Wolff Olins came to us with a simple request: "We like your website, could you make one like that [but y'know...better] for us?".

When the butterflies-of-flattery finally settled in our stomachs and after doodling some backend interface ideas we built them a restful API backed by a beautiful CMS, populated by their own little gems around the internets. With a single click it is organized and presented in a sexy grid. All this written in Node making it blazing fast.

• With/For: Wolff Olins
• Link: Wolff Olins
• Year: 2011

The classic game that made men into nerds, now remastered. This was our entry for the 2011 Node Knockout competition. Creating a game that not only made it possible to play pong in a circle, oh no... We made it possible to play Pong inside a HSL color wheel with all your friends (apparently original enough to give us an unofficial award!). 48h was not a lot of time, so pumped full of sugar and sleep deprivation we managed to squeeze in a few bugs in the last hour to make the game a lot less fun to play, forcing us to restart the server every once in a while just to keep it somewhat interesting. But who cares? We had a blast doing it and it's a beautiful game - awarding us with a 3rd place in design baby!

• Design: Desumade™
• Link: pong.publicclass.co

It started off as a prototype written entirely in in-browser javascript (which worked a little bit too well). But then it evolved into a node.js front end serving 35 cities around the globe. Using an API provided by EF it ending up as a storytelling site made by the students about their lives studing abroad.

• Client: North Kingdom
• For: EF Languages
• URL: www.ef.com/lifein/language/london/
• Year: 2011

We are back in New York for a couple of weeks.

Let us know if you want to grab a beer or two!

After about a 6 month streak of apathy since we first attempted to put up our lovely styrofoam logo on the wall (and it just kept falling apart one letter at a time over a few weeks) we figured, with it being a new year and all, it was about time to get it back up again. No more " u lic lass" for us!

So LazerPositionedLogo™ is now in effect and will stay there for a lifetime! Or at least until that carpet tape give up...

Adamsky represents artists that makes our world a more beautiful place. And now they beautify their own corner of the internet with a little help from us. And with over 50 artists with expertise over 6 disciplines our challenge involved making a backend interface that gives artists (even those with less web experience) the power to manage their portfolios by using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

• Design: Dancemade and us.
• Url: www.adamsky.se/

After 3 years of talking about it we finally have one wall with not just white paint on it, bringing a bit more life into our space. And it's all thanks to our great friends and masters of paint: Carl & Gab (and Mila probably helped out as well) whom we locked up inside our office for a month while we're enjoying ourselves (I mean working) in that big apple town.

We can't thank you guys enough!

We are heading west for a couple of weeks, to start up a great new project. Happy holidays, see you in 2011!

Our friends at Garbergs mentioned that it was time for a new website. So we discussed some ideas and ended up leaning towards a system based on hierarchical tags where every piece of content, which are aggregated from Garbergs' Flickr and YouTube accounts, would be connected in one way or another through these tags. And to find your way around all that content we went with a search-like navigation which magically finds related pieces of content and tags. On top of that we added another interesting way to get a glimpse of what these guys and gals has done these past 20+ years.

• With: Garbergs
• For: Garbergs
• Url: garbergs.se

One year after releasing the Pulp Labs site it was time to give the site some well deserved new features and bring along some new perspectives. As a bonus it received a the FWA site of the day-award!

The project has become a true success story and fulfills its place as an inspirational site for making new use of pulp.

• With: Garbergs
• For: Södra
• Url: www.sodrapulplabs.com/

So, once again I’ll be using minimalcomps as an example because I needed to have a sortable and editable version of the List component.

So what I did was:

1. Extend the List component to become a SortableList.
2. Extend the ListItem component to become an EditableListItem.

And I’m just surprised how problem free this was, at least as long as I don’t need to override any getters or setters. And I can even statically type the list items!

Instead of having all the code embedded (as there’s a few classes) you may find my example here as gist. Hopefully one day github will accept haXe as a language that should be color coded as well…

Our own little lol-cat.

The last couple of days Nicolas committed some interesting updates to the SWF linker. This is the first steps to the upcoming SWC input support.

So, I had to give it a go, and since I’m a fan of Keiths minimalcomps library, I thought it would make a perfect example.

The first obstacle though was that the updates included changes in the dependency libraries for haXe, so first I had to update rewrite my Homebrew Formula to use official repositories for the dependencies so it’ll be prepared for further updates in the long run. It took me a while, and the formula still need some cleanup, but it works rather well by now, hurrah!

And the next step was to follow the instructions of Nicolas email to use a SWC library:

1. We need to use the SVN version of haXe, which fortunately is very easy to do with homebrew:

   # brew install haxe --HEAD
   

   or, if you prefer, the official way:

   # wget http://haxe.org/file/install.ml && ocaml install.ml
   

2. I’m making a little test project:

   # mkdir sofaware
   # cd sofaware
   

3. Get the SWC you want:

   # wget http://minimalcomps.googlecode.com/files/MinimalComps_0_102.swc
   

4. Extract the SWC (it’s really only a zipped file) and rename it (library.swf is a bit too generic for my tastes):

   # unzip MinimalComps_0_102.swc
   # mv library.swf minimalcomps-0.102.swf
   

5. Create our test file, Comps.hx:

   # mate Comps.hx
   

   Paste in our little “Hello Keith”-example:

   class Comps extends flash.display.Sprite {  
       public function new() {
           super();
           new com.bit101.components.PushButton(this,0,0,"Hello Keith!",function(e){
               trace( "Hello there!" );
           });
       }
   
       static function main() {
           flash.Lib.current.stage.align = flash.display.StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
           flash.Lib.current.stage.scaleMode = flash.display.StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
           var c = new Comps();
           flash.Lib.current.addChild( c );
       }
   }
   

6. Compile it and see it in all it’s linked library glory!

   # haxe -main Comps -swf comps.swf -swf-version 10 -swf-lib minimalcomps-0.102.swf
   # open comps.swf
   

Now that was quite easy, right? And I presume that soon it will be even easier as the SWC will be able to be linked directly. But why not enjoy the upcoming fruits of haXe already? Well, one reason might be file size as it currently links everything even if it’s not used or imported which is something that will be fixed when this feature finally arrives.

So of course I’ve rewritten the haxe/neko port to a Homebrew formula! Unfortunately, until they’ve added it to the official repository you’ll gonna have to go through some extra steps to get haxe and neko using brew install haxe:

1. Install homebrew using the instructions here (unless you have already): http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/

2. Install git (no need if you already had it installed):

   # brew install git

3. cd into the directory where you installed homebrew:

   # cd `brew --prefix`

4. Pull in my github fork:

   # git remote add slaskis git://github.com/slaskis/homebrew.git
   # git pull slaskis master

5. Install haxe (it will install neko as well as it’s a dependency):

   # brew install haxe

   or (if you want to use the latest source from the svn trunk)

   # brew install haxe --HEAD

6. Follow the instructions from the install to get haxelib working properly.

By the way, I’ve only really tested this on OS X 10.6 so let me know if it’s working on 10.5 as well!

If you vote for the formula it might be accepted a bit faster.

In Sweden we normally see daylight from 0 to 5 hours per day in the winter, In other words it's cold, dark and we're always prepared for the giant polar bears to show up! "Lys upp Stockholm" means Lighten up Stockholm, and the campaign gives the citizens of Stockholm a chance to add or vote for places they want to brighten up. We used Google maps flash API to visualize the Stockholm area. By darkening the map we managed to change the normal map appearance while keeping the functionality of Google Maps. To sum it up in 8 words: One dark map and plenty of glow galore!

• With: Garbergs
• For: Fortum
• Url: www.fortum.se/lysupp

Sometimes it can feel a bit pointless to work hard on a project when you know it will have a short lifespan. To compensate for the loss of your digital creation, leaving no other trace than a beautifully coded repository, we try to squeeze in some analog projects in between.

It doesn’t matter if the result becomes a table, or if the walls get freshened up. We get a sustainable result not only viewable on a screen. The hunger to get back in front of the screen normally takes a couple of days, which is just enough to clear the head and join our pet zeroes & ones.

A couple of weeks ago we delivered a campaign for Telenor, a Scandinavian telecommunication company. It was a great and intense project we produced together with Garbergs. After the project we finished an analog project we started in the spring: swapping all yellow colors in the office to a new fresh white shiny tone. But now when that’s done it feels good being back on track.

We just had to make the screen even more slim for our sweet old server, goodbye plastic crappy stand, hello duct tape!

Let an adventurer hang 20 meters in the free air, above the traffic and people walking on the ground. Add three web cameras, a mobile modem and a desk, whoala! That's a good description of a normal event in the "I work from here today" campaign. Over 40 event locations a cross the country in a week, each event had at least two camera angles, and everything streamed live using Bambuser. A great week could have been enough but hey, let's add a competition, use Facebook Connect for user management and handling the contributions and point system.

• With: Garbergs
• For: Telenor
• Url: www.telenorjobbamobilt.se/

It was a bit tricky to port, even though most of the hard work was done by the as3tohaxe tool I had to rewrite it from using inheritence (i.e. extending flash.display.Sprite) to using composition (i.e. wrap a flash.display.Sprite object and repoint all the methods to it) as haXe doesn’t like the getters and setters that AS3 (and the Flash Player) uses. Or rather, it doesn’t like to override them as getters and setters behave very differently in haXe. It does give some unexpected features (bugs some might call them, see the “known issues” below) but generally it works quite well.

Another issue I’ve come across while doing this is that when I want to use the components in a project I now have to add the font which is required by minimalcomps to it, and if I want to add other swf-based assets I would have to merge the minimalcomps-font into it. So it’s a bit of extra work which could be avoided if the resource management of flash9+ based targets could be fixed.

But as long as it’s a simple project with no other assets it’s really as simple as adding these two lines to the hxml:

-lib minimalcomps
-swf-lib font/pf_ronda_seven.swf

And then you can use it like this:

var vbox = new minimalcomps.VBox( this );
new minimalcomps.HUISlider( vbox , 0 , 0 , "Slide this!" );
new minimalcomps.HUISlider( vbox , 0 , 0 , "And that!" );

And you’ll get this!

Known Issues:

• VBox won’t position Knob and InputText properly
• ColorChooser doesn’t position it’s popup correctly
• Event targets isn’t the object but the _comp
• “-swf-lib font/pf_ronda_seven.swf” must be added when compiling

TODO

• Fix the known issues (duh!).
• Add the missing components (last I checked the FPSMeter was added since my port).
• Generate some docs would be nice.
• Add it to haxelib as soon as I figure out what my password was (if anyone who can reset it reads this, please do!)

So after plenty of debugging, recompiling and asking stupid questions on #macports I got it up and running again. And this time I fixed a bug in the compiled libneko.dylib library that I noticed while creating the ehx executable (which I’ll do a little writeup on soon, I actually have it working now) - it was pointing to the wrong library path. And I also rewrote the Portfile entirely for haxe so it now doesn’t do any Makefile hacking so using the official repositories should work fine now.

Now go update your ports as I need to know if I broke it for <10.6!

Instructions can be found in my previous ports-post