Alain Hufkens
I started my professional life as a developer writing Powerbuilder applications in the late nineties. After that I entered the world of Object Oriented programming of Java and .NET. Currently I am working as a User Interface Developer at Nascom. We create RIA applications mainly using the Adobe Flash Platform, but we are also closely following Microsoft Silverlight. I recently started learning Objective-C and Cocoa Touch and did a couple of small iPhone projects.
In a nutshell you can say that I am a Flexible developer with broad interests in new emerging technologies focused on User Experience.
When I am not working I like traveling, snowboarding, mountain-biking and driving with my Vespa PX125. I am also a proud father of 2 kids: Robbe & Arthur.
I’ve been working on a lot of projects in my career. Below you can find a small summary of some my favorite projects.
iOS Projects
This is a list of iOS projects I worked on.
Finger Billiards
Discover this amazing new approach to bumper billiards, played entirely with your fingers! It’s a 2 player game built for iPad only, so you will have to find a friend. But I assure you that it’s addictive once you get the hang of it. It was built using cocos2d, box2d.
Bumba
Everybody who has children in Belgium knows Bumba. I created the iPhone/iPad version of the interactive world that already existed on www.bumba.be. It was fun doing this and this was my first cocos2d game. The application was Nr1 Paid iPad app in the Belgian App Store the week after launch. It’s a Universal App so you can use it both on iPhone and iPad.
Piet Piraat
Piet Piraat is also a character from the same company as Bumba. We created a game where you can shoot at a Tower to collect treasure. The fun part is that you can play against a human opponent in the versus mode. So you can enjoy the game together with your children.
Timy
Together with some colleagues I created a native iPhone version of the Timy application. This was my first real iPhone project, that I worked on.
You can see a demo in this blog post, or download the app in the App Store here. Don’t worry it’s a free app but if you like it then please visit timy.be and a donation is always appreciated 
Raz*War
Nascom created this App for Raz*War. Raz*War is a brand offering quality shaving products at fair prices and you can check their website and all products at www.razwar.com.
It’s something completely different than Timy, it’s a gimmicky fun app that can be used to browse through some of Raz*War‘s products. But if you want you can order the blades right from within the app. We also added some nice effects to the app: if you swipe over a blade you can get cut, and shaking the phone shows shaving foam.
ActionScript Projects
Timy for Desktop
Timy is an easy-to-use Adobe AIR desktop application to fill out your Basecamp timesheets. You can read all about Timy on the site or on this post. The application can be downloaded for free, so feel free to check it out and give me some feedback.
It’s not open source but the BasecampAS3Lib is. You can use this library to build your own Basecamp clients in Flash.
Airbob
Airbob stands for Better Overview on Builds and is a small research project to investigate the new Adobe AIR technology. The application was developed using Flex3.
The application can be used to monitor a Cruise Control build server. There are other existing 3rd party tools available that in some way interface with the server. Tools like CCTray and JCCTray can be used to monitor the build status of the projects.
The project is hosted on Google Code where you can download the source code.
Basecamp AS3Lib
Basecamp is a project management, collaboration and task solution built by 37signals. BasecampAS3Lib is an Actionscript 3 wrapper library for the Basecamp REST API. The library can be used by Actionscript applications built with Adobe AIR or in the Browser.
This project started after building the Timy application that we use in my company to do our time-tracking. This application only uses a very specific subset of the Basecamp API, so I decided to build an AS3 library that wraps the Basecamp REST API. There are still a couple of nasty issues to fix, but the goal is to create a reusable library that provides access to all API functionality.
The code can be found on Google Code but at the moment it is not being developed anymore. If you are interested in contributing to the library please let me know.
Nascom ASLib
The Nascom ASLib is a group effort by nascom flash team to:
- Improve the quality of internally written code by pulling the skirt up to the entire world!
- Improve the consistency of projects by using the same growing library.
- Have public access to our code and working environments for collaborators and external projects done by nascom employees.
- Provide a business card of code. Also enable developers to link directly to their code from blogs etc.
The project is hosted on Google Code.
Other Projects
Océ ’Sales Configurator’
The ‘sales tool’ is an application build in Silverlight using RIA Services. My role was to help with the architecture on the client side. Read more about this project in this PDF file (Dutch): Een ‘sales configurator’ bouwen met Silverlight.
VlaaiVis
VlaaiVis is a visualisation tool originally developed for multifactorial structure activity relationship (SAR) data. The tool was developed as a Microsoft Windows application at J&J PRD in Beerse, Belgium. Read more here.
