Another year
Living for over 10 months in Sydney now we’ve decided to spend another year in beautiful Australia. The original plan was to only stay for 6 months, but our todo-list on Remember The Milk still keeps growing. While having excellent opportunities to unwind at the beach and surrounding areas, it’s much easier to focus yourself at work and get things done. I’d certainly miss this work-life balance and productivity back in Germany.
Nevertheless we’re leaving our hotspot Sydney next week and are going to be on the road for a full month, trying to make our way from Darwin back to Sydney. Feel free to follow my flickr photostream.
Amnesia Connect
You get most enthusiastic about your work when you manage to combine all your skills in a single, amazing product. Amnesia Connect certainly is one of my favorite, because it does not only close the gap between mobile and digital signage technology like Microsoft Surface, but it also required to break down the user experience to the most simple and elegant elements.
Read more about this project on Emerging Experiences and I can’t wait to see what comes out of it.
Baby Dice 2.0 is out and looks lovely
The original version of Baby Dice was my first attempt on the iPhone. Considered as a kind of playground app, there was a lot to learn about how to get the development part right and how to handle all the AppStore related bits.
While I was pleased that this turned out well, I wasn’t 100% happy with the app itself. Especially the visual design and the limited support for sharing was lagging behind the original idea. But at the time it was important to get it into the store no matter what. We’re not talking about the money making part here, it was just so terribly exciting to have it there and think about the opportunities.
Now after a full year and a few minor enhancements we finally had the time to work on a major update. A fresh new design and a bunch of sharing features were on top of our priorities list.
While there are still many things left to be improved, I now feel that this is the level of quality we were always shooting for right from the outset. It’s smooth, colorful and fun to use. Thanks to all the refactoring work done in the 2.0 process, an iPad version is already around the corner and being able to share baby names across social networks is only a matter of time. Unfortunately time is a very limited resource right now, but it won’t be another 12 months until we can see some progress here.
In the meantime find more details about the project here and make sure to check out Baby Dice on the AppStore.
OakleyView on the AppStore
This is the last project I was involved in while working for Neue Digitale / Razorfish and I can’t say enough about how much I like it. The simplicity and strong focus on magnificent sceneries makes it a perfect experience especially on an iPad. Also check out this article on Emerging Experiences.
More work in the mobile channel is already in progress – including a fabulous Baby Dice 2.0 facelift.
Moving to Sydney
I’ve moved to Sydney two weeks ago and will stay in Australia until 2011 working for Amnesia Razorfish as Technical Lead Emerging Experiences and enjoying this beautiful country.
Feel free to follow my public photostream on Flickr.
New Media Award for adidas Your Perfect Run
Yay, one of my favorite projects last year just placed second in the category Trends at New Media Award 2010.
adidas Your Perfect Run is a lovely 3d visualization for your favorite running routes. For more info about the project watch the video summary on the Award page or find more screenshots here.
Geneva 2010
Just in time before new work for iPhone & iPad comes up I like to point at this article about the A1 world premiere in Geneva. We had the chance to develop two A1 Multi-Touch configurators to explore the broad range of customization features. Based on realtime-3d as demonstrated on Vimeo. We should have some new video coverage uploaded soon.
Bad Words available on AppStore
My second iPhone App made it to the AppStore yesterday. Find more screens on the project page:
Audi 3d Configurator on 46″ Multi-Touch Display
We managed to port the Audi Surface Application over to a 46″ Multi-Touch Display running Windows 7. As shown in our last video, the original configuration process on Surface featured a physical token which obviously didn’t work out in this scenario.
So, apart from adjusting the configuration handling, the major tasks included to swap the underlying Multi-Touch framework and scaling the app up from 1024×768 to Full HD.
The application was demonstrated at the Windows 7 Release Party in Hamburg.
More impressions @ Emerging Experiences.
Baby Dice available on AppStore
I’m relieved the review phase didn’t come up with any unpleasant surprises and Baby Dice is finally ready for sale. This is certainly not the kind of app that will make me rich, but I’m confident there are some people out there who will like the original idea and concept behind Baby Dice.
The next days I’ll try to come up with a roadmap for the next releases. The most important features still missing include a way to manage your favourite names, a history (undo) and e-mail / tell-a-friend functionality. If sales are good enough, I might also switch to a commercial baby name database to improve the results and provide more information about the names. This is supposed to be a long-term project with periodical updates.
As promised I’m going to write an article about my thoughts and experiences regarding the development process soon. If you have any additional ideas or feature requests let me know.
Latest Surface Project Showcased at IAA
This year I had the pleasure to spend most of my time working on extraordinary projects so far – each one with a different focus and unique challenges. Since there was lots of research and secrecy involved I’m relieved there is at least one project which made it to a public release.
We’ve been working together with Realtime Technology AG to create an outstanding car configurator which was showcased at IAA 2009.Read more about the project in my article on Emerging Experiences.
Baby Dice (In Review)
The idea behind Baby Dice originated over 2 years ago. There was this idea of a game of dice which lets the user find baby names in a playful experience. My coworker and I sat together working out the interaction design and we created a rough prototype in flash. Months passed and there were few approaches where we tried to give this little idea a platform, but it just didn’t work out.
I almost forgot about it until I got my first iPhone three months ago and realized that this is the chance to gain more experience with mobile development. This is where it became obvious that Baby Dice on the iPhone would be a perfect start: It’s relatively simple to code and fun to use. As it turned out, the development and distribution process was way harder than expected, but it was worth every second.These days Baby Dice is already in review and will hopefully enter the AppStore soon. I’ll post more details about the gameplay and development process after the app has been approved.
Screencaps Online
When deploying Microsoft Surface projects it’s common to produce at least a neat little video afterwards. This way you preserve the most relevant output with all the efforts from the team and it makes it easy to include a short sneak peek in an upcoming presentation.
This inspired me to create a couple of Screencaps also from my recent online projects, since the Surface stuff will be covered in videos anyway. I updated my portfolio with the following videos:- adidas Women – Style Yourself
- Foot Locker Bounce
- BYM Online CommunityMore to come.
