TOKI WOKI. 

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!