TOKI WOKI. 

A per­sonal homage to African Apparel’s first.

I also printed it on a shirt but the result is too shitty to share.

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!

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.

I talked about the logo here and there and now, here are the EPs! Grab them dig­i­tally or phys­i­cally.

You know you want that.

Two amaz­ing artists I dis­cov­ered recently.

Sol LeWitt

Ellsworth Kelly

Just came back from a California-Nevada-Arizona trip!

Want a quick and abstract selec­tion of pics or some­thing more thor­ough? Help yourself.

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.