WUZU is a long-term collaborative program between the Jiangnan University and the Industrial Design department of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK). Alternating every year, one university hosts a joint international summer school. Since its inception in 2004, the WUZU program has stated an example of successful collaboration between Chinese and European universities.
This years WUZU 2010 program was organised by the School of Design at the Jiangnan University in China.
The Subject was “YOU•WU”. The program started in June 2010, when 11 students and 2 professors from the ZHDK had the opportunity to fly to China and meet their educational partners; 20 students and 4 professors from the Jiangnan University. Together they conceived and designed a product that will be exhibited in September in the pavilion “Basel Geneva Zurich” at the Expo in Shanghai. Read more »
A couple of days ago I had the chance to visit the Expo in Shanghai, China. The Expo site is impressive and unbelievable huge. Same with the amount of people. There are pavilions, for example the Swiss one, on which you have to wait for hours just to go in. But even without going into the different pavilions its an amazing place to be. The building have all a really fantastic architecture and try to impress with its appearance.
The last couple of weeks I had the possibility to work for Jung von Matt, one of the leading advertisement agencies in Europe. I worked on different small projects but mainly on the Migros Terra Suisse Microsite “Who is Muh”.
What is “Who is Muh”?
“Who is Muh” is an interactive platform for the Migros brand Terra Suisse. This interactive site shows different animals from the Terra Suisse program and explains what each animal does and how the animals are being treated and raised by their farmers.
A few days ago I had to build a web-app for a mobile device. The problem was, that some external input device changed values in a database and I had to make this visible in my web-app.
I came across a good solution from the w3c school. The problem was that this only updated with a user input. Therefore I changed quite some part of their script and made it easy understandable. To keep the coding part as small and easy as possible, I will not access a database in my example. My PHP script only displays the PHP function date(“H:i:s”); which shows the current time. You could easy build what ever you want in the the PHP script but keep in mind that this code will be called often and could slow down your server if you have many users and a short refresh time and therefore to many requests to your server.
Whats do you need in order to see this example.
I created this example in three files.
- The HTML File
- The Javascript File
- The PHP File Read more »
Last week, Spot the Dogference came online as a public beta. Time to write a blog post about this project I worked on during my internship at Almer/Blank.
What is this game?
Spot the Dogference is an online game of spot the difference featuring pictures of dogs. It has 3 levels and one bonus level. You can share your score on twitter and it will be displayed on the spot the dogference website. Read more »
Lately I came across an old project I build back in 2008. It‘s not the latest project but for some of you it might be quite interesting to see what I worked on quite some time ago. The project NOMA was a CD-ROM for the Noma-Hilfe Schweiz which helps poor people with NOMA. I worked on this project because I think its very important for people to know what NOMA is and how we can help people with NOMA.
Last summer I had the change to be part of an international project at the university of the arts with Chinese students. In the project WUZU 2009 we worked in mixed groups of Chinese and Swiss students on Industrial Design projects. The topic was “Food and Drink”.
I think all of you know how to use trace in a flash project therefore I will target only on how to set up an easy tracing environment. I use terminal to display my traces on my Mac. I think this is an convenient way if you work on a dual screen environment. What do you need to do? Read more »
Some of you probably read my article about Font Embedding in Actionscript 3 projects. In the January L.A. Flex User Group meeting, Tom Bray recorded my talk about MojoFont. MojoFont is an Eclipse Plugin for easy Font Embedding in Flex, FDT or Eclipse. It was a good experience to speak to the L.A. Flex group. Thank you Tom for letting me a part of it. If you want to see my talk watch this video.
Unfortunately the picture quality is not really good but if you want to know more about Font Embedding with MojoFont read my post about Font Embedding in Actionscript 3.
My second project from the time of my internship which i want to show you is the Almer Blank Labs. This project is currently online and can be seen at labs.almerblank.com. I designed and developed the Wordpress Theme. The design goal for me was to create a design which is clean but also gives the impression of a lab. It should show what we guys at Almer/Blank do or what we look at. The posts get syndicated from different employee blogs and I had to make sure that the pictures and other formatting stuff from other sites work on our site.
My roommate Junya Sakino is a talented filmmaker here in Los Angeles. In the last couple of days we quickly build his website. The site is Wordpress driven and uses a couple different plugins. The website design was created by Junya and I build it into Wordpress. I used the capricon theme but changed quite some stuff. The reason why I mention this website here on my blog is because its a good example for a small and easy website build with Wordpress. Using Wordpress as a CMS is one of the quickest solutions and its easy for both, the developer and the customer.
After being here in Los Angeles for about 7 months I think its time to show you some of the projects I worked on. The first project I want to show you is St Moritz TV.
What is this project?
The website www.StMoritzTV.ch is a Web TV station with short videos about St. Moritz and the Engadine. The main goal of the website is to inform tourists and locals about events, art, dinning and shopping in St Moritz and its surroundings.
What was the goal?
The current version is a Beta site. Its focus is to see what the needs of the users are and how we can build the final version and what we have to improve. Because this is a Beta site we are asking for any feedback about the site and would highly appreciate if as many of you can try it and give us a feedback. We want to find out how we can make it most enjoyable for its user.
While working on Actionscript projects you will have to use fonts quite often. There are many ways how you can embed a font into your project. In this post I will illustrate different ways of how to do that and I would like to demonstrate a very easy way with MojoFont.
This book is one of my favorite Actionscript books. The author writes in an understandable and clear way. The examples are on topic and clear in the understanding. The book covers a wide variety of different aspects in the use of image effects and image processing in Actionscript 3. The target audience are definitely not for beginners or coders new to Actionscript, but for coders with medium or more advanced level. This book is definitely worth your time to dive into and gives you a lot of new ideas. Read more »
I run into the problem that I had a div tag with a certain width. From a external site I loaded some content in this div tag. The problem was that I did not have the control over the pictures loaded from this external server. Some pictures where bigger then the size of the div tag. I didn’t had the possibility to take the picture and make them smaller with PHP as the source of the picture had to be on the external server. And furthermore, I needed a solution in CSS or Javascript and couldn’t use something like phpThumb.
What is Adobe MAX? Adobe Max describes them self as following:
We are in a software revolution fueled by social computing, client and cloud, and the spread of rich media across screens and devices. For four unforgettable days this October, MAX 2009 will bring together thousands of designers, developers, and decision-makers to shape the future. (Source max.adobe.com)
My feedback after visiting this event in Downtown Los Angeles.
Add Communication to your Applications with Ribbit
On Sunday, October 4th, I had the change to visit a workshop about the Ribbit mobile service at the Rich Media Institute in Venice. I could see some examples how to build a Text message application in Flex or Flash and saw different ways to build a phone application. The combination between Actionscript 3 and a telephone system is quite interesting and I see a great potential in it.
During the time of Adobe MAX i moved to Downtown Los Angeles. A quick search in the Internet and I found a place in walking distance to the Convention-Center. For only $40/night I got a room with shared bath and shared toilet in the Hotel Cecil. Without thinking I booked it and worried a bit when I saw the prices of the hotels in the neighbourhood. When I arrived at the hotel I was very surprised. The price for this hotel was really good. I liked my room, everything was clean, there was free wireless Internet and the staff was always helpful and really friendly. I totally recommend this hotel to everybody with a tight budget. Should I stay again in Downtown, I will definitely book this hotel again. The only disadvantage is that they do not provide parking, but parking in Downtown is not really a problem. For about $15/day you find plenty of indoor parking all over the city center.
The saturday before Adobe MAX we hadLAFlashapaloozastock from FITC in our company.
I went to this event with Marcel Vogt from Switzerland who came to L.A. for Adobe MAX. We heard a couple of very interesting talks from Joshua Davis and Joshua Hirsch. After all the presentations our offices changed to a party location. I was amazied because there was free food and free alcohol for everybody. Later the night, we got a pole-dance girl a strip-these dancer as well as a magician. It was good fun. Personally I think, that more conferences should have a fun factor like LAFlashapaloozastock. Because of this relaxed after party I got in touch with many people and had a really good time.
Just before Adobe Max I had the opportunity to visit the Joshua Davis workshop about the HYPE Framework. The HYPE-framework is a easy framework for creating digital art. It makes it easy to build computer based art in Actionscript 3. Josh is a very outgoing and super friendly person. All of us had really good fun with him. We build a couple of examples with the HYPE framework which was build by Branden Hall and Joshua Davis. Read more »
During the time of Adobe MAX i moved to Downtown Los Angeles. A quick search in the Internet and I found a place in walking distance to the Convention-Center. For only $40/night I got a room with shared bath and shared toilet in the 