After running our bike shop website R107BIKES for a couple of months, we exerienced a strange behaviour of Magento, rendering the shop disfunctional: You could never complete a shop transaction because you weren’t able to put items into the cart, doh.

The only hint given was the error message:

 Please specify the product required option(s)

I was close to freak out and even evaluated a “downgrade” to much simpler Joomla shop solution VirtueMart.

Luckily i found just by random this post, where one guy reported a similiar problem caused by the integration of a SSL certificate on his server.

The resolution took a few seconds, just enter https as the base url for secure and insecure connections in your magento configuration.

Revolver (Official Trailer) from Poor Boyz Productions on Vimeo.

This is an ongoing and growing collection of hints and experiences for working with unity, textmate and svn. first thing:

Filtering unneccessary .meta files inside Textmate’s project folder:

Inside Textmate, venture to the prefs panel and change the File Filter in the Advanced Settings Panel to:

!(/\.(?!htaccess)[^/]*|\.(tmproj|o|pyc)|/Icon\r|/svn-commit(\.[2-9])?\.tmp|\.meta)$

Some useful tools for concept, strategy, design & technology or creative development as I tend to describe, as it applies for a lot of disciplines.

UX Basis has a nice recurring approach as for most projects you wont have a final point of delivery but an evolving evolutionary process.

More generic work process links:
http://project.cmd.hro.nl/cmi/hci/toolkit/index2.php

Eines der schönsten Bücher seit langem.

Generative Gestaltung from Benedikt Groß on Vimeo.

Nokta . from Onur Senturk on Vimeo.

something i am really looking forward to is to finish our cuda cluster :)

Some Logo Rendering for the LISBET Systems eG. wip…

Very good introduction:

Watch Raetselhafte Quantenphysik in Bildung  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHdHJrkBM28

More bull Mountain Biking >>

Die wohl am häufigsten anzutreffende Antwort wird vielleicht die werbliche Gestaltung sein. Vielleicht dicht gefolgt von Interpretationen, die mehr den Künsten oder dem industriellen (Mode-, Grafik-, Interactive-, Produkt-, u.v.a.) Design zuzuordnen sind. Weitere könnten das “Prozess-Design” oder systemisches Design sein. Oder Designer-Drogen. Sicherlich gibt es noch sehr viele Bereiche, die unter dem Begriff Design zusammenfassbar wären, die Grauzone ist dabei natürlich sehr hoch, da heute jeder Design in irgendeiner Form als Notwendig erachtet und somit der Einsatz des Wortes in Mode gekommen ist. Allen gemeinsam ist jedoch, dass ein mehr oder weniger zielgerichteter Prozess zu einem bedarfsorientierten umsetzen oder handeln führt, also konkret z.B. eine Zahnbürste wird, für eine rechte Hand optimiert, entworfen, oder abstrakter ein Ablauf für eine Zielgruppe oder einen Einsatzzweck definiert. Wenn man sich dies alles bewusst macht, fällt auf, das Design sicherlich auch als rein visuelle oder haptische Komponente verständlich sein kann, aber auch als super abstrakter Prozess oder idealer Weise die Kombination beider:

“Ein gesamtheilticher Vorgang, der alle das jeweilige System betreffenden Komponenten umfasst und zu einem auf den Bedarf hin ausgerichteten und optimierten Ergebnis führt.”

Dies könnte eine idealisierte Definition sein. Wie das aber meist so ist mit den Idealen, ist der menschliche Drang zum subjektiven interpretieren der Faktor, der das Ganze wieder unscharf werden lässt, aber eben auch menschlicher, also für den Menschen (um den es ja letztendlich geht) verständlicher.

Genau so wie man z.B. zwischen Kunst, also der zweckentbundenen Gestaltung und dem visuellen Design, also dem zweckgebundenen Design, unterscheiden muss, so kann man auch z.B. das wuchernde organische Entwickeln eines Ablaufs (lernen eines Jobs “on the fly”, aka “trial-and-error”) einem durchgestylten Prozess zur Unterrichtung eines Menschen in diversen Abläufen gegenüberstellen.

Worauf will ich hinaus?

Wenn man das zuvor gesagte als Basis nimmt, fallen jedem leicht ein paar Beispiele ein, in denen etwas “konstruiertes” auf der einen Seite und etwas “natürlich gewachsenes” auf der anderen Seite gegenüber gestellt werden kann.

Ich persönlich sehe das eine als “heissen”, das gegenüber liegende als “kalten” Prozess, vollkommen unabhängig davon, ob es ein konkret visuelles, ein abstrakt konstruiertes oder etwas völlig anderes als Ergebnis haben soll.

Es geht quasi darum, den Ursprungspunkt zu definieren, mit all seinen Eingangsparametern und das Ziel. Der Prozess der hier nun gestaltet wird, ist eine gesunde Kombination aus “heissen” und “kalten” Prozessen, nämlich den “konstruierten” und den “organischen”.

Nun bin ich doch recht weit vom Thema abgekommen! Oder doch nicht? Eigentlich wollte ich über Design reden. Letztendlich tue ich genau dies. Es geht letztendlich darum, Design nicht nur als produktives umsetzen nach dem Ansatz “form follows function” zu begreifen, sondern es als generellen Ansatz für das Formen, das Modellieren von jeglichen Abläufen zu sehen. Unabhängig vom Geschäftsfeld, Auftraggeber, Zielsetzung, Herleitung, usw.

“Alles ist Design. Die Kunst besteht darin, Design als Prozess zu sehen der gesamtheitlich ein Ziel definiert und den Weg dahin modelliert.”

Nun ist dies alles schön daher gesagt, alles in allem doch nichts besonderes. Aber wie schafft man denn ein “gesamtheitliches Design”?

Dazu mehr im nächsten Teil…

i just saw this report on blackberrycool about flawed comparisons between e.g. iphone and blackberry.

interesting about this whole topic could be another point of view: is it true, that a device which is easier to use because of a good interface design is technologically more challenging, than one designed in a different/ not as user friendly manner?

the same comparison applies in the neverending win/osx comparison, where you cannot automagically assume, an early adopter is a more technology savvy person. usually a pro user of blackberry or windows might be more savvy as they can overcome the restrictions brought by bad system design.

dont get me wrong, i develop for osx and iphone, android, etc. but i guess this might be a valid point of view, too, rendering these social hullabaloo comparisons meaningless anyway: never believe a comparison you didn’t fake yourself ;)

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

Schau dir meinen Entwurf auf NIKEiD.com an

hope to receive it soon. as well waiting for my stantum devkit… will be a awesome autumn.

why would you want sound and physics when you can have sparsely clothed ninja space marine amazon secret agents riding on chainsaw-hoofed flying pink stealth space unicorns through a brightly colored dystopian african urban jungle fantasy wasteland island state populated with mutated propaganda-spewing gas mask-wearing alien nazi zombie demons that entered this island planet dimension through a hellgate portal invasion triggered by a black magic freak teleportation experiment resonance cascade accident caused by a power-hungry mad scientist wizard evil genius working for a multinational corporation conspiracy of lawyers and weapons manufacturers without morals, and all that in its proper realtime dynamically lit globally illuminated deferred-shaded parallax-occlusion-mapped ambient-occluded shadow-buffered high dynamic range silky smooth glory?

ryg

The Unity3D Version

[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.zero.io/wp-content/uploads/unity3d/speedstream.unity3d" logoimage="http://www.zero.io/wp-content/uploads/unity3d/75_neg.jpg" width="575" height="300"/]

cinema4d particles/mograph

Martin Lihs arbeitet weiter an seiner WiiSpray. Nach wie vor ein Brett vor dem Herrn :)

WiiSpray Teaser from Martin Lihs on Vimeo.

Kind of a concept for our upcoming event on new years eve @ the new office. Maybe we should use it for a portfolio, too.

[WP_UnityObject src="http://www.zero.io/wp-content/uploads/unity3d//cubic.unity3d" logoimage="http://www.zero.io/wp-content/uploads/unity3d/zeroioloader.jpg" width="575" height="300" backgroundcolor="#000000" textcolor="#ffffff" /]

Amazing quality!

Further reading about assembly: http://www.assembly.org/summer08/compos

Just to complete the “my vehicle photo collection”:

Components:
Hope Hubs, Sun Single Track Rims, Marzocchi 66 ETA, X-Fusion Vector PVA, Formula the One, SRAM X9, Truvativ Stylo Cranks, Crank Brothers 50/50 Pedals, Chris King Headset

This guy is amazing!

Another finished bike project: Ibo’s City Racer:

Als Entwickler von Flash Anwendungen mit WiiFlash und vor allem mit unserer heiß geliebten Unity3D Plattform – mit der man auch für die Wii und das iPhone deployen – kann freuen wir uns natürlich über jeden neuen Controller, der uns neue Anwendungen ermöglicht. Natürlich bringt Nintendo auf der E3 neuen Stuff, nämlcih MotionPlus für die WiiMote:
Nintendo Wii MotionPlus und Mehr Details und Fokus auf Community building

An dieser Stelle natürlich ein Verweis auf WiiSpray, denn davon sollte es noch viel mehr geben!

Auf der schönen Bright gab es natürlich viele interessante Dinge zu sehen, lustig war auf jeden Fall AUXPEERs Vinyl-Toy Stand! Unter anderem gab es da kurioser Weise auch eine Leo Burnett Figur:

Und hier noch weitere shots:

Finally someone conserving the history of broken bikes. Big up to nohair, keep up! Will send some photos soon! Maybe add some google maps link to store the location too?

Just a short stop inbetween, my new Team MAXMAX is on its way to completion :)

Parts so far include Chris King Headset, X0 Gears + 11-26 Cassette, Stylo Cranks, Thomson Post and Stem, Team Riserbar, Leaf Neon Pedals, …

Here the 90% state:

100% – isn’t she cute?

Finally some good news. After spending quite a long time on various coding projects and getting over my stoopidly twisted wrist, I could finish some small bike projects as well as start my new 4X machine: hello craig.

Anyway, here are some pix of the bits so far:

New Stuff from the r to the t to tha z:

Cam von Oregon Scientific, sah recht brauchbar aus und ist sie auch!
Siehe hier:

Well, I had wuite a relaxing time. Tho me workaholic felt a bit challenged by total silence. At last a good opportunity to work on some tracks:

What happens if you take to bikers to WC DH course without further notice…

Wenn der Zen-Praktizierende zur Auffassung kommt, dass alles im Kosmos miteinander in Verbindung steht, so bedeutet dies für ihn, dass keine real existierende absolute Grenze zwischen dem einzelnen Übenden und allen anderen Menschen besteht. Hieraus folgt die Überzeugung, dass jede schädigende, aber auch jede helfende Handlung letztlich auf den Verursachenden zurückfällt

Wow, some interesting work for a Multiplayer Engine in Flash here… Even with dynamic lighting! Good work, guys!

Found an interesting application here done by these guys. Though in japanese, pretty interesting (to me at least).

Another, actually quite nice, approach for multi-touch sensing, here shown on a laptop…
Sadly the youtube video has been removed. So I will try to explain the principle instead:

Read the whole story at I STARTED SOMETHING

Last but not least this guy shows how to achieve the same (multi touch sensing) with a bag of dyed water and an isight, hehe : $2 Multi-touch. Yeah, ok, some C-coding involved as well…

To get you started with this topic (maybe for your own experiments), here some rough ideas:
Basicly you will need some acrylic glass, a hand full of white leds, reflective tape, black tape, a cam and some decent software which is not too hard to code:

The effect providing us the ability to actually “see” the points where you are touching the surface is called FTIR or “frustrated total internal refraction”. More information can be found at the wikipedia entry

To sense the coordinates where the object interacts with the surface the process would be to project from the rear onto the surface. The cam will capture the resulting projection on the surface. If you start to subtract the projected and captured images the result will be null.

But if you touch the surface the resulting image will be the areas as shown in the images:

If you normalize the image you will have a rougher image (vary the resolution according to your CPU capacity) which you can easily analyze.

Wow, this stuff was really needed. As stated in his article, there is no proper UML tool for the actionscript world. Maybe, this will make a developers dream come true:
Saffron UML Modeler.

It was just a question of time, until one of the big players will jump on multitouch in this way…
surface. I am really curious, how the dev kit for this might look like and about pricing too. Anyway, let’s get it on!

After taping for a while i found some blank decks and some old cans…

For all of you Flash / Flex and Papervision3D lovers. Since Apollo is available from today on, there are already really amazing demos for its application. For example at the Flexblog is a not only nice but performant demo as well made with Apollo and PV3D. Jipiee!

Today, in a little retro feeling, i looked up my first two computers. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 from Sinclair. This little plastic box with foil “keyboard” made my start into the world of digital and analog design. Yes, hard to believe. After toasting this lucky piece of technology, i found a Laser210 at a friends place. At least it had a gum keyboard instead of the foil, more RAM and color! Woohoo!

My gaming history started in ’82 with MBs (yeah my initials) Vectrex, which had a quite rare vector monitor. Sadly it got replace by an Atari 2600, which featured colored games.

After the usual C16 / Plus4 / C64 / C128 era i ended up with an Acorn Archimedes A310. This was the most amazing piece of homecomputer. It featured a RISC processor and a really nice BASIC interpreter where you could add inline assembly code, wow. During this time Jan Klose and i started coding and designing games.

A really nice gametrailer featuring collaborative playing, yeah! As far as i know its for the PS3 in combination with their new platform ‘home’ which seems to be quite similar to the hyped SecondLife. It might be interesting enough to take a look on this, but at the end small to medium sized developer and design teams might be disappointed by the rigid licensing strategy, which is why second life is so popular: everybody is able to produce content.

However, check the trailer here..

As all of us want to enjoy life on a colourful planet, check this out which is really amazing: graffitiresearchlab.

I have started a little model in december, which looks like this at the moment:

A new project in cooperation with BOQOO: Barcelona is suffering heavily from too many flyers. Though i quite like good printed stuff, we have an environmental issue coming up here sooner or later. Therefore we are starting to implement pur new POI devices, where everybody from local to tourist can get the latest club information straight to our Flash + Phidget driven Terminals. Watch out for the full report in a couple of days.

Well it seems to be a wonderful combination: Create content in WordPress and reuse the content inside a nice Flash-Frontend with swfobject detection. Obviously we will have a couple of advantages resulting out of this:
1. Full XHTML Support as a fallback.
2. Full featured Flash page with content management
3. Rights management for the content management
4. Maybe even WYSIWYG content editing through a flash Rich Text Editor.
Sadly, before we can profit from all of this, there are a couple of changes to be made inside the wordpress core. XML-RPC works pretty well to read posts in categories and post into categories. What if we want to have a structure made of pages and subpages?

My approach to combine all of this and get over the little problems, i have set up the following structure:
1. Installed WordPress 2.1
2. Installed a really minimalistic Theme (we can change that later).
3. Inside the theme we have swfobjects implemented to exchange the whole content and navigation section with a swf object.
4. The Flash frontend for the content and the Flash frontend for editing content ( both based on mattismes xml-rpc classes).
The actual state of development can be checked here.

Based on Phidgets RFID Interface, the Phidget Server and some Frontend made in Flash I have built a nice Car Configurator Interface.

The main idea was, to improve the users experience concerning haptics and recognition of materials and colors involved in the configuration process of a car by giving them the opportunity to change e.g. the color by dragging a RFID tagged and painted item over a hotspot to change the cars color. Due to the fact that the user actually saw the real paint before, makes it easier to experience the same color on the rotateable 3D-model of the car.