TOKI WOKI. 

Hey! Another free AIR app! This time that ain’t no side project I made on my free time for some obscure users, but rather a big thingy for a big company. Namely Fotolia.

I did all of the coding part (ActionScript 3, Flex 4) and Steaw is responsible for the UI and all graphics. The app is basically a solution for power-users, providing most of the functionnalities of the website and adding some more (such as direct download and local library). Allowing you to search, browse preview and buy all types of medias, including video and vectors. You can also log into your account and store your favorites in a lightbox or create and fill galleries.

This is my first multi-lingual app: to this day it provides 13 translations including Japanese, Chinese and other funny looking languages!

Flex 4

This is also my first big real-life project with Flex 4 and I have to say it’s way better/easier than Flex 3. Really. What changed my life is the way it handles states and component customization via skins… Oh boy, this is easy!

AIR 2.0

Yep, using the brand new AIR 2.0.2, buddy. What for? Mainly for global error handling and the almighty openWithDefaultApplication (for both folder and medias). I’ve also heard this version of the runtime is faster and lighter, and we all like that.

OpenSource

As for every project I work on, I try to have some OpenSource bits so that anyone can benefit from the work and time I spent on it. I asked Fotolia if the AS3 API I was going to write could be OpenSource’d and guess what, they accepted. So here it is, based on the as3-rpclib and on the as3 Signals logic: fotolia-as3-api. I implemented most of (if not all) features of their official API so building an AS3 app off of that should be pretty easy, do so!

Go get it!

Yeah, go get it.

I’m still having a hard time believing what I’m about to write, but hopefully you will.

That was my intro, buddy.

A little bit of context

I listen to music, I try as hard as I can to be eclectic but let me confess that: I’ve always loved Hip-Hop. Of course my Hip-Hop heroes have changed through the years, but there’s one that never left my inner podium… He’s Canadian, he’s weird (proof: he’s worn a platypus shirt, once), he’s probably the most subtle writer I know (OK, with Yoni Wolf) and he’s evolving.

He’s Buck 65.

An ounce of Twitter

As in every web tale, it all starts with a Twitter status. Mine started with this one:

I kinda need a logo-thing made of the numbers 65 and 20. Anyone wanna take a crack? Who knows what might happen?!

I read this and thought “Well yes, but I’m kind of busy you know. And what the hell could I do with those damn numbers? Plus, lots of fans will answer that”.

Some friendly advice

A few days later as I was chatting with a good friend of mine (and discreetly sent him the link to that tweet) he reacted something like: “You bitch-ass cunt, you could try something and see! Stupid-ass jerk”. “Hum, well yeah, you know. Just sayin’…” I kind of replied.

So I fired Illustrator and tried a few things out. A “65”, a “20”, and 15 minutes later I had something.

Not quite ready for prime-time, but the concept was there. A few iterations later I was kind of happy with this:

So I tweeted back.

Who knows what might happen

And got an answer, a private one. Saying he was liking it… Oh boy.

A few days later I received another private message asking me if I could add a “th” to the logo, letting me know the mysterious logo was in fact for his “20 years as a rap weirdo”. Which I (of course) did.

We then e-mailed back and forth and “sorted out the details”, he “blew [the logo] up with dynamite and shot it with a gun a few times” and that was it.

Oh boy

I made Buck 65’s 20th “year in the game” logo, which is up on his new website.

Call me a happy fan. Yup.

Meet Dok, my latest and nicest AIR app to this day!

Always looking for help when writing AS3 for Flash, Flex and AIR? Think Adobe’s reference is rich but browsing it sucks? Well, I did too. So I wrote this little thingy that loads, parses and caches help pages and then presents them in a slick and quick UI!

Since this app is only intended for devs and therefore may not be very interesting to others, I decided it should look good. So I tried my best and worked hard on those pixels and styles (colors and textures inspired by that sweet clock)… Jump to the project page for life-size screenshot!

This project is absolutely OpenSource, from top to bottom. AS3 classes, MXML, Illustrator and Photoshop files, PNGs and so on… Help yourself.

C’était hier soir, c’était à Bordeaux, y’avait du monde… Et j’avais bien fait de m’entrainer un peu avant !

Le son n’est pas extra, l’image est un peu moyenne mais l’ambiance est là ! Merci aux organisateurs d’avoir pensé à moi, merci aux gens qui sont venus me voir après pour parler ornithorynque, merci à Céline pour avoir appuyé sur le bouton aux bons moments (et pour l’encodage !), merci à Renaud, à ma manageuse, aux tickets boisson, au tram qui n’a pas accepté de nous prendre… Je m’arrête là, de toute façon personne ne sait de quoi je parle !

Voilà donc ma session de cette 4è Pecha Kucha, hop.

[vimeo id=”11549043″ width=”560″ height=”418″ color=”ff9500″]

Mise à jour (08/05/2010) ! Une photo et la liste des slides, avec quelques liens…

1. No Online Friends
2. Cahier d’enfant – Icônes
3. Mon bureau – Play Station
4. L’ornithorynque
5. Scroll Clock
6. Scroll Effect
7. dribbble
8. Kwot
9. Kid Acne
10. FFFFOUND Desktop
11. Erosie
12. Buck 65/20th
13. Eltono+Nuria
14. Les sites morbides…
15. Alopecia+Alopecia
16. Boks
17. Les Gens
18. Jan Vormann+truth
19. Paper
20. No Requests

Boogie down!

English readers: jump straight to the end, and excuse my french!

Jeudi prochain (le 6 mai) je vais participer à la 4ème Pecha Kucha de Bordeaux, parmi une quinzaine d’autres intervenants. Pour ceux qui ne connaissent pas le concept, c’est assez simple : une présentation (à la Powerpoint) avec 20 images et 20 secondes pour chacune. Un peu plus de 6 minutes pour présenter ses travaux et ses sources d’inspiration ; ça va vite, ça passe du coq à l’âne (“comme dans une partouze à la ferme”, comme dirait Fuzati) et y’a des gens intéressants !

Je ne peux pas dire grand chose sur ma propre présentation parce que le suspense c’est sympa, et puis que je suis encore en train de préparer…

Bref, venez me jeter des pierres à la gueule ! En plus, parce que vous êtes des gens bien, j’ai invité mon poto Alain Juppé à venir aussi poser son slam ; coup-de-pouce style. Toutes les infos sont sur le site officiel et sur Facebook, fastoche.

Fais gaffe, la suite du billet est en Anglais, retour à la normale quoi !

On thursday (May 6) I’ll take part in Bordeaux’s fourth Pecha Kucha (France)! If you don’t know what a Pecha Kucha is yet, the PK guys have set up a page for you.

Now I can’t tell you much about what I’ll talk about and what I’ll show because I need to keep up the suspense… And even though my slides are set and sent I’m still practicing and deciding what I’m really going to make out of these 20×20 seconds!

Fun fact? One of the other presenters is Bordeaux’s current mayor!

WordPress’ Shortcode API is a really cool thing, and since I’m working on a Drupal site these days I’ve been looking for something similar. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything… There are some implementations out there but the ones I found and tested always come pre-bundled with specific tags and don’t always provide an extensible and stable logic.

So I made mine!

Most of my work simply consisted in copying/pasting the code in WordPress’ shortcodes.php and binding it into a Drupal filter. Easy enough.

Now if you want to use it, you have to:

1. Get the module
2. Add it to your “modules” directory
3. Enable it
4. Add it to one of your setup’s filter bundle
5. Write your own module where you’d implement one or more Shortcodes (via add_shortcode) and make sure you add “dependencies[] = shortcodes” in your .info file

You might experience a nasty “Call to undefined function add_shortcode“. If so, you have to change you module implementation’s weight, either directly in your database, or thanks to the cool Utility module. Set it to 10 and you’re set!

During the last couple of months I’ve been working on a free AIR app for a French community-based site called Weecast. Its purpose is to allow users to submit and/or buy screencasts about your favorite apps and languages (mostly Adobe’s and Microsoft’s, but also 3D ones’, OS’s and more).

Introducing the Weecast Player!

The app allows you to browse your videos, watch them (4 view modes), search for more, drop comments and stars… I think that’s called an RIA, right? There’s also an offline mode, so you can access all your stuff anytime.

All of this is made in Flex+AIR. The visual identity was made by Weecast ; thanks for the PNGs, folks!

By the way, some parts of it are actually OpenSource, including:

• Miscellaneous AIR utilities
• The infamous GradientLabel (for Flex)
• Dynam.ize and BaseObject, for working with synchronous SQLite databases

If you don’t know Weecast yet I highly recommend you go visit their site, grab an account and the player, enjoy free videos, and then buy some! Now if you don’t understand French… Well, learn it!

Facts

So the other day I had an hour to waste, I decided to learn how to use MooTools classes and, as the best way to learn something is to play with it, I played with it.

About 30 minutes after, I had something  running. Dirty and buggy but still, looking cool. It took me an extra 30 minutes to clean that up, make sure it was working on most browsers, add the Google Analytics tracker, push it online and add it to the projects page…

You probably guessed it already, I’m talking about the Scroll Clock. Well this hour might be the least wasted one of my life. Think I’m radical? Read on!

Results

After tweeting about it twice (once to someone who’s interested in netart, and once to the MooTools team) things went big. I don’t know exactly how this happened but it (the Scroll Clock page) got love from Gizmodo, swissmiss, QBN, Ajaxian, Neatorama and many more. Wow.

A few days after the tsunami, here’s what my Analytics page looks like. My daily average of 600 page views has seriously been put to shame, with a climax on the 19th of November: 313,000+.

Side effects

This is probably the funniest part, not only did I worry for the server the site is hosted on, but a few things happened…

I got 3 job offers ; many friend requests on Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo and so on ; received a donation ; was contacted by a Google guy to add the project to chromeexperiments.com, which I did ; and of course had to bother my friends and colleagues about my new web-fame…

Conclusion

The short one: don’t spit on Twitter, it might make you a star. Just joking, keep spitting on it.

The long one: the simplest and shortest project of mine is the one which received the most visitors and love, ironic right? What does that mean? Should I stop working on full-fledged AIR apps?

Prove me wrong!

Introducing my latest project: TW Paper, a simple iPhone/iPod touch wallpaper gallery+collection.

A little bit of JavaScript and some Photoshop/CSS trickery to present a growing collection of images designed for your favorite piece of technology!

The page also works on iPhone/iPod touch but looks a little different for better usability. Just tap+hold on the image to save it.

Expect the gallery to evolve, with new images and quotes!

I played with MooTools a bit and did that. Useless, opensource, nerdy.

I also set up a gallery, so if you’ve got nice scrollbars that aren’t here yet, send’ em right away!