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 it can be downloaded here.

The plugin has been developed mainly during my working hours there and also because it is very branded, I don’t see so many possibilities for me to develop it further (since I don’t work anymore for LBi). At least, different people found it already very useful and hopefully it can still be handy for many others.

It’s an open-source project part of an ambitious initiative at LBI called LBi Useful (unfortunately almost all the initial contributors left since then).

The plugin project page is here.

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 sms. The size of the text of course depends on the display size. The user can then change the text speed if necessary. As you can see it’s a pretty banal application, but it could be a good start to investigate on the usages we could do of those big displays.

Following two demo videos, unfortunately not a proper scenario, I’ll leave it to your imagination (someone trying to approach a gril in a club, for instance, or suggesting something private to a friend in public spaces).

Due for technical limitations of the platform I developed the first prototype, many of my ideas are not yet implemented, but hopefully I’ll be able to do it soon or later (if anyone is interested on helping me, it will be of course welcome).

At the moment it has been developed a PalmOS version, thanks to the fundamental work from Jagat N. Mahapatra, and a FlashLite 2.x version, that I did by myself. At the moment I’m considering the eventuality of developing a J2ME version (that would make it much more accessible).

Any feedback is welcome.

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 my interest was far from producing final and refined software, i wanted mainly to prototype some ideas and it’s clear C is not the most recommended platform for prototyping, but due to my learning interest and poor testing devices availability I gave it a go.

Luckily I recently bought a second hand Nokia N70 where I could easily install FlashLite 2.1 and very easily prototype the applications with limited hardware access. In the same device I will be probably be able to use in Java at least some multimedia functionalities for more complex prototypes.

I’ll post soon the first concept, stay tuned!

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 of lectures I’ve seen on TEDTalks, I started thinking again about what makes us happy - who doesn’t? Basically happiness is a status that can happen in very different contexts and it’s not a result of an entire analysis of what happened so far, but it can be triggered, also if temporary, just by a positive thought. Doing a whole analysis about what happened to us we will always be able to find reasons to be happy and reasons not to be so. The first trick so it’s simply to think about the good things.

During a small research on the topic I found the reasons why people are happy very inspiring. Not only because sometimes you can think “hey, how can be this guy happy only because of that?”, and this can trigger a kind of self-consciousness that we should be happy also with smaller things. But what could be very helpful is to get some suggestions from there. For instance, if a person is happy because he helped a friend in troubles, if we are not happy, why don’t we try to help a friend? Happiness doesn’t always fall from the sky, sometimes you have to earn it.

So after these technological and social inputs I ended up developing a Yahoo! Widget (formerly Konfabulator), the Widget of Happiness.

As you can read I use the term “lucky” instead of “happy”, this is because the user maybe is not yet happy, but it should be after having remember the reasons. Probably the right terminology should be “I should be happy because…” but it gets too much explicit and pretentious in my opinion.

It has basically three simple functions:

There are some preferences you can set:

To avoid as much as possible any misunderstanding about its usage, I put some instructions that can be accessed using the right-click button menu.

Since a common aim for artists is to make people happy, if this simple widget will success on that, am I risking someone will start defining me like that?

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 busy on other sides, I only developed a fancy slideshow that I reckon easily fits with the free grid interface - it seems I did already $10 from it! .
Not sure about the future of this website but I’m definitely curious to see how it goes on, since the passion the creators are putting on it is definitely remarkable. I wish I will have time to develop more interesting Mod’s though.

For the workshop I attended in Linz (OpenFrameworks) the organizer asked to all the partecipants to bring, if available, a showreel to show our stuff in the Electrolobby while we would have been away. So I took the opportunity to generate some video from my recent processing projects (so more experimental) at a very high resolution and put them roughly together.

OpenGL didn’t help me so much when exporting from bb-write so unfortunately it means I will have to export them again when I will finally decide to prepare a more professional showreel. Hopefully my computer and processing itself will be updated at that time.

As someone may know I always liked to talk about interactive design projects, I did it in different web magazines so taking advantage of my new html based blog I was definitely going on doing it here. But then I thought that maybe it was better to keep my personal stuff separated and also that someone could be interested in joining me writing some small stuff. By the way, here you can find the new tiny blog I just launched and will follow a small description grabbed from the first post.

—– start copy —–
In the last few years there has been an increasing consideration of new topics in design that were previously ignored. Technology has brought with it new potentialities but also new issues and new challenges. The experience of the user while reading and browsing digital information is of key consideration. It is vital that the user understands the data in the easiest, maybe most intuitive, way possible. Considering that almost every data can now be digitalised – even our DNA – the way we use this information and refine it according to user interaction becomes fundamental.

Everyday designers face these new challenges when trying to explore new ways on interfacing people with themselves or with data. Given the quickening evolution of technology, the “perfect” solution doesn’t exist, or at least can’t exist for long. So there is a continuous need for thinking.

ID-Review is born with the aim of encouraging thought and discussion about the new solutions thought-up by designers. We don’t propose to come up with finite solutions ourselves, but merely examine, evaluate and anticipate potential solutions as part of a collaborative process.
—– end copy —–

I hope to see you there soon!

I put on my download page the source files of some of the components (classes) I created for my blog. Unfortunately you can’t find the source file of the whole thing, it would have taken ages to do it both for cleaning the code and creating the documentation. I reckon the ones I selected are the ones that could be more easily reused, I hope you will find them useful somehow.

Hi guys, as posted in my old blog, I’m here to ask for any feedback about this new blog. As you can see the graphic is quite simple, so I would prefer that comments will be more about factors like:

• understanding of data
• semplicity on using it
• support on finding data

The first aim of this blog, in fact, is to help users to find what they may look for, so please let me know if it helps on that (please consider that this is a blog and so for portfolio and stuff it could be necessary to browse the future main site, but I’m still thinking about it).

Many thanks!

Update: Thanks to a bug in the beginBitmapFill on IE crashes, in the IDE as well, this mean that I will have to change rollover effects in the tags, at the moment I will disable the texture.

It’s getting even more common to deal with clients that need an accessible site (this happens in general with big corporates or government institutions). An HTML based solution is always the best choice for this, also because from the tests I did so far there are too many variables to permit to a screenreader to read and browse Flash content. The problem is when the client wants also something engaging and appealing, for this reason JavaScript can’t be compared to Flash: a solution like that would require much more time due to many compatibility issues.
Taking inspiration from the technique used by sIFR (Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses), I thought to replace a HTML chart with a Flash applet where I pass as data the code of the initial chart itself. We are defintely talking about much more complex data then simple text, and for this reason they have to be structured. XML, of course, is the best way, so I instantly decided that the initial chart should have to be in XHTML.

Not being an Accessibility expert, the first thing I did was to google for an accessible XHTML chart. I found then this example, wonderful for its semplicity but that, I have to admit, required small modifications, that I tried to fix as much as I could, to be as mush accessible that possible.
I thought it was enough to get the XHTML code with the innerHTML property of the element containing the chart and passing it straight to the SWF in its FlashVars parameter, but instead the typical browser issues came up. For instance, the innerHTML property, even if the page is in XHTML, returns always HTML code and — without closing tags like BR and IMG — it breaks unavoidably the XML formatting. Netscape based browsers embed a serializer (XMLSerializer class) that does a wonderful job, but we can’t renunce to IE compatibility, at least with Windows. The remaining solution is to convert the HTML coming from innerHTML to XHTML. To build this converter have been crucial the Regular Expressions (regexp). Being a very customized solution, so where the used tags are known, it has been enough a relatively simple regexp that so can’t be definitely considered very consistent, if we imagine, for instance, the eventual usage for new tags added later on.
This is the final result that, I want to clarify, rests an example of a possible technique and so very far from a final solution adaptable automatically to any context.

By the way I hope someone can take inspiration for this approach too and maybe investigate more on the potentialities. Here are the source files of all the experiment.

While capturing frames from my application to create the big printings for the stand, I created two compositions using some of those frames.

The vortex one was bigger than 7k x 7k pixels, and strangely, definitely not so much, Flickr wasn’t able to resize it So if someone is interested on having it at the original size just drop me a line.

Today was published a part of a big work I created with my coworkers for KEMEN, the company we are collaborating with from October 2002. In particular I made all from my own the Making of section. Check them out HERE!