Via the teaser site at tv.be

Once again a new personal record: more than three months since my last blog post. Hooray!
Try to beat that sissies.

Such silence always means the same thing: lazyness, pure and utter lazyness.
And doing other things, not taking the time to talk about ‘em.

More of that now.. See you later!


Made with Face of, crappy face replacement osx tool by Pill & Pillow

Comment on kingoftrash.be

It’s hip, it’s healthy.
Its de pedaalemmer transfer.

I’m happy to announce the launch of ‘Objets Trouvés‘.

It’s a project aimed at giving more attention to design in the streets of Hasselt. It consists of two parts: an installation that will be placed in art center Z33 from september 16th, allowing to browse a map with designs in the city and to print out postcards of it. The second part is a site with the same functionalities where people can contribute by sharing pictures and descriptions of design they love.

Objets trouvés was conceived by product designer Wim Buts who was selected for the Toegepast12 design presentation by Design Platform Limburg. Wim contacted me to help realize his project. Among others, he took care of the content and the visuals. My contribution included designing the interface and developing the website.

I’d been wanting to toy around with the Google maps API for a while and this project was a good excuse to get that of my todo list. The Google maps resources that were most helpful were: Google mapki, the maps group on Google groups and Mike Williams’ tutorials. There’s plenty of examples to get you started so basic things are pretty easy to make. It just gets a bit harder when you want to combine specific functionalities from examples. The hardest part in development was making sure everything was working cross browser. The javascript ànd the CSS. Like many times IE6 proved to be a royal pain in the ass.

Then there’s the backoffice. All the data is stored on our server and it feeds the javascript via an XML file. I decided to try out a cakePHP to whip up this basic backoffice to approve and manage entries. Cake is a rapid development framework using the model-view-controller pattern. W.o.w. this experience makes me want to throw away all the previous CMS code I’ve built from scratch. I’ve only learned the basics of cake yet but already it’s clear that this the way to go: faster development time, clear code structure, OO approach,.. This is good stuff.

The installation at Z33 is a slimmed down version of the website. Visitors will only be able to use the mouse. We’re using a kiosk extension for Firefox to limit their possibilities, present the site in full screen and print the postcards without a dialog box popping up.

That’s it. Now go to Hasselt, take some pictures and post them on the site. I want some content there :^)
And if you happen to print out some postcards with the installation, feel free to send me one.