the giant newsgroups we have become so familiar with. Get A Life offers a snapshot into the life of somebody, somewhere, whose story is still in progress.

You can play the game and challenge your friends on our website and on Facebook.

This project was developed specifically for the “Apps for Development” competition.

While playing Get a Life, you can monitor up to 52 indicators for your selected country.
They are sorted into the following categories: Public expenditures, Labor Forces, Education, Health, Infrastructure, Economic Policy and Environment.
Your character’s development will be calculated based on more than 60 demographical indicators divided by gender.

Playing Get a Life with ODDZ is an entertaining way to access the World Bank Data!

Screen captures


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