We launched Yearbook Yourself earlier this week and the response has been astounding. I didn’t really have much to do with this years project, the lead development was slated for my friend Andrew Charon; and he did an excellent job.
http://www.yearbookyourself.com
Comgratulations to everyone at C+M that worked on it! And congratulations to Taubman for receiving such a successful campaign!
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Flashbelt has come and gone for 2009, and again it was an experience that I feel lucky to have been a part of. It was great to spend 3 days with like-minded designers and developers; and to listen to presenters show where the past year has led them. Presenters demonstrated completed projects, experiments and the new tools they are using. Rather than repeating tidbits I picked up here and there, I want to show some things I have thrown together since Flashbelt. These are just some quick demos, for me they mainly serve as a form of notes to get familiar with some of the new features and also were thrown together as a quick ‘capabilities demo’ for the team.

Below are three demos and source code. These demos use some new features, I wrote these for use with the free Flex 4 SDK, which you can also use with Flash Builder 4 Beta, these classes are all very simple to convert for use with Flash CS4 instead.
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Make: Day was on Saturday. What a crazy event. The event ran from 10-3 and there were several thousand people pouring through the doors. There was a wide range of audience and the fellow presenters/makers were very inspiring and showing a lot of interest in everyone’s work. There was a sense of community that was real nice. (more…)

Well its all done.  Starting around 7:30 a.m. (official start of 9 a.m.) on February 28th and ending around 11:00 a.m. on March 1st, the Overnight Website Challenge is complete.  I am proud to announce that my team, Team Praxis, were the winners. (more…)

Tomorrow morning, starting at 7:00 a.m. I will be joining 119 other local developers and designers for a good cause. We are split into 12 teams, and each team is assigned a different non-profit organization. We will work for 24 hours straight to build a complete solution, and then present our results to a panel of judges. The challenge is very development-centric, the teams are loaded with web-dev talent from the Twin Cities. My assumption going into this challenge (and from their banner) is that our result may not be a design beauty, but it will have the functionality and clarity to help this organization for a long time to come.
Hopefully I get some good sleep tonight.

On Saturday, March 14th (PI day), 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. I will be presenting my What Matters Most application and my multi-touch surface at the first annual Make: Day in St. Paul, MN. The event will be held at The Science Museum of Minnesota and is an initiative by Make: Television (of Make: Magazine). Come help us “celebrate the ingenuity and inventiveness in our community,” get inspiration, and maybe even learn some new skills. Some more information about the event is also posted here, it looks like circuit-benders Beatrix Jar will be there!

I had been waiting for some content to show up from our PhizzPop Minneapolis presentation a couple weeks ago. I do not have any personal documentation of the event, so I’m glad to see some has appeared on YouTube. Thanks to SocialWendy, for letting me see what everyone else saw, while we were on stage. The presentation starts off with a description of our project and demonstrates the web application. The surface table is about 5 minutes in. Barrett Haroldson is the main presenter, I am demonstrating the applications and our partner Andrew Charon helps me demonstrate the Surface table’s multi-user experience. A video overview of the event can be found here.

Last Thursday, I presented alongside two colleagues, Barret Haroldson and Andrew Charon. We opposed five other teams from local agencies in a Microsoft design challenge. We spent half of the previous week at Microsoft receiving training in their technologies. We learned how to use Microsoft’s Expression Studio and Visual Studio software and were given a basic understanding of Silverlight and WPF (Windows Presentation Format). The work-flow is an odd one, I suppose it is the most similar to Flex Builder. It involves frequent swapping between your visual description (sets of containers and elements) written in their XML format, XAML and your code logic written in C# with Visual Studios.

At the end of our three days of training we were given a brief. Help a big box retailer (like Wal-Mart) find success in its brick-and-mortar world during our economic recession, and allow them to compete against Netflix, Amazon and iTunes through a web presence. A bit impossible for a three day project?

We built a web application focusing on the social aspects of shopping, public custom lists, shout-style commentary, localizing rss-feeds from favorite brands. This concept was then bridged with an in-store shopping experience using a Microsoft Surface table. The three of us stayed locked in the office long nights, throwing around concepts, designing, and trying to pick up a new application model quickly. My main focus became the multi-touch Surface application, which focused on remote account access and a multi-user shopping experience through the table.

The teams were MOOV w/ Sierra Bravo, Hanson, Space 150, Zeus Jones w/ Sierra Bravo and Colle+McVoy (our team). In the end Zeus Jones won with their ability to re-invent the brief, and distill it to a single sentence. Their Silverlight application was very well designed and functionality behind the application seemed solid. Their in-store presence was lacking and I think that is one area that we were very solid. In the end we are not heading to SXSW to compete nationally, but every single judge did come up to us that night and explain how difficult of a decision it was, so I feel proud of our work. You try designing and developing a web application and a multi-touch application in three days with three people!

In the end it was a great time. I met a lot of cool people, I got to present my ideas to a room filled with talent, I got free Absinthe, a great party and some Microsoft swag.

Below is a photo of the in-store application we built using the Microsoft Surface table. You can see a shopping catalog, watch theatrical trailers, and bring up your personal account information.

Flashbelt ended yesterday, it was a great experience. This was the first year that I have attended and I was very impressed by the program. These were some of the highlights of this years program…
“Emergence” by Jer Thorp, was a very interesting discussing on generative environments and making use of complex systems as a basis. Andre Michelle’s showed some incredible work generating sounds directly in flash with a byte array and showed a preview of his new tool currently titled AudioTools (he said he’ll change that). Robert Hodgin was the last lecture, his presentation was an hour-long display of some of the best generative work I’ve ever seen, the lecture was a very helpful look inside how his applications are working.
The afterparties were also great, the past 3 days have provided me with inspiration for the next several months.