What's going on in Stockholm?

The HyperHummus tells a bit about what's going on in the Hyper Island Stockholm facilities at the moment.

The importance of GUI design in Mac applications

The thing with having a Mac, at least to me, is the feeling it gives me. The genuinely well-thought out order of things. Everything just feels right. That's why it bugs me when applications are for example ported and have an altered GUI (that is inferior to the Mac OS's own). There are both good and bad examples of this. Mostly bad, though. Take, for instance, Mozilla Firefox. It looks alright by most standards, but there's something there. There's something that is off. Something that makes Safari feel like more of a Mac browser than Firefox. Let's not even get into Opera. Mozilla Thunderbird is another example of a good idea, but with bad execution.

A good example would be Panic's Coda application. It's got a very good-looking, "Mac OS X"-feeling to it, even if it has been designed in a way that is not specific to Apple's operating system. What it seems to boil down to, at least for me, is that it doesn't matter that much if the user interface is different, as long as it's good different, meaning the interface has been designed in an attractive and well-thought manner.

Therefore, it's nice to see that something will happen to an app like Opera.

Twisted Brains with Attitude

That's our group name! Frickin' awesome. Our task this week is to come up with fiddy different business ideas and select the top five. It's not as easy as one might think.

Getty Images Reportage

I got a link from Alexander Koste a few weeks back which I haven't had time to check out since now. It's from Gettyimages and their Reportage section. Check it out. There's some really nice photos.

Concept development

A new week and a new module! Today we've had an introduction with Micke Ahlström to our new module called New digital business / Concept development. Other than that it's the usual drill, getting divided into teams and writing the preject (how we will deal with issues that come up, how we'll treat each other etc). Looks to be quite a challenging and fun module (something I've come to expect from Hyper!)

Experience Technology 2008

What a blast! We went up to Stockholm by bus last Tuesday and arrived at around 5.30 pm. Everyone got off and checked out the Hyper Island Stockholm facilities, which were impressing! The following two days were spent getting our installations ready at the exhibition area, but not without having some time over to check out the city!

Then came exhibition day, which was really fun. I'm not sure how many people came or how many that played our game, but I can say it was a success! There were people everywhere, mingling and experiencing the different projects we'd created. I also stumbled upon Nico up in Stockholm (DM09STO), which was nice. As to which class performed the best? No idea. I was very impressed with many of the Stockholm class' projects as well as my fellow class mates from Karlskrona so I can't really decide. It was very interesting to see the different outcomes and styles of our creations even though they blossomed from the same types of technology.

I was in a discussion panel about the tech surrounding the project, which was a little bit odd since I'm not a tech guy per se. But there I was, sitting in a group with other Hypers discussing the programming bits and what it was like in front of a camera crew.

All in all this module has been a very frustrating, but incredibly rewarding, experience.

Setting up

Today's been a pretty good, laid back first day up here in Stockholm. We were supposed to get to school at around 11.30 am, and when I'm walking towards school I see Sarah, Alexander, Nella, Stian and Lil' K coming towards me. They're going into the city to eat lunch. I tag along.

We walk around for a while trying to find someplace to eat (which is hard being six and all). We end up at Pizza Hut by Hötorget where I can't remember the name of "selleri". I spend a good fourty-five minutes scratching my non-existent beard and calling up people (even asking the local staff), but to no avail. Finally we went by some fruit and vegetable stands and there it was. The "selleri".

After that we go to Åhlens to get some cloth for Alex's group.

We get back to school at a while past three o'clock and everything is set up and rocking. Since we've made everything in Karlskrona and tested it there, all we needed to do was to connect a cable to the projector. Turns out speakers for the sound was included in our spot, so John didn't even had to bring his. We really do have the perfect spot at the exhibition. It's close (relatively, at least) to the entrance and the projector is big and awesome.

This evening we're going out for a beer or two to celebrate, but tomorrow it's presentation at school at 9 in the morning. We originally had one of the latest time spots but Robin and Max's group wasn't going to be done in time so we had to switch.

Almost ready!

It's Sunday today but I still went to school to fix some things, so we'll take it a bit easy tomorrow. The biggest bugs are now officially squashed, which is a huge burden of our chests. I also put in the ending when you've reached the final level of the game.

John is still trying to find a way to get the motion background in the end. We'll see how it works out.

There's not very much left to be done on the project, actually. There's some minor things like screwing the RFID reader to the box and getting a cord for the projector, but apart from that the actual coding and interface is done!

Finishing up

It's getting better and better. The game, that is. Everything seems to be circling around that at the moment. Today me, John and Eliot went to the printers' to get our print out. It looked really good. 218 crowns, though. What the heck, you're only young once, right? Today I got all of the levels in, plus the "prepare for next level" fly-by's. We spent one and a half hour (yes, hour) to try to carry it to Ångan and trying to make it work with the projector there. It didn't work. Finally we got it back to Häktet and we borrowed a projector to try it out.

Except for a few small bugs there's not much left to do on the game. Things of concern: we must get a Mac cable for projecting the image. We also must mount the RFID reader under the top of the box.

Interface elements

Today we've added some felt to the backside of our wooden letters, with the RFID tags baked inside. We've also rendered out most of the interface and gotten it to work in Flash. The one thing we're still struggling with, however, is the background video loop of stars flying around in space. We're unable to get a .flv file that looks good enough, and we've tried using .swf but the files end up way too big.

We've got most of the sound effects in and have selected music. It looks gooood.

Photos from the project

Here's some photos of what we're doing.

During the process

At the moment me and John are working on the code and interface elements. There are still some minor bugs in the code that need to be worked out and that's what I'm sitting with. At the moment, you can swipe a letter to the reader even when the game is showing the level sequence. That's something that needs to be fixed. On the level side we have four at the moment, of a total of around 10. Tim has been calling around trying to get a hold of a projector and Mathias has been running around to a lot of different meetings. Even though things have been slowing down a bit I still feel confident in us being ready in time for the exhibition.

Bringing the pieces together

Yesterday I thought I was going to cry myself to sleep. Today, though, is a completely different story. Much thanks goes out to Åsmund, who helped me understand the way our project was supposed to be coded, and also to Max, who helped me actually do it. Due to the efforts of these two gentlemen, my group is now on its way to achieving victory, fame and glory up in Stockholm in two weeks.

Phiddlers, continued

Today's been a good day! First we had a lecture by Henry Brook of Digit and then me and Eliot went to get some color. The guy at the paint store only had white, but since it was free we happily walked out of there with 4 liters of paint.

Phiddlers

The Experience Technology module has started at full effect and we're currently in our cells trying to research on ways to make our project a reality. Our idea is based on a memory type of mind game which John in my group has devised. Tim and Eliot have been out getting wood so we can build a box to house the computer in.

The technology we got assigned to us was the Phidget RFID kit. Last Friday we sat down and had a brainstorming session where we basically just tried to come up with a bunch of different ideas. In the brainstorming process some of the ideas were very far out there and some were more "doable" in the sense of time and within the range of our skills. Since none of the members of our group are self-acclaimed "coders" or "technies" I felt that it was important for us to focus on what we actually could accomplish rather than spend time on complex and, in effect, impossible ideas. We have also heard that most groups that struggle at the exhibition are the ones that have took upon them too much. The keyword, it seems, is to keep things simple. At the end of the day we decided to roll with John's mind game idea.

The basic concept is taken from the game Memory and then upgraded with new technology and tweaked to be more fast-paced. We have been very ambitious with our ideas and thoughts on how our space at the exhibition should look like and we have a pretty good idea of how things should work. Tim and Eliot have already begun searching around for the physical resources like wood and Plexiglas that we need for the project. Me and John are looking into the coding part, which will be based on Action Script 3.0. Mathias is our project manager and is also in the exhibition group which will handle the practical issues surrounding the event.

We haven't really run into that many problems yet, besides the fact that we're still sort of new to the whole thing and don't really know exactly what we should be doing all the time.

Since I'm not very "techie" as a person, I decided to challenge myself and try to be a part of the coding process for this very reason. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute with something, but for the moment I'm mostly just looking on, pointing a finger here and there and speaking my mind when I have something to say.

Introducing.. Bluestring Technology

Today we've had workshops with Stefanie Wuschitz who is an artist working in the technological space and uses it as a tool for her creations. We got an assignment to come up with something based on a word. My group's word was "bandwidth". We made an old school string phone which actually worked. We didn't really expect that.




This afternoon we're going to do some java programming and put the results on our mobile phones.

Android: Robotic Scarecrow

Today we've been listening to Robin Gavin and also brainstormed for cool concepts we would like to build. My group, consisting of myself, Koste, Max, Nella and Sara, came up with the fantastic idea of taking the old school scarecrows, but pimping them for the 21st century. We call it Android: Robotic Scarecrow.