This was my last month at coUNDco.

For the past year (and some more before that) I’ve worked with these fine people on all sorts of exciting projects. I’ve learned a ton about myself, the way agencies work, dealing with clients, and developing web experiences in the real world — a world that has timelines and budgets and limited resources and other potential pitfalls. coUNDco offered me the most enjoyable job imaginable right after my studies, and I think joining them was exactly the right move for me one year ago. But now, it’s time to move on.

There were a lot of factors influencing my decision. I enjoyed my role as an Interface Designer at coUNDco, but also wanted to get involved in the strategy and concept process much earlier than I typically did. Having direct contact with a client can be challenging sometimes, but I enjoy bouncing ideas back and forth and developing holistic concepts. Combine this with my untamable ambitions for creating the highest quality of work, mix in two exceptionally smart friends of mine and add a shared business idea and the outcome is Interactive Things — my dream, my motive power and now my workplace starting January 2010. Christian, Jeremy and I conceptualize, design and develop interactive media solutions. With a field of work ranging from Web to Mobile or Installation and everything in between we solve the need for simplicity, usability and rich user-experience. As you’ve probably noticed by now I’m really really excited about it.

coUNDco has gone through some changes over the past few months and will continue to clarify its strategy for the months to come. For the record, my decision was not based on these changes. I believe coUNDco goes absolutely in the right direction as a online advertising full-service agency. Hans-Jürg, Florian and Remo navigate their boat with agility and cleverness and I congratulate them for their calm mindset in rough times. These are the factors that not only make you survive but actually let you grow and flourish! Needless to say that my “Good Bye” was not an easy one. Let me make some quick notes about the characters that make coUNDco so unique:

Thanks to Andrea for her adaptability over such a shot period of time, Léonie for her supportive nature, Jari for his fresh thinking, Philipp for his calmness and inspirational ideas, Stef for being one of THE hardest engineers, Jean-Pierre for his backup, Garry for being a project management samurai, Miri for bringing the office back to life when needed, Mike for kick-starting good mood. Thank you Remo for all the inspiration, fun and appreciation. Thank you Hans-Jürg for the never-ending support and for driving my interest in entrepreneurship that ultimately led me to owning my own business. Thank you Flo for the excellent work relationship early on and your belief in my ideas.

This big change almost concludes the year 2009 for me, but there is still a lot to do for a seamless transition from being an employee to being both — designer and entrepreneur. I promise to take the lessons learned during my exciting year at coUNDco and do my best to push Interactive Things to where we want it to arrive.

So, if you have a project you’d like to work with me on, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, and if it’s a fit, we’ll figure out how to make it happen.

Brief

For our new Blog over at datavisualization.ch we’ve planned a comprehensive news section to stay up to date with the latest examples of the bespoken field. I wasn’t always a fan of the reblog behavior but I begin to understand the value of reblogging interesting stories for both the blogger as well as the reblogger. Call it “share of content” or simply “spreading” – it helps gain traffic to a site (everyone loves traffic, don’t we?) and it also helps push the original story up a notch in terms of linkage and exposure. So I thought about a clever system of getting quickly to the newest stories without giving up my 9to5. Getting through my favourite 30 datavis blogs I wasn’t really satisfied with the flow of content coming in each day. Don’t get me wrong: the quality is superb and I’ll never give up on reading them by personal interest but to find those newest gems for this purpose I need to dig deeper.

The requirements

Back when I was a student at IAD I created a dashboard for me and my commilitones to stay up to date with everything thats happening at our university as well as in the field of interaction design. I used Netvibes and was able to build a useful ressource for us using different feeds and webscraping technics as information ressources. This time again Netvibes is the platform but the sources needed to be much more sophisticated. Using the tools that are out there makes it quiet easy to aggregate and conglomerate feeds together. But a vast amount of data isn’t worth much when you can’t consume it with a moderate effort. Rewireing, filtering and prioritizing seems to be the keys.

The sources

For our daily visual inspiration I used a combination of the most recent uploaded Flickr pictures combined with a Yahoo Pipe that combines flickr searches on different tags that relate to data visualization. A YouTube – GoogleVideo – Vimeo – Viddler Mash-up delivers us with some animated niceness and Slideshare serves our educational needs. The cutting edge news part is provided by three social spider heavyweights. We use SocialMention to search mainly Google’s Blogsearch, Upcoming, Eventful, Digg, YouTube and Flickr. Spy.appspot.com aggregates Twitter, FriendFeed, Backtype and Yahoo BOSS for microposts about the searched topic. Last but not least we use a modified version of the Social Media Firehose by Kingsley2 on Yahhoo Pipes to spider even more platforms. To avoid duplicates and give the more important posts some extra exposure we run these feeds through PostRank.

The dashboard

All these feed come together on our Netvibes dashboard and this makes it possible for us to review the huge amount of data coming in on an hourly basis. We choose the most interesting posts to share with the community in our news section at datavisualization.ch. If I had to choose one feed to recommend to you I’d be the CuttingEdge RSS – it’s a neat condensed flow of information about whats happening right now in the field of data visualization.

Footnote

As we love flows of data that are freely available so we thought it’d be a shame to keep these valuable resource for ourself. Thus the whole stream of data is also collected in our database with the superb lifestream plugin for wordpress and as a result it’s presented on our dashboard page. So feel free to check by and take a glipse in the datavis universe.

The errors occurred the first time after several commits to my repository on GITHub.com. When I tried to compile the .fla file the application wouldn’t start and the screen remained blank. Saddly no error was mentioned by the Flash IDE. After some reviews of the code and the fla file I saw that the fla file couldn’t find the DocumentClass.as and therefore would create one on the fly when compiling. I’ve tried everything from moving files around to restarting the machine and finally I recreated a working copy of my project by copying an old .fla file to my directory. This error occurred repeatedly and I already got the routine to solve it but wasn’t really satusfied with this solution.

After some googling I found this report from the Agit8 blog. The same bug seems to be an issue when using svn as the subversioning tool. Geoffhom points out at comment #48 that using the git gc command to reduce the git history solved his problems. It seems that the .fla file searches the whole directory for classes and is  searching the .git directory as well. This seems to be the root of the evil and it’s an easy thing to avoid:

Place the .fla and all the needed sources and classes inside a folder and keep the .git folder outside of it. So my folder structur now looks like this:

1. folder with .git folder, .gitignore file, README, LICENSE and the “app” folder
2. in the “app” folder I keep my com/ch/org etc sources, my .fla file and the DocumentClass.as

I hope this saves anybody a few hours of headches and brings some light into the dark zone Flash bugs

This is a report about some inconveniences with GIT when syncronizing the .gitignore file. In this article I define the problems I had and outline the circumstances that lead to this situation.

I ran into the troubles with my co-worker Christian Siegrist when syncronizing our GIT repositories. Christian forked my repository on GITHub.com. Previously I excluded some files from the GIT index. My .gitignore file looked like this:

.DS_Store
*.fla
*.swf
*.tmproj
com/modestmaps/*
com/stamen/*
docs/*

I had to remove the modestmaps and stamen library because as soon as I committed those libraries an syntax error was traced in flash. For more details on this subject visit the getsatisfaction.com thread.

When we tried to merge our branches we recognized that the .gitignore file didn’t accomplish it’s task. Christians files that had to be excluded were suddenly on GITHub in his master repository. We ended up removing all those files manually over Terminal and the pushed the updated repository to GITHub. Now Christians origin was clean of disturbing files and he first added a new .gitignore file and then the missing files I had sendt him. After updating the online repository again our merging was succesful and finally our updates came together.

Has anyone experienced similar problems or knows what caused this problems? Any advice would be appreciated.

Recently I abandoned two of my favourite apps in favour of two fresh & new apps with very similar functionalities but one major difference: Syncronization. The following thoughts explain the reasons of switching and the big advantages of having done so.

Leaving “Vienna” and sailing over to “NetNewsWire”

The former commercial RSS Reader NetNewsWire released an free version of it’s magnificient reader. The experience consists of an online account with all your RSS Feeds nicely aggregated. A neat desktop client with great performance advantages over Vienna (saying goodbye to my beloved theme was the hard part of switching – exporting and importing the OPML file was a snap). And last but defenitely not least there’s an iPhone application, that nicely loads new entries and let me switch them trough while on the train or bus. Saving the interesting ones as clippings allows me to find them later on the desktop client with ease.

Taking “Evernotes” instead of writing a “Journler”

Journler was my companion troughout my studies at the ZHDK. It held my notes, drafts, concepts, server login data, passwords and undefinable rambling neatly together. But at some point I wished I had all my notes in an online repository to have access to it all the time and not just from my own machine. I allready thought about setting up my own Wiki on my server, but luckily wasn’t completely satisfied with the available solutions around. Then I heard Jon Hicks mentioning Evernote over and over again, so I gave it a shot. Multiple Notenbooks, tagging, online & offline editing, syncronization from my online account to the desktop client and the sweet iPhone app in combination with nice conflict handling. Need any further proof of the well thought out concept of Evernote? Okay here’s more: iSight notes from the desktop, speach recordings from the iPhone, geo-tagging and an interface as sweet as candy for both the iPhone and the desktop application are just some nice extras.

Closing note

Syncronization proved to be the most helpful feature when working on multiple devices. After all the waiting seamless communication between desktop, cloud and mobile is at reach.

After bookmarking, note-taking, news-reading and so on, what are next best things to sync over the cloud? Here’s my wishlist:
Timetracking: well, there are some applications – let’s try these out
ToDo management: Can I haz a Things online version?
Backup: This would be the most useful one, but the initial 80 – 500Gigs backup scares me just a little.

Well, you had that great idea. Everything set up and planed nicely so you could start to build that “thingy” to blow up the already crowded Web2.0 market. But, how do you check the chances of surviving? We’ve seen great products succeed or fail and the line between both scenarios is frightening thin.

I’ll present some well known examples of success and provide you with a hint to a possible root of their success. As always in the fast-living world of the web there are a lot more factors than what I could list here, but if I may pick just one thing from every application and abstract it to an advice, these would be the ones.

Offer a new service

Collaborative project management as complete and as streamlined like Basecamp was simply not around before 37Signals launched it back in 1999. And I’m not even talking about the pricing model here!

Efficiently streaming video over the internet and presenting it with a wide spread cross-plattform plugin – and this for mere mortals? Unthinkable before YouTube launched.

Offer a better service

Photo sharing was around for some time and it even worked for a broad audience, but now everybody can use a sophisticated photo-organizer online and share their pictures with ease thanks to Flickr.

Offer a simple solution

Google definitly wasn’t the first search-engine. But they knew the importance of simplicity when searching so they kept their Homepage minimized to the famous one-line search field.

Offer simplicity to complex processes

Easying the problems a lot of people are faced with is a shure shot in delivering services. The famous $ function from the prototype library has been one of the most duplicated functionalities.

Publishing on the net has become incredibly easy but setting up the publishing engine still wasn’t for everybody as easy as desired. With the WordPress-installation taking less than 5minutes they made it a snap.

Offer sophisticated tools

Del.icio.us isn’t the prettiest site around, period. But the functionality is undenyable and they offer a great set of tools to make using it even nicer. Posting links on the site itself fades to be secondary as illustrated by the position of the “post” link on the homepage.

Maintaining a personal tumblelog can be a time consuming process but with the superb toolset of tumblr.com posting content is just one click away. Appart of the bookmarklet they provide a great API and feed implementation.

Offer open data

What good are you’re statuses if they’re closed away on a site far away from your digital home? The portability of the data and openness of the Twitter API let developers easily integrate them anywhere. We can also see some complete new applications exists on top of Twitter. See Foamee for example.

Offer your plattform

With a global player offering his plattform for developers we see a nice example of a new direction in the portability of data.

Be remarkable

I still remeber the first time I saw the nice semi-transparent black in the background, the smooth transitions between the different images and the well-known preloader.. everything looked sleek and there was only one tought in my head: gotta have this! Visit the Lightbox 2.0 site

Be desirable

The digg-rank quickly became THE measurement for news-stories. What better situation for an app than beeing the referee for such a gigantic field known as the news.

Be the missing link

As we’re all customers, we all know the problem with hotlines, contact-fields, support-tickets and what-not. The chain between provider and customer is mostly broken. Here comes in GetSatisfaction.com, makes support go social and fills in the gap.

The launch of a service or product on the internet is a complex process and I am far away from beeing an expert in this field but I wanted to take the time and collect some aspects of it by analyzing the launch of the Silverback app by Clearleft.

Talk about it

The first crucial thing you need to do for starting the needed buzz is to talk about it. If a simple blogpost or a big announcement is adequat depends on the focus and appeal of the promoted “thing”. The first time I heard of Silverback was in Andy Budds blogpost about it over at Blogography.

Spread the word

After the first curious comments on the initial message and with the help of effective teasing the word starts to spread. Leaving some things unsaid and having people guessing about the service helps definitely to build a hype around it. With the support of opinion leaders writing about it, high digg rankings are a snap. We’ve seen a fair amount of mentionings of Silverback in the blogosphere lately. See Jeff Croft or Harry Brignull write about it.

Create visual impression

Beeing remarkable is one of the most crucial things in corporate identity. Again this is field with a scope far far beyond this post so I leave it with this simple statement and continue rather documenting the superb decisions Clearleft made in the past few months

Having Jon Hicks do the Silverback artwork was a very clever decision. He created a remarkable detailed Illustration of a silverback gorilla (well, what else!). The quality of the work follows seamlessly his previous works and serves very well as the brand recognition. One point that pushes the usefulness of this cooperation to another level is Jon’s kindness in sharing his work on his own site. View the working process at hicksdesign.ch.uk. Furthermore his work gets discussed and honored on flickr for example.

The only official representation of Silverback is the signup page and again they did a great job in creating something very special. Paul Annet, frontend-designer at Clearleft, designed the page and implemented one of the lately most discussed technics aka parallax-scrolling. The layered leaves from the background create the illusion of a three dimensional space by moving with different velocities when resizing the browser-window.

Doing great work is nice but having it presented and discussed by many pushes the effect even further. Paul wrote a extremely useful and comprehensive article about this technic on Vitamin. Again, the generated traffic supports the product itself and helps build up it’s reputation – even in it’s not yet published status.

Conclusion

We’ve seen some great things happening around the launch of Silverback and as we can expect this is only the peak of the iceberg. When it comes to opening the app for the broad public we’ll certainly see more of the buzz-magic Clealeft provided so far.