TOKI WOKI. 

Back in 2008 I would spend some of my Sat­ur­day after­noons sit­ting in a Laun­dro­mat, wait­ing for my clothes to smell good. I quickly real­ized these moments were per­fect to bring my lap­top with me and code. One of the first AIR apps I wrote was Shrink O’Matic, now you know where the name comes from.

It quickly became suc­cess­ful. It now has been down­loaded 168,000+ times, a best-seller of sorts. Except it’s free.

But with suc­cess comes feed­back, and with feed­back comes fea­ture sug­ges­tions. Most of them were included through updates, some of them didn’t make the cut. Prob­a­bly because of me being lazy or because of AIR’s limitations.

Then AIR 2 came out, then I learnt Robot­legs… So I re-wrote it from scratch! Intro­duc­ing Shrink O’Matic 2, the same quick and sim­ple app but with more fea­tures and a nicer theme.

Here’s what’s fresh off the oven:

• Drop fold­ers onto the app: every image in it (or in its sub-folders) will be shrinked.
• New “Rota­tion” set­tings pane: either use a spe­cific angle or let the app read your images’ EXIF data and decide what to do.
• Cus­tom name option: choose exactly what the out­put name will be using your own pat­tern and inject­ing the orig­i­nal file’s name (using $name) and/or its posi­tion in the queue (using $num).
• PNG files now keep their trans­parency when shrinked.
• Water­mark: water­mark your images, even choose where to place the overlay.
• Drop files onto the app while it’s pro­cess­ing, no problemo!
• No more dimen­sion limits.
• Shiny new theme!

But! I decided some fea­tures had to go. I removed the “name pre­view” that used to be in the sta­tus bar. I also removed the abil­ity to drop images from web pages. If you need these fea­tures and want them back, make sure to drop a com­ment and let me know!

That’s it, go get it!

Hey every­one, what’s up? Made it to 2012? Me too!

My girl­friend and me wanted to exper­i­ment a lit­tle for our new year wishes, so we looked at what was handy and came up with this lit­tle video… We know it’s not per­fect but we’re pretty happy with it. Tell us what you think!

Thanks to Craig Bald­win for his great stop-motion tuto­r­ial on Adobe Pre­miere, pretty use­ful for a new­bie like me. The sound­track is home made, thanks to this cool MIDI file.

Wanna lis­ten to the full-length ver­sion? Here it is.

Happy new year every­one; 2012 is going to be a piece of cake!

“W-Architectures is an archi­tec­ture and urban-planning agency. The firm brings together a highly-qualified team of archi­tects with inter­na­tional expe­ri­ence.” This is how they intro­duce them­selves and I couldn’t have said it bet­ter myself.

I recently pub­lished their brand new web­site, designed by Chris­telle Bon­net and devel­oped by me. It’s been a pretty long process (they are very busy guys) but it’s here and I like it!

I used mostly Word­Press and MooTools to develop it. Every­thing was designed to be light and sub­tle, I think I can safely say that it is.

When writ­ing in French I’m always look­ing for char­ac­ters that can’t be eas­ily typed with a key­board (like œ, for exam­ple). I used to go to copypastecharacter.com for its sim­plic­ity: just go to that page, click on a char­ac­ter and boom, it’s in your clip­board, ready to be pasted!

But I wanted some­thing more powerful/thorough that would remem­ber my fre­quently used char­ac­ters. So I wrote Uni­pasta!

Here’s what you should know about it:

1. Every input under the selected char­ac­ter (char, code and hex) can be edited and will update each other. Eas­ily jump to any character!
2. The font met­rics (base­line, x-height and cap-height) are auto-calculated and will help you know where the char lives;
3. Click on the “More Info” link to jump to fileformat.info and access a lot of details about the selected character;
4. Every char­ac­ter your click will be auto­mat­i­cally copied to your clip­board, handy!
5. Use the “Recent char­ac­ters” list to quickly access your favorite ones (lat­est used will always be listed first).

If you think some miss­ing Uni­code blocks are impor­tant to you or if you’d like to add a new char­ac­ter list­ing, just ask for it!

Remem­ber Shrink O’Matic, the “oh, so easy to use” image shrinker for Win­dows, Mac and Linux? Intro­duc­ing Shrink O’Mobile, the “oh, so easy to use” image shrinker for Android!

Because cam­eras on phones take big pic­tures and because you might want to send smaller/lighter versions, Shrink O’Mobile is here to help out. Just launch the app, choose the way you want your image to be shrunk, pick your image and BOOM! Your fresh, smaller, new ver­sion is instantly stored in your cam­era roll. Easy as pie.

And did I men­tion the app is free? It is.

I just launched a Tum­blr about the font cre­ation process I recently started. Should be inter­est­ing to any­one lov­ing fonts as I will study some of their aspects and be as visual as I can. Should be.

Here it is, folks: Type Tip. Learn more on the About page.

I’m big, now.

As a free­lancer I mostly work on AIR apps, but when friends asked me to develop their new web­site I hap­pily jumped aboard!

Le bureau baroque is an archi­tec­ture agency in Bor­deaux; play­ing with art, design and — of course — archi­tec­ture. They’re the ones that set up the Pecha Kucha event in Bor­deaux and who invited me to show off a bit! Of course they work on lots of other great projects so they needed a site to let the world know what’s up.

They wanted a highly visual site that would be easy to update, we con­sid­ered a few options but quickly came to the con­clu­sion that Index­hibit was exactly what we were look­ing for. But one thing that was really bug­ging us is how most (if not all) Index­hibit sites look the same. Indeed they’re a great way to show big images and the nav­i­ga­tion is damn sim­ple, but hey, why not keep these great qual­i­ties but in a more orig­i­nal layout?

Since we’re really keen on hor­i­zon­tal lay­outs we went for this. But some­thing both­ers me with this: you get a hor­i­zon­tal scroll­bar at the bot­tom of the page; which is hard to see, because it sits at the bot­tom of your screen and we — dumb humans — are not really used to it. So I thought: why not have a hor­i­zon­tal lay­out scrolled by a ver­ti­cal scroll­bar? That seemed a bit tricky at first, for two reasons:

1. Is that tech­ni­cally feasible?
2. Isn’t that too weird, for the end-user?

Both ques­tions could not be answered with­out try­ing, so I tried. And it looked cool!

When the pro­to­type was ready I started tak­ing a look at Indexhibit’s guts; and although it looked a bit ugly to me, I real­ized pimp­ing it was no big deal… A few e-mails and burger-meetings after we were happy with the newly cre­ated theme. Chris­telle Bon­net helped out with her great typographic/balance eye and we were ready to go!

Go see the site live, enjoy those nice projects, play with that side-scroll con­cept and tell me what you think!

My “anniver­sary” intro

It’s been five years (this mon­day) since Google added the abil­ity to sim­ply chat inside Gmail and to store your chat his­tory, just like your reg­u­lar e-mail dis­cus­sions. This poster is a cel­e­bra­tion of that, plus a big high-five to my “chat pal” (who hope­fully received my pack­age on time), plus a tech­ni­cal and aes­thet­i­cal look at what we wrote dur­ing these years.

Let’s make history

Back to the chat his­tory thing… I remem­ber being pretty happy when Google announced it, mainly because I knew I’d use it for later ref­er­ence, archiv­ing links and thoughts had become much easier.

Here’s a copy of the announce­ment they made:

Chat with your friends from right inside Gmail. There’s no need to load a sep­a­rate pro­gram or look up new addresses. It’s just one click to chat with the peo­ple you already email, as well as any­one on the Google Talk net­work. And now you can even save and search for chats in your Gmail account.

So it’s been five years. And I’ve chat­ted quite a lot; mainly with one guy, my buddy Renaud. We chat­ted around 2,800 dif­fer­ent dis­cus­sions so I thought there might be some inter­est­ing data to dig in these archives… So I dug.

But dig­ging thou­sands of dis­cus­sions is not an easy task, so I had to take a look on the tech side of things.

Join the tech side of the force

Before dig­ging, I had to retrieve all the dis­cus­sions we had, in an easy-to-analyse for­mat. I used Gmail’s offline fea­ture: apply­ing a new label to our con­ver­sa­tions and locally sync­ing this label. For some unknown rea­son it would crash on Google Chrome so I had to use Mozilla Fire­fox. When sync­ing was done I got a pretty big file in my “Google Gears for Fire­fox” direc­tory.

Cool thing is, Google Gears stores data as SQLite data­bases, so I fired up Lita in order to under­stand what the struc­ture was like… Things looked a bit messy but I even­tu­ally found every­thing that would inter­est me; and it was in the “MessagesFT_content” table. Here’s the query I ran:

SELECT c1Body FROM MessagesFT_content WHERE c0Subject LIKE '%Chat%'

Almost cool. The query still returned a bunch of HTML code, our names, and other use­less crap. So I fired up Flash Builder, imported the SQLite file and wrote a few AS3 lines, in order to grab the results and fil­ter them with reg­u­lar expres­sions. Bang: plain text! Oh, this use­less AIR app is Open­Source, by the way.

Now that the data was clean and ready to be ana­lyzed I had to find a cheap or free way to do it. I chose Prim­i­tive Word Counter, not because it’s per­fect but rather because it’s very sim­ple and could han­dle the large amount of data I was going to feed it (some other apps sim­ply crashed)…

Run­ning it gave me the most used words and phrases, I only picked the most inter­est­ing (at least to me) and launched InDesign.

A cel­e­bra­tion poster

I decided to go for an A1 poster, mostly focused on those words and phrases but with a tech twist to it. I kept it all secret, got it printed, and sent it to my pal… Happy fifth Google-talk-history-enabled anniver­sary to him; and to all of you out there that use it on a daily basis!

Hey, 2011 is here folks! Go grab you favorite QR Code reader and decrypt this tag, fool. QR Reader links on the greet­ing card page.