Here's a pretty good review of Battlefield Heroes from Gametrailers. This is the project I'm currently working on.
...
On monday my vacation starts. Hopefully I will have some time to be online and update this blog.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Site launches and job changes
The official site for Swedens presidency of the European Union was finally released the 1st of june. Besides being involved in every bit of this project, I did all the frontend work through numerous of design changes over the months. There are many cool features of this site, and some of them will not be revealed until certain times of the presidency. One of them is the calendar. It features a challenging design, a really advanced filtering function from the backend perspective, and a javascript that extends the accessible calendar into an infinite scrolling area (both downwards and upwards!).
The site was featured a lot in media, and still is. Dagens Nyheter called it "ambitious and well-designed", while Aftonbladet spend a whole column rating the different parts of the site. Internet legend "Paf" blogged about se2009.eu using IPv6 and DNSSEC. And of course Twitter have been pretty active.
...
Unfortunately, I promised to stay at Cloud Nine only long enough to release the se2009.eu site. I've had a great time at that company and I wish them all the best in the future, hopefully I will have the privilege to work with them again sometime soon. But even if I had a very successful two years (Byggmax, Acando, First hotels, Inner and so on) I couldn't refuse the offer from EA/Dice. So since a few weeks back I'm now located at the Dice office, working on the game Battlefield Heroes. It's a childhood dream coming true working for a company like EA and Dice.
...
Got the "HelloAndy" nickname on Facebook. I wanted this nickname really much, because I use it everywhere, but I'm now beginning to think I should've used my full name instead. Facebook is probably the site that describes me the best, and from a SEO point of view, I'd like hits on my name to link to all the content on Facebook.
...
For my social media friends out there: I haven't forgotten you or disappeared and I haven't really gotten bored of social media either. I'm just not all too happy with how the whole thing works at the moment. Getting more excited about Google Wave and I really hope there will be a beta invitation for me some time soon.
...
Oh, and I updated my portfolio with two other sites I did during 2008. Inner, which is a company health program made as a web application, and Acando, " a consultancy company that in partnership with its clients identifies and implements business improvements through information enabled by technology."
The site was featured a lot in media, and still is. Dagens Nyheter called it "ambitious and well-designed", while Aftonbladet spend a whole column rating the different parts of the site. Internet legend "Paf" blogged about se2009.eu using IPv6 and DNSSEC. And of course Twitter have been pretty active.
...
Unfortunately, I promised to stay at Cloud Nine only long enough to release the se2009.eu site. I've had a great time at that company and I wish them all the best in the future, hopefully I will have the privilege to work with them again sometime soon. But even if I had a very successful two years (Byggmax, Acando, First hotels, Inner and so on) I couldn't refuse the offer from EA/Dice. So since a few weeks back I'm now located at the Dice office, working on the game Battlefield Heroes. It's a childhood dream coming true working for a company like EA and Dice.
...
Got the "HelloAndy" nickname on Facebook. I wanted this nickname really much, because I use it everywhere, but I'm now beginning to think I should've used my full name instead. Facebook is probably the site that describes me the best, and from a SEO point of view, I'd like hits on my name to link to all the content on Facebook.
...
For my social media friends out there: I haven't forgotten you or disappeared and I haven't really gotten bored of social media either. I'm just not all too happy with how the whole thing works at the moment. Getting more excited about Google Wave and I really hope there will be a beta invitation for me some time soon.
...
Oh, and I updated my portfolio with two other sites I did during 2008. Inner, which is a company health program made as a web application, and Acando, " a consultancy company that in partnership with its clients identifies and implements business improvements through information enabled by technology."
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Happy Easter
You read all these things in the papers, blogs and communities, about how your government is spying on you, how other governments are spying on you, how Google spy on you, and that they already use a lot of the information they have against us.
Usually you dismiss those as Someone Elses Problem. Why would anyone be interested in you? All you do is surf around the net, log in to Facebook, sometimes end up on some dating site by accident, or maybe even download a song or two. No big deal.
But sometimes, maybe even for just a fraction of a second, you get the feeling that somebody watched you do what you just did.
Like me starting a blog post about how Internet Explorer and Microsoft kills creativity, and just a few hours later find myself with a broken Macbook pro just as the Easter holidays starts. Since then, it has been ups and downs:
Down: My computer is dead
Up: Seems like it's just the graphics card
Down: It costs a fortune to fix a graphics card
Up: Seems like it's a known Nvidia problem and the card will be replaced for free
Down: Files I had open by the time I had to shut down the computer has been broken, and it was files on a live server.
Up: Binero, the company that keep my sites, have a really fast and good backup system.
Down: I have to use my Vista computer to fix this
Up: Reasons to try a lot of new developer editors
...
VisitSweden is nominated for a Webby award! That's huge, the Webby is almost like an Oscar in the international web development world.
...
For every week now, it feels like Twitter is getting twice as big as the week before here in Sweden. Every company seems to start a Twitter account, although most don't really know what to use it for. I believe it's better to stay away, watch and learn more from the others, because badly handled social media is one of the worst things that can happen to your brand. And you see examples of that everyday.
...
Talking about Twitter, I made my first Adium theme a few weeks ago. It's inspired from the looks of the excellent Tweetie Iphone app and meant to give a better look and feel for the upcoming Twitter support in Adium. It was much easier to create the theme than I first thought, only one minor detail made me confused about the rendered html flow. Submitted a pre-release version to the Adium Xtras site, but since then I've added a bright variant and a lot of other fixes. Should put up a version 1.0 any day soon.
Usually you dismiss those as Someone Elses Problem. Why would anyone be interested in you? All you do is surf around the net, log in to Facebook, sometimes end up on some dating site by accident, or maybe even download a song or two. No big deal.
But sometimes, maybe even for just a fraction of a second, you get the feeling that somebody watched you do what you just did.
Like me starting a blog post about how Internet Explorer and Microsoft kills creativity, and just a few hours later find myself with a broken Macbook pro just as the Easter holidays starts. Since then, it has been ups and downs:
Down: My computer is dead
Up: Seems like it's just the graphics card
Down: It costs a fortune to fix a graphics card
Up: Seems like it's a known Nvidia problem and the card will be replaced for free
Down: Files I had open by the time I had to shut down the computer has been broken, and it was files on a live server.
Up: Binero, the company that keep my sites, have a really fast and good backup system.
Down: I have to use my Vista computer to fix this
Up: Reasons to try a lot of new developer editors
...
VisitSweden is nominated for a Webby award! That's huge, the Webby is almost like an Oscar in the international web development world.
...
For every week now, it feels like Twitter is getting twice as big as the week before here in Sweden. Every company seems to start a Twitter account, although most don't really know what to use it for. I believe it's better to stay away, watch and learn more from the others, because badly handled social media is one of the worst things that can happen to your brand. And you see examples of that everyday.
...
Talking about Twitter, I made my first Adium theme a few weeks ago. It's inspired from the looks of the excellent Tweetie Iphone app and meant to give a better look and feel for the upcoming Twitter support in Adium. It was much easier to create the theme than I first thought, only one minor detail made me confused about the rendered html flow. Submitted a pre-release version to the Adium Xtras site, but since then I've added a bright variant and a lot of other fixes. Should put up a version 1.0 any day soon.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Nerves
Beautiful weather in Stockholm today! Could've been a great day if it wasn't for it starting with me discovering an old Internet Explorer 6 and 7 bug I forgot about. Can't do position:relative elements inside a block if you want the block to be overflow:hidden. Luckily I managed to get around the bug pretty quick, or we'd have to scrap the whole feature.
I'm a peaceful man, living in harmony with myself and the world, but there's nothing that gets on my fucking nerves as much as that FUCKING Internet Explorer, Windows and all that Microsoft CRAP I have to live with in my job.
...
Speaking about nerves, I haven't visited Nerve.com in many years now. It used to be one of my favourite sites back in the days. I loved the essays, the photos, the design and the whole community feeling it had to it. Looking at it right now, I think it still is pretty good. Some article pages got a great typography with 15 pixels font-size (I've recently discovered I love 15 or 16 px sized text, perhaps a sign of getting older) and the spacing, the images, it all holds together really nicely. Happy design that isn't necessarily perfect but makes you feel good.
...
Attended a seminar last week and was asked to talk a little about Ajax and JQuery. While there isn't much to say about the few lines of code needed, it can still be the source of discussion on how to use it the best. The company where I'm currently employed use Microsoft .Net and Episerver for pretty much every solution, and coming from that world it's not clear why .Net sometimes clashes with other javascript functionality. Especially when it comes to postbacks and viewstates, which from a backend perspective is a nice and simple way of doing things, but for a frontend guy like me it's a horror. Inline javascripts, hidden fields, forms that surround the complete page and so on ... really everything you should avoid in a modern web production. All in all a good discussion, I learned a few things about CSS 3 selectors, and I also had to get back on what the difference is between preventDefault and "return false", which was kind of annoying that I couldn't answer at that point.
...
Finally, I got a reason to download a trial of Flash and dust off my old skills. Realised a lot had changed since I last used Flash (Shockwave!), but after spending a couple of nights messing around, I had a working prototype of a game done. Actually, the goal was to have a prototype done but in the end I think I managed to make it almost complete, except for the lack of sound effects. Went pretty smooth and the game is fun and looks great! Wish I could post it here but I think it's right now under a NDA so ... maybe another time.
...
This weeks best music album is "Two suns" with Bat for Lashes.
I'm a peaceful man, living in harmony with myself and the world, but there's nothing that gets on my fucking nerves as much as that FUCKING Internet Explorer, Windows and all that Microsoft CRAP I have to live with in my job.
...
Speaking about nerves, I haven't visited Nerve.com in many years now. It used to be one of my favourite sites back in the days. I loved the essays, the photos, the design and the whole community feeling it had to it. Looking at it right now, I think it still is pretty good. Some article pages got a great typography with 15 pixels font-size (I've recently discovered I love 15 or 16 px sized text, perhaps a sign of getting older) and the spacing, the images, it all holds together really nicely. Happy design that isn't necessarily perfect but makes you feel good.
...
Attended a seminar last week and was asked to talk a little about Ajax and JQuery. While there isn't much to say about the few lines of code needed, it can still be the source of discussion on how to use it the best. The company where I'm currently employed use Microsoft .Net and Episerver for pretty much every solution, and coming from that world it's not clear why .Net sometimes clashes with other javascript functionality. Especially when it comes to postbacks and viewstates, which from a backend perspective is a nice and simple way of doing things, but for a frontend guy like me it's a horror. Inline javascripts, hidden fields, forms that surround the complete page and so on ... really everything you should avoid in a modern web production. All in all a good discussion, I learned a few things about CSS 3 selectors, and I also had to get back on what the difference is between preventDefault and "return false", which was kind of annoying that I couldn't answer at that point.
...
Finally, I got a reason to download a trial of Flash and dust off my old skills. Realised a lot had changed since I last used Flash (Shockwave!), but after spending a couple of nights messing around, I had a working prototype of a game done. Actually, the goal was to have a prototype done but in the end I think I managed to make it almost complete, except for the lack of sound effects. Went pretty smooth and the game is fun and looks great! Wish I could post it here but I think it's right now under a NDA so ... maybe another time.
...
This weeks best music album is "Two suns" with Bat for Lashes.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Last few days round-up
Maybe I should start writing some kind of weekly update blog. Just to recap what I've been up to, what I thought was interesting and various other things that wasn't posted in my feed.
---
So, the above paragraph was written two week prior to this one. That should be a safe sign of a bad idea. I need to realize more often that I just don't have time to do all the things I want to do. I could probably prioritize better, like stop playing World of Warcraft 3-4 nights a week and use those hours for something more creative. But it's a form of relaxation, as well as TV or movie or sports, and I already spent so much time in the game to just give it all up. Addict. Speaking of TV shows I'm up to pair with Lost now, and only lagging behind two episodes of 24. Still way behind in Prison break and Smallville and Heroes, and haven't even started looking at some other shows that sounds great.
---
There has been some talk about the logo of the Swedish EU presidency I'm working on. The responsible bureau even felt the need to explain themselves in media. I have mixed feelings to the logotype, but fortunately I'm only doing work on the site itself and not the graphics.
Apart from the EU site I'm gonna spend some time next week with update to the Byggmax e-commerce site. Got some new features coming up which needs polishing. It's a quite fun site with lots of content and movies, instructions, advanced shopping cart functions and so on. I almost wish I some day will need to order something from Byggmax.
---
Got a missed call today that made me happy. We'll see how that turns out. Now I'm gonna watch the end of the movie "Snakes on a plane" and then it's finally bedtime,
---
So, the above paragraph was written two week prior to this one. That should be a safe sign of a bad idea. I need to realize more often that I just don't have time to do all the things I want to do. I could probably prioritize better, like stop playing World of Warcraft 3-4 nights a week and use those hours for something more creative. But it's a form of relaxation, as well as TV or movie or sports, and I already spent so much time in the game to just give it all up. Addict. Speaking of TV shows I'm up to pair with Lost now, and only lagging behind two episodes of 24. Still way behind in Prison break and Smallville and Heroes, and haven't even started looking at some other shows that sounds great.
---
There has been some talk about the logo of the Swedish EU presidency I'm working on. The responsible bureau even felt the need to explain themselves in media. I have mixed feelings to the logotype, but fortunately I'm only doing work on the site itself and not the graphics.
Apart from the EU site I'm gonna spend some time next week with update to the Byggmax e-commerce site. Got some new features coming up which needs polishing. It's a quite fun site with lots of content and movies, instructions, advanced shopping cart functions and so on. I almost wish I some day will need to order something from Byggmax.
---
Got a missed call today that made me happy. We'll see how that turns out. Now I'm gonna watch the end of the movie "Snakes on a plane" and then it's finally bedtime,
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Where to keep information?
Lately I've been struggling a lot of where to store information, and what information goes where. I'm all convinced that self-hosted solutions are gonna disappear again, as the "cloud" services is getting better each month. There's just not gonna be any point of hosting information yourself when the cloud services will have all the space, features and backup plans needed. During 2009 I'm sure we all stop collecting MP3 files and solely use services like Spotify, the same will most probably happen for TV shows and possible also movies.
That being said, I need to sort out the information I post myself.
First off: what services to pick? For photos, this is basically a choice between Flickr, Picasa and Apple Mobile Me. The later is something I pay for, and it works quite good, but since the storage space is limited and I don't know if I will pay for MobileMe forever, it's not an option. Picasa has some nice features, but the community and popularity favors Flickr so that is my choice. I will post all photos, screenshots and work related images on Flickr.
I will use Twitter for microblogging. There are some cool swedish ones, Bloggy, Yo, and then there's Jaiku, but Twitter is where most people are and that's where I'm gonna be too. This is not an easy choice as the swedish microblogging community is quite big, but one service must be enough.
For bookmarking I will go with Delicious. I used to use MobileMe for this, but they removed the web access to bookmarks. There are a lot of great synching services around, but I'd like the choice of accessing my bookmarks without leaving traces on the computers I sometimes use.
Blogging is ... troublesome. I kind of want to have a personal blog, but I don't quite want it mixed up with the professional side of me. Not that I have much time for blogging, but it's nice to have a place where I can formulate my thoughts on different subjects and not having to explain it over and over again to people. Here's also the biggest language problem. A professional blog would of course be in english, as my contacts and work is international, but a personal blog would have more readers interested if it was in swedish. Can't say this is really sorted out yet, as the solution seems to be three or four different blogs, which of course is insane. Anyway, I tend to pend between choosing Wordpress or Blogger but think I'll go for Blogger. They both suck, but other services sucks even more. Blogger wins because I don't have to pay to customize the blog if I want to.
Second: aggregation. Many services today allows you to cross post to other services. Update Twitter and automatically send the same text to Friendfeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and so on. That's all nice, but after following a few friends I realized I got their information feeded to me not only two times but in same cases on five different places. I already have too much information coming to me and seriously don't need more copies of the same stuff.
My solution is that I will only aggregate information on one place, and that's on my own homepage. That page will not contain any unique information but will act as a "master feed". Follow that page to get it all. If you're only interested in some parts, like my photos, work, blogs, tweets etc, then follow me on those particular services. This way, you will not get duplicates.
My third concern is language. English seems to be the natural choice to store information in, as the web is international, and most people I find interesting is not found in Sweden. The only problem here is that I will most likely only work in Sweden, with swedes, and swedes seem to be not so keen about blogging in english. So by writing in english I win international followers but lose some of the more important local swedish ones. What to do, what to do, I have no clue.
That being said, I need to sort out the information I post myself.
First off: what services to pick? For photos, this is basically a choice between Flickr, Picasa and Apple Mobile Me. The later is something I pay for, and it works quite good, but since the storage space is limited and I don't know if I will pay for MobileMe forever, it's not an option. Picasa has some nice features, but the community and popularity favors Flickr so that is my choice. I will post all photos, screenshots and work related images on Flickr.
I will use Twitter for microblogging. There are some cool swedish ones, Bloggy, Yo, and then there's Jaiku, but Twitter is where most people are and that's where I'm gonna be too. This is not an easy choice as the swedish microblogging community is quite big, but one service must be enough.
For bookmarking I will go with Delicious. I used to use MobileMe for this, but they removed the web access to bookmarks. There are a lot of great synching services around, but I'd like the choice of accessing my bookmarks without leaving traces on the computers I sometimes use.
Blogging is ... troublesome. I kind of want to have a personal blog, but I don't quite want it mixed up with the professional side of me. Not that I have much time for blogging, but it's nice to have a place where I can formulate my thoughts on different subjects and not having to explain it over and over again to people. Here's also the biggest language problem. A professional blog would of course be in english, as my contacts and work is international, but a personal blog would have more readers interested if it was in swedish. Can't say this is really sorted out yet, as the solution seems to be three or four different blogs, which of course is insane. Anyway, I tend to pend between choosing Wordpress or Blogger but think I'll go for Blogger. They both suck, but other services sucks even more. Blogger wins because I don't have to pay to customize the blog if I want to.
Second: aggregation. Many services today allows you to cross post to other services. Update Twitter and automatically send the same text to Friendfeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and so on. That's all nice, but after following a few friends I realized I got their information feeded to me not only two times but in same cases on five different places. I already have too much information coming to me and seriously don't need more copies of the same stuff.
My solution is that I will only aggregate information on one place, and that's on my own homepage. That page will not contain any unique information but will act as a "master feed". Follow that page to get it all. If you're only interested in some parts, like my photos, work, blogs, tweets etc, then follow me on those particular services. This way, you will not get duplicates.
My third concern is language. English seems to be the natural choice to store information in, as the web is international, and most people I find interesting is not found in Sweden. The only problem here is that I will most likely only work in Sweden, with swedes, and swedes seem to be not so keen about blogging in english. So by writing in english I win international followers but lose some of the more important local swedish ones. What to do, what to do, I have no clue.
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