I just finished to read a post on one of the very few RIA blogs I read. Yet another post related to Flash and Silverlight and their implicit competition, which in many cases is more like a religious war. If you know me, or follow this blog, you would know how I tried hard in my career not to be platform dependent and always trying to use the best solution for the needs. If Silverlight will have different features than Flash, and be as stable and as spread, it's obvious that could be a better choice in some cases despite they are

I always considered Twitter a too big commitment and because I liked to considered myself too busy to use it I desisted for long time on using it. But considering its popularity it becomes definitely a good tool to follow what a mate is up to and it is also true that in this busy world it might help to be more publicly active if there is not enough time to post properly on a blog. So after this long wait you can finally follow my twitter (hopefully I'll embed its feed on the blog soon).

With Internet you can have your second of fame pretty easily, not that I've been looking for it, I always try to think to the bigger picture with better hopes. The work I do, designing and mainly building rich user experiences, also doesn't really help to make you popular to the big public, and if you do my job you know how hard it is to explain to others what you actually do for living. For these reasons I had very positive feelings when I saw on TV footage of some applets I developed recently. On "The Gadget Show" on Channel 5, one of the major TV channels here in UK, this Monday (24th Nov

You can easily see when people do things with passion and put lots of effort in small details. I've been working on GUI for long time because I love it and this love is defintely what I would like to show with my work. I am writing about this because few days ago I saw the love someone else put on building their product, I'm talking about Interface Builder 3.1 from Apple. If you are passioned on GUI as I am, please enjoy this video. As you can see Apple decided to have 3 visual status for their components: In the library as a cell. Dragged as a more detailed element And in context where the size of

After some months where I had big difficulties on finding the time to do some personal research, as I always did, it seems that I am finally finding again this mixture of motivation, constancy, and of course time. So in the last month I've been studying Objective-C with iPhone SDK and, as you can see from my more technical posts, I'm quite happy with the results I'm getting. Playing with iPhone SDK means also have a very portable way to test multi-touch interactions. This kind of applications are definitely not new for many developers, just imagine the Tangible Media Group at MIT, then of course all the Jeff

Sorry if after such a long silence I would try to keep this short... few months ago I joined Conchango to help them building non Microsoft RIA (Rich Internet Application) expertise. It is definitely quite a challenge, even more now that EMC bought us, and challenges are of course what we need in life. By the way, my position there is pretty technical indeed and, considering I always tried to keep this blog less practical, I took the opportunity to open there a blog about my day to day technical challenges (with a bit of thinking as well). Nowadays iPhone is keeping me busy. Check it out!

This is a very late post, in facts the project I'm presenting has been developed months ago but, as you probably can see, I've been quite away for blogging recently :( When I used to work in LBi we used intensively Eclipse to develop in ActionScript with FDT plugin. In FDT at that time wasn't possible to debug the application a la Flex, so the main support was still the old trace in the log file. When the application gets bigger, though, the traces increase and gets difficult to differentiate visually one from each other. For this reason I created an Eclipse plugin which permits to log files assigning different styles to the traces, it has been named LBi Logger and

Domus Academy, Milan, is offering partial, but substantial, scholarships for their Interation Design Master Course to "Technotalents". Having been myself one of their students years ago, I highly recommend it (I wish I had this opportunity!). More info here. Good luck!

As not everyone knows, because my love to club music, years ago, I used to play as DJ on my spare time. Not many performances in clubs but I managed to record some studio sessions. Which some of them I'm still proud of. One of my last mixes before yesterday was dated 2000 and it can be heard here. Because I played at my birthday this year and I should play this weekend, at my company's summer party, I had some records I could gather in a mix. Yesterday I had the opportunity to record it at my parents' house (that still hosts my old DJ equipment). You can definitely hear the influence that London had

The first days we buy a new computer it always seems much faster than the old one and we are very delighted. But what happen after? Do we get used to it and we don't notice the speed anymore? Maybe. Do we install lots of software and it gets slower? Maybe. Do we install new much heavier versions of our software and it starts struggling? This for sure! Come on, it's cool to have a new flaming version of our favorite software with lots of new feature we almost never use. It's true, this is a cheap argument, but the benchmark published few days ago should make us think more about this.

Our mobiles screens are getting everyday bigger and brighter, my Treo, for instance, is capable of transforming itself in a light in not daylight contexts. This made me think of many ideas around the context of using the mobile display as a short range communication tool. Quite interesting the fact that it is meant to be for very long range interactions. There are also situations in public where speaking becomes odd and also shyness can be an obstacle. If we consider that nowadays our environment is getting crowded of flat screen / projectors, why not to use our own? In this first implementation the user can use the display to show text messages he writes, not

When this autumn began I decided as indoor spare time activity (everyone knows how sad winter in London is) to improve my poor C++ maybe applying it to hand held devices. I had some applications in mind that I wanted to create and as Palm Treo owner, and in need of multimedia functionalities, with J2ME it wouldn't have been straight forward anyway. After my computers have been stolen (and thus lost the source of many experiments) and found out that OOP in PalmOS is not that recommended, after many months of not exiting results I ended up looking for a technical partner for PalmOS development. At that speed I would have probably delivered the applications way after PalmOS was extinct. Of course

Long time ago I discussed with a graphic designer about the appealing of motion graphics. He said he didn't like it because he considered it as the imperfection of still graphic. He meant that discreet graphics, if animated, can seem perfect. Of course in motion graphics part of the trick is about illusion, but he was worried about the fact that designers weren't looking for perfect graphics for that reason. Why am I saying that? Recently, thanks again to TEDTalks, I saw a video that looked to me composed by perfect images. I'm talking about Ashes And Snow by Gregory Colbert. When I say perfect images, I mean

While I'm finally reading Raskin's master piece "The Humane Interface", I came across an inspiring article. Like many of the people working on IT I'm always involved in duscussions that compare Mac versus Windows, or Apple versus Microsoft. Being in the past mainly a Flash Developer I had to switch from Mac to PC many years ago because the big differences in the performances with that technology. In these years I enjoyed very good performances and the possibility to easily develop with different and new technologies (like J2ME, Palm OS and Flash itself) that otherwise would have been almost impossible. I left the mac soon after Mac OS X was

Widgets, in terms of concept, are getting quite popular. Not only because of the interest from Yahoo! when they bought Konfabulator more than a year ago, or their embedding in MacOS X and in the next Windows Vista, but now also Adobe with Apollo is "pushing" into that direction. A strength of a widget is that it can stay in the background providing subtle information, or something we should keep in mind, being this content visible every now and then (when we hide or close all the opened applications, for instance). How does the happiness fit in? Recently, thanks to a couple

Recently I had to think a lot about an eventual hardware and software configuration for a personal project - still on progress. Basically my aim is to provide PCs with a pre-installed software. The software has to be, as usual, visually and interactively compelling. After a bit of research I wanted to share my actual thoughts.

 

Operating System

When it's about delivering a full solution, the OS is definitely an important part. Not only because the eventual cost of the license, for instance the Windows' one, but also for the time you will have to spend on setting it up. Linux distributions are getting incredibly complete and Ubuntu, of course, is a good example. To set it up as

While I'm about to start writing a report about the NextFest I just attended in New York, Idearium published my report about this year Ars Electronica Festival. Unfortunately it has been written only in Italian but it contains plenty of links and they can be of interest also for foreign readers.

Few months ago I have been invited to partecipate to the beta testing for Wallop and, since it has been launched, now I can communicate it. Wallop is "another" social network website. Personally I'm not keen to this kind of applications, especially because at the end if you want to have interesting connections you end up using 10 of them, and since they are accurately not connected it becomes a too big commitment. The particularity of Wallop, and the reason why I accepted, is that the front-end is entirely in Flash and the users can also design and develop Mod's. These are Flash applets that can be even sold through a Marketplace between users. Personally, since I was

This monday I started as Senior Rich Internet Application (I always hated this definition) Developer at Framfab London. Due to the merge with LBI, they will become one whole company soon. I will have the opportunity to focus more on Flash development working for medium to big scale projects and collaborating on the organization of the internal framework. I'm sorry to leave some nice people at Lateral but I'm sure I'll see them soon, hopefully before one of their crazy parties ;)

For the 10th anniversary of formerly Macromedia Flash, Adobe have been involved in many interesting celebrations/initiatives (being very close to Flash I'm delighted to see Adobe taking so much care of it). In conjunction with FWA (Favorite Website Awards), they launched a public poll where for every year people could vote for the website they consider the most influential. It was very emotional to have a further view to websites that impressed me so much the first time I saw them during the early years of my career. I could name yugop or neostream, but there were many others and you could easily see how with the time they were getting much more complex, due