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In the last months I worked with people from abroad or with big physical distances. The first time I thought, yeah that is not a problem. Everybody has got an internet connection and that is all what we need. In my old company the Liip AG - who I worked for - their whole project management and file management systems were almost accessible over an internet connection. For this reason I could work from everywhere I want. I thought, that would not change in my future time, because the internet has solutions for everything. Yeah, I have to say that is true. But it was not easy to find the right tools and services for exchanging ideas, files, time schedules and other stuff for free. My projects are not so big that it makes sense to implement this infrastructures by my own. I found some free or at least some cheap services which you can use for working together with friends or other small projects.

Idea Development and Sharing

Creating and developing ideas with people, who are not physical available, is not very easy. Maintaining and extending are also two not very minor problems. In the last time I found a very good workflow for me and my friends. We do a telephone conference via skype and in the same time we use the service Mindmeister (Online Mindmapping Tool) and the tool Balsamiq MockUp. At the moment our solution works good and it is totally free with some limitations. A more professional solution for idea development and exchange may be the Service ProtoShare. Unfortunately, there is no real free pricing model available, therefore I never tested this service. Read more...

A small summary of my Twitter messages from Januar - February 2010:

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Vom 2. bis zum 7. Februar fand das Medienfestival Transmediale in Berlin statt.  Das Festival stand ganz unter dem Motto "Futurity Now", sprich was ist und wie gestalten wir unsere Zukunft. Gemäß aller Vorträge und Diskussionsrunden soll dabei das Internet und die kreative Klasse die wichtigsten Rollen für unsere Zukunft übernehmen. Vom meinem subjektiven Gefühl her stammten die meisten Besucher auch aus dieser sogenannten kreativen Klasse. An sich eine gute Sache, nur wandelte sich genau dieses Publikum in einigen Diskussionsrunden zu einer wahren Selbstbeweihräucherung, wie toll und kreativ und innovativ man doch sei. Besonders negativ ist mir die Diskussion am Ende  zum Thema  Creativity as an Economic Resource aufgefallen. Nun gut davon wollte ich mich mir freilich nicht die Stimmung vermiesen lassen und besuchte die Transmediale Ausstellung. Viele Kunstwerke gab es zwar nicht zu sehen, aber das war für mich schon O.K., denn das A Parallel Image, die Paparazzi Bots und der Artvertiser haben mich ziemlich überzeugt und waren sicherlich auch einer der Highlights der Austellung.

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During my master studies at the Interface Culture department of the University in Linz I visited the great lecture SENSEWARE - How to Create the Experience's Architecture by Hide Ogawa. In this lecture we learnt and discussed how we can integrate and reproduce emotions + experiences in our technical-based environment. Furthermore, we discussed the roles of the different interactive design  disciplines - e.g. Product Designer, Industrial Designer, Interaction Designer, Visual Designer, Experience Designer etc. - and how they work together in the domain of SenseWare products.

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from November - December 2009:

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During the first semester of my study Interface Culture at the University of Art in Linz I had to write some papers about interactive art. My first papers dealt with the history of interactive art and continued with some different art movements in this domain. In some cases I am more or less satisfied with my papers. Anyway, I think every 2page long paper contains some interesting points for Interaction Designer, Web Designer, Web Developer, Web Artists, Computer Scientists etc.. That is the reason why I want to share my written work with you.

Please consider that all my papers here were an assignment for the master classes of Interactive Art by Christa Sommerer. My papers don't meet the requirements of a scientific work despite the fact that the format seems to be scientific. All my texts represent partly more my own thoughts on the different art topics, so please interpret my papers as a short essay or summary. My thoughts are mainly based on the first and second references, which are mentioned at the end of each paper. I highly recommend to read these references, because they are a very good collection for delivering an introduction in the domain of interactive art. Thanks Christa for this great collection of references and the introduction!

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The last blog post Flash Indie Developer Part 2 dealt with idealism and requirements. In this blog post we will discuss the most dangerous risks for your daily life.

A smaller or a bigger problem could be diseases. If you get sick you might not be able to work for short or longer periode. You have to pay some bills for the treatment and your income will normally decrease. You can reduce this risk with a health insurance. In Europe it is quite normal or it is even obligatory to have a health insurance. I think health insurances are the most important insurance you should have! For other important insurance please check some web-portals about "how I should start my own company" or something similiar.

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from September - October 2009:

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After the first blog post of the blog (Flash) Independent Developer was a little bigger, this article will be smaller and I will discuss the requirements for an (Flash) Independent Developer. These requirements are not very Flash oriented, they deal more with the idealism attitude of the new way and what do you have to consider in the beginning phase.

When you decide to work as an Independent Developer, you will risk a lot. And this high degree of risk is, of course, strongly connected with a high degree of  uncertainness in your working life. You should be able to handle this risky life, otherwise you should not choose the way as an (Flash) Independent Developer.

Another very strong point , if you can become an (Flash) Independent Developer is, which degree of responsibility do you have?!  Read more...

I was very pleased that YouTube released a ActionScript 3 API for their Chromeless Player. I looked at some availabe code snippets on different blogs and unfortunateley, I had to realize that the API is not really object-oriented and a little bit annoying to work with (because of the missing code completion).

My current project - an independent Web Video Player - is still using the old workaround YouTube API Tubeloc and I have to change this. That is the reason why I created a Flex Component for the new YouTube AS3 API. If you would like to use my code for your Flex or Air projects, please feel free to use it and if you will find some bugs, please leave a comment!

Now I will start with some explanations of my code. I create 4 classes, which manage the whole YouTube Chromeless API. The class YouTubeAs3 contains all the most important functions and is based on the Flex Framework(!). The classes AirYouTube and FlexYouTube extends the YouTubeAs3 class. Both classes are Flex Framework based classes. I had to divide the YouTubeAs3 class into these 2 classes, because the Adobe Air environment don't support the command Security.allowDomain() and it is cleaner to use this command for a web-based projects. So therefore please use the FlexYouTube component for web-based projects and the AirYouTube component for your Air projects. The fourth class FlashYouTube is an only Flash plattform based class, that should be very handy to use for non-Flex projects. Read more...