TOKI WOKI. 

A few days back a very simple idea struck me right before going to bed. The more I thought about it, the less I could sleep. The day after this short night I fired up Photoshop and started writing a little bit of JavaScript. All this led to Fluid Corners.

The idea is pretty simple but could come in handy: when your OS’s windows are moved off-screen, their essentials UI elements (think: buttons) stay at reach, sticking to the screen’s limit. Go ahead and play with the demo, you’ll get it!

Thoughts welcome, of course.

ps 1: A hot thread about it on Hacker News.
ps 2: @raphaelbastide‘s take on the idea: greasy!

Remember Kwot, my Flash quote viewer? I published it back in December 2008.

It is a mix of Flash (most part of it), JS (for the add form and its communication with the main UI) and PHP (CRUD logic). Read the blog post for more details on it.

I recently started looking at JavaScript frameworks and tools, probably like most Flash developers. Not because Flash is dead, but because the more tools you master, the better you are. And because yes, everyone is asking for JS and CSS3 these days. After some investigation I decided to give Backbone.js a try. And re-writing Kwot from scratch with it seemed like a great exercising opportunity.

So here its: Kwot JS!

It should work really well on Safari, OK on Chrome, not-that-perfect on Firefox and poorly on Internet Explorer. You were looking for a reason to continue using Flash for building “experience sites”? There you have it: compatibility. Kwot JS relies on CSS3 transforms to allow this perspective view on quotes, and on property transitions to animate the quotes’ colors. Of course this doesn’t work in all browsers!

Now, about Backbone.js. The framework’s requirements and logic are good, but coming from an AS3 world mostly everything looks odd, for better or worse. Note this is my first project with it and I might have missed some good practices or handy tips.

The good thing is its persistence layer. In Kwot, quotes are stored in a database, I simply wrote a simple RESTful API with Slim (try this PHP framework: win) and connected it to my Model classes. That’s it, it just works. Underscore.js’ templating system is handsome, too. Never used that before, cool stuff.

The bad things are, as far as I’m concerned:

• No strong typing. Of course this isn’t Backbone’s problem, but rather JS’ one. On this particular point your IDE can help, but you won’t get runtime errors.
• The “this” keyword. You always end up with plenty of lines all starting with a “this.something”. It frustrates me.
• Scope issues: when listening to events you pretty much always have to use Underscore.js’ bind method in order not to lose your infamous “this” scope. I don’t like that.
• The MVC pattern. If you ask me: it sucks. I’m no integrist but I wouldn’t have called what Backbone provides MVC. I was always wondering “who should do that?” and never really came up with a satisfying answer.

Overall the learning curve is pretty steep, I think it took me less time to write this version than the Flash one, but I’m a 3 year more mature developer. Also, when I wrote the Flash version I didn’t really know where I was going and I kept experiencing with concepts and ideas to see what would look best.

On a side note the Flash version uses Neutra, whereas this one uses Questrial (hosted and served by Google Webfonts).

Tell me what you think, both about the app and the framework!

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!

“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.

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!

Some projects become real, others never see the light of day. This one is more of an abortion.

Six month ago I’ve been contacted by an architectural firm to provide some consulting on a project of theirs (I’m not going to name names, you’ll understand why). The goal was to find ideas to make a building’s front more interesting. The building being a place to help and promote Hip-Hop culture.

So I started working on it and came up with ideas and concepts. The architect I was in contact with seemed pretty happy with it and everything was looking good.

Until I no longer received any answer to my e-mails… Our last interaction is now 5 month old and I think time has come to mourn. What I came up with can be interesting and since it involves an OpenSource project, here are a few bits about it.

At that time I was discovering  GML (Graffiti Markup Language) and Evan Roth‘s work. Bordeaux hosted Les Grandes Traversées and all of this really inspired me. So I thought of a mash-up between GML’s #000000book (black book, open archive of GML tags), a player of my own (Okr), the building itself and Twitter. Here’s the document I presented to explain what I had in mind.

The steps are:

1. Creating and sending a graffiti;
2. Receiving data;
3. Converting it to an image;
4. Projecting it on the building’s front;
5. Photo-shooting of the front;
6. Sending to Twitter;
7. Online consultation.

After a few e-mails with Jamie Wilkinson (heads up!) I started working on the core classes writing GMLPlayer and GMLCreator. The goal was to provide both a way to display tags and to create/upload them. I then built a UI around all that (a Flex one, after noticing Minimal Comps didn’t work the way I expected).

[iframe src=”http://toki-woki.net/p/Okr/” width=”752″ height=”506″]

Note: you’ll also find the app on its dedicated page. Try searching for “dasp” or “hello world” for example and play with the settings (the 3 top sliders).

Unfortunately it is only after creating all this that I realized the project would never become real… So I simply stopped working on it. I am well aware that some parts of the code is a bit raw and could be optimized and I haven’t built the creation/upload feature into the UI yet. Don’t know if I will, but the project is OpenSource so feel free to give it a spin! I also share my initial attempt and a pixel version in case you’re interested.

Pretty happy that — even if not feature complete — Okr made it to the GML project gallery, yay!

And just because a project will never see the light of day doesn’t mean it doesn’t need a proper logo, right?

[iframe src=”http://toki-woki.net/p/golden-ratio/”]

I wrote a quick and simple golden ratio tool (dedicated page). Basically it helps you find “golden ratio neighbors” for a given number: every number in the list divided/multiplied by its neighbor = φ.

Pretty straightforward but could come in handy. I’m aware it could be improved; if you have suggestions…