Adobe organizes this year another edition of the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. It’s a competition, divided in several subcategories, in which students all across the globe compete against each other, with projects that were developed or created as a school assignment.
For our last RIA-assignment, our teachers insisted that our class would submit all of it’s projects, considering their overall high quality. So I followed their advise, and submitted both my geoPhoto application, and my iVlog application for review.
A few weeks ago, I received an email, notifying me that geoPhoto was selected as one of the 15 international semi-finalist in the Mobile-Design category. It also said, that to be judged, all of my development assets ( code, design files, …) needed to be shipped by mail to the ADAA headquarters, before the due date of July 22th. So I did!
I actually never expected the international mail services to get this package in time to San Jose, but on July 22th, I received an email from ADAA, that my package had arrived, and was ready to be judged in the first week of August.
The first 3 of the 15 semi-finalists, get the chance to go to Beijing, for the great finale. So for the next 2 weeks or so, I’ll be checking my mail 10 times a day, for any news from the Adobe people. I’ll keep you posted! 
Cheers, Davy.
Update: Today, I received an email, that congratulated me once again with me being a Semi-Finalist, but telling me that my entry wasn’t picked as one of the three final entries. I guess this is where the geoPhoto-adventure ends (for now). Time to move on to some other projects & ideas!
A few weeks ago, Mobile Vikings, a new MVNO in Belgium, which is focusing on free mobile internet, released the bèta version of their API. The API makes it possible for developers to make their own applications for viewing your account details, such as your calling history, your topup history (since it’s a prepaid service) and of course your current credit status.
Being somewhat free at that time, I figured it would be quite useful to create a mobile application for displaying this data. There was already an iPhone application, released by Mobile Vikings itself, so I chose to create a Flash Lite application. I started with designing the interface of the application, in the branding style of Mobile Vikings. Making use of highly-contrasting -yet easy on the eyes- colors, in mind, I managed to put together a result I was quite happy with.
After some technical difficulties, with accessing the API through the security sandbox of Flash Lite, I happily released the bèta version of the application on June 13th. I made an announcement on Twitter, and on the official Mobile Vikings Facebook community, and got some positive feedback from other Nokia users.
Currently, there are only Nokia S60 & Nokia S40 installers online, but as soon as I find the time, I am planning to take a look at the possibilities for other mobile device platforms.
The homepage, installers & a demo of the application can be found .
Since then, the application has been mentioned on several other blogs, among which Creative Geeks & Vincent Verbist’s‘s blog.
Installing Nokia OVI store manual
Two days ago Nokia released it’s OVI store to the mass. Unfortunately, it was only yesterday I actually managed to browse through the store, because of the high traffic the OVI servers had to deal with. But there are allready enough blogposts with opinions about how good/bad the launch of the store has been (Terence Eden’s post, All About Symbian’s Post, Mobile Industry Review, and TechCrunch), so I’ll focus on the one thing that bothered me…
A problem I was facing, was the lack of an application on my phone to visit the store. I went searching online, and found out that for many people the method Alessandro La Rosa described seemed successful. As you can guess, it wasn’t successful for me. So I decided to write down how I did manage to get the application installed on my N85.
1. As you can see: no OVI store icon in the “download” application, even after refreshing it’s content.
2. So let’s try it online!
Use your device’s webbrowser to surf to http://store.ovi.com.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page
And see if you can find the link “install OVI store on your mobile”
4. Login
Log in with your Nokia account. You can use the same account as you use on the rest of the Nokia website.
5. Great! The installation will start
The installation of the application will start, and you should follow the directions the installer gives you.
5. Success
The OVI store application is now installed, and can be found in the “Applications” and you can browse the OVI store without opening your device’s browser! Even if you want to browse OVI using your browser (http://store.ovi.com), the application will start automaticly.
I hope this post was helpful to those of you who had the same problem I had. Now go and enjoy the content of the store!
Catching up with some schoolwork
Well hello again! Since this blog still looks way to empty, I’m posting some of my previous school assignments here. There are 2 projects I am eager to share with the world:
- iVlog – videoblog to YouTube [AIR]
- geoPhoto – geoTagging photo’s & sending to server – [FLASHLITE][FLEX]
iVlog
For the lessons of Rich Internet Applications, last december, our class got the assignment to create a “multimedia-creation-tool”. Meaning that the user of our application should be able to create some kind of media.
I opted for the creation of videoblogs, being somewhat popular at the moment. Since YouTube is the best known videocommunity website, I chose to integrate support for that, as well as Twitter support, in case the user wants to notify all of his followers when he records a new videoblog…
Click for gallery
geoPhoto
For our final project of the Multimedia course, our teachers let us choose what kind of project we wanted to create, or extend. I chose to try something new, being FlashLite. My first idea for an application ended being technically impossible, so I came up with the idea to create a mobile application, which lets you take a picture, reads your GPS coördinates, and sends the geotagged image to an online server, where the uploaded pictures are displayed using Google Maps.
After a lot of hassling, the project did succeed, and I am rather proud of it also to be honest… 
Click for gallery
The year was 2009, …
… and it was a beautiful, sunny day. It must have been about half March, when I got the luminous idea to finally catch up with the rest of humanity, and create my own blog. Although I had always intended to write my own blogscript, I did choose for a WordPress blog, since I can’t deny it has all the functionalities one could ever expect from a blog.
So here I am, writing my first blogpost. Now let’s see how often I can push myself into writing one again… This one is actually just a post to fill the empty space of which there seems to be al lot. I intend to publish some of my school projects I have been working on lately, though.
But first, I think I have to explore the true capabilities of WordPress… You’ll hear from me soon enough!
Regards, Davy.
