nascom

Jul
17

Great iPad apps for Kids

Posted by Alain at 11:19 pm

Being an iOS developer and dad myself, I let my 2 year old son play with my iPad. He likes it a lot and I don’t have to tell you that he can already find it’s way to his favorite apps himself. This is because the device is so easy to use. He already played some games on my iPhone before I got an iPad, but the iPad is more suitable because of it’s bigger size. Here we go:

Toca Boca

Number one on my son’s list are the apps from Toca Boca: They have a couple of apps and what I like about all of them are the little details. The design is great and the game mechanics are fun. The mini games in Toca Doctor are great fun and easy enough for the youngest.

Toca Hair Salon is also a great app. You can cut, paint, trim, … the hair on some strange character. Especially the blow drying of the hair is pretty funny.

And their latest creation Toca Robot Lab is amazing. Boys like robots, and in this app you can create you own Robot. After creating the Robot, it can be tested in small game. The game is easy enough for young kids, but the robots are different every time and the combinations are endless.

Great work guys and keep em coming!

Peekaboo: Find Hidden UFO Characters

Nice little app about aliens that land on earth and you have to find them. It’s like “Where’s Waldo” but for the youngest. I like the little details and animations. The only thing that could still make it better, are some more levels.

HeyHey Colors

Coloring apps on iPad are very widespread. There are lot’s of them out there, but most of them are just unusable for small kids. This app from HeyHey Apps brings the colorful world of street artist Bue the Warrior in an amazing iPad coloring book to your child’s fingertips. It’s very easy to use, and there are also a lot of colorful patterns available.

My First Puzzles

There are a couple of My First Puzzle apps by Alexandre Minard. All their games have the same look and feel. It looks like real wooden pieces. Check out the website for more apps, or watch this review of one of their apps.

Mosaic

This another real world kids game ported to iOS, but it works really well. And it’s a lot less work cleaning up afterwards.

And last but not least check out the games we worked on for a Belgian Media company called Studio 100. One of the apps is only in Dutch but it’s about Pirates, so let’s hope we can port it to English in the near future. The other app is for toddlers and there is no real language.

Bumba

Bumba is a Clown and a famous TV Character in Belgium. The app is an interactive experience for the youngest kids who like Bumba and his friends.

Piet Piraat (Dutch)

Piet Piraat is a very friendly Pirate. In the game you can play against the AI or you can play in versus mode. So you can play together with you child. The goal of the game is to collect coins and treasures by shooting at then with canons. Along the way you collect items for your treasure.

So that’s it for now. If you have any other good apps for kids to share with me, please comment.

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May
28

Personal Tech Flashback

Posted by Alain at 10:13 pm


You might have noticed that since I started my blog in 2008, I covered a lot of technical topics. Before this blog started I was already working as a programmer building application in an Enterprise context. This has been a very interesting journey for me and I am quite happy to be where I am right now. So I want to share with you some of the technologies that I worked with and how it all started. I know this is a completely useless post, but I hope it will be fun to write, and it will have some nice retro images of cool stuff.

My interest for computers and technology started way back with the old Nintendo portable game devices. I played a lot on Donkey Kong and I also got this very addicting egg catching game from Mickey Mouse. Those games were very simple but as far as I can remember I could play them over and over again. And some of the iOS games created by Indie Developers remind me a lot of those fun times.

After these wonderful toys, came the age of the ATARI. This device really got me hooked into gaming and it was then that I first got to know Mario Bros. Although most games were pretty simple, I could keep on playing Mario and Luigi. And the cool part was that back then you could play this game against a friend. I still have the ATARI stacked away in a box.

After the ATARI came the Commodore AMIGA. I skipped the Commodore 64 and jumped straight onto the AMIGA. This was quite a powerful computer and all my friends with PC’s were jealous of my full VGA color screen. Besides gaming this computer was also suited for running programs. I created my first pixel artworks with the mouse. Oh, good times, but also frustration. I will never forget the frustration when in the middle of a game the AMIGA floppy drive started to make that awful sound which resulted in a “Read/Write Error“. This usually ment that the floppy was corrupted and there was no way beyond this. But still I had a lot of fun with this wonderful computer.

Ok, time to be serious and talk about programming, and we’ll come back to gaming later. I graduated from the University as a Commercial Engineer in Computer Science, so not exactly a very technical direction. But I got “lucky” and at the time I graduated, programmers or any IT related job was in high demand. So I ended up starting my professional career as a programmer. Sure we got some basic programming classes at the University, but Turbo Pascal, COBOL, come on. The company I worked for wrote most of their software in PowerBuilder and later in JAVA. So I did some projects in PowerBuilder and JAVA but ended up in Microsoft’s Visual Basic. From here on I evolved to .NET and that has been a big part of my career. C# was the first language I really liked, so I decided to jump on the .NET train. I worked on several projects mainly for Banking and Pharmaceutical Companies. Most of the apps were desktop apps, but then I ended up at an agency coaching young developers and creating backend’s for online campaigns.

So I jumped ship and moved away from being an enterprise developer, to a web developer. I started writing backend’s for campaigns but my first love was stil writing User Interfaces, so I decided to dig deeper into Action Script and Flex. I had fun working on several projects, mostly touch but then came the whole Flash vs. HTML5 and I decided that I reached my potential as a Flex developer and wanted to try out something new again, so here comes that shiny new device where you can build apps for and make money, mmm. Let’s try it, but what’s that language!! Objective-C looks at first site a bit odd, and takes a while to get used to. But hang on, once you get it it’s fun and very powerful. I worked on a couple of apps and also games. And finally I did something I always wanted to do: writing a computer game. It took a long time, but I got the opportunity to write a game. And the best part was that for one game my 2 year old son was my first user.

So that’s it. I’m 37 years old and have 12 years of experience as a Developer and I still like what I do and I still like new gadgets and technologies.

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May
16

New cocos2d game: Finger Billiards

Posted by Alain at 9:57 pm

I am proud to announce that we have released a new game for iPad built with cocos2d and box2d. The game is called Finger Billiards. It’s an iPad version of the very popular bar game Bumper Pool. The biggest difference is that this game comes in a box and not a table, and you play it with your 3 fingers and a rubber band. A rubber what? Yes a virtual rubber band (check out the screenshot below for the mechanics).

So how does it work? The first thing you need to do after the launch is open the box. After that the start player (red or white) is determined, and the game is on. It’s a 2 player game, so you will have to find a friend to play against. It takes a little practice before you get the hang of it, but it’s great fun.

Finger Billiards - Nascom

The game was developed by Nascom. The only thing left for me to say is, download the game and let me know what you think. We are open for any feedback.

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Feb
13

2011 – Mobile all the way

Posted by Alain at 10:11 pm

Last year I took my first steps into iOS development with projects like Timy, Raz*War and a couple of projects I can’t talk about right now. But this year I am going to focus on Mobile development. In the first place it will be iOS development, but I am also ready to dive into Android or Windows Phone 7. With my current knowledge of Silverlight the latter should be a peace of cake, and in my somewhat far away past I also did some Java development.

I will also do something that I always wanted to do, and that is building casual games for those platforms. I am diving deep into cocos2d right now, and if you want to start learning cocos2d I would certainly advice you to read the book “Learn iPhone and iPad Cocos2D Game Development” by Stephen Itterheim. It gives a very thorough overview of the capabilities of the Framework and yet it’s easy to read. Besides games I will definitely continue to develop Apps.

It is going to be an interesting journey, but I like developing for Mobile a lot more that classic application development. Mobile App development is great because it tries to solve a small problem and do that very well. Don’t implement too many features, just keep it simple. Although I think that the future of mobile will also involve Web Apps build with HTML and JavaScript, there is still going to be room for apps.

So stay tuned for more, because this year a lot is going to happen…

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Oct
14

Raz*War iPhone App

Posted by Alain at 11:07 pm

Our next iPhone app has just been approved and is now available for download in the App Store. 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.

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. So I would advice you to visit their website and order a Starter Kit (El Che or El Fidel), so you can start using the app to order a blades refill.

It was a small project, but it was very fun to do. For me the the graphics and animations were a fun challenge but easily done with Core Animation. The assets were made by some of my Designer colleagues. I also liked the Designer – Developer workflow in this project. All and all we did this is a very short time. It took less time to develop than Apple needed to approve it! You can download the app right here

Check out some of the screenshots:

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Sep
25

Timy for iPhone

Posted by Alain at 9:02 pm

Yesterday evening I got the mail from Apple telling me that Timy is available for download. So that was definitely the perfect way to start my 3 weeks of holiday.

If you want to see it in action, check out this screencast of the application in my previous post: Timy for iPhone Sneak Preview.

So what is Timy?

At Nascom we are using Basecamp as a Project Management Tool since the beginning and we built an AIR Application that enabled all employees to easily fill in their time tracking. Because we felt that people got frustrated when they had to track time on projects using the Basecamp Website.

Most people just want te see if the have filled in their day/week/month and then complete the rest. Timy for iPhone starts with a simple week overview showing the totals of all time entries of that week. You can drill down using the standard Table Views that the iPhone SDK provides.

This was my first experience with Objective-C, XCode, Cocao Touch and everything. I have a Macbook and I use it at home mostly for Internet, Email, Music and Pictures. I had XCode installed and already did a couple of tutorials, but never got into building something real. And it was only when I started working on this project that I got really into it. And yeah, it takes a while to get into. It’s not exactly the same like C# or JAVA. But once you get the hang of it it’s a fun environment to work in.

So what’s next?

In fact I am about to finish my second iOS project which is something completely different. Timy was a real application built using standard components (UITableView, UIViewControllers, …) and most of the the complexity was in the data parsing and data visualisation part. The other project was nothing like that and only about graphics, animations and effects. I can’t say what it is yet, but it was fun!

Please keep in mind that this is only version 1.0 and we had to leave some features out for this first release. But we are open for feedback and please let us know what you think of the app. If you like it, just write a positive review :)

And before I forget, I will become father for the second time. The first time was so great that I actually decided to go for version2.0 and let’s hope he will be like his cute older brother of 2 years old.

Timy for Android

Check out the Android version of Timy here:

More about Timy

And most important: Download Timy

Timy

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Sep
10

The F*Team @ Nascom

Posted by Alain at 9:07 pm

After a very relaxing holiday under the Tuscan sun in la Bella Italia, I just finished my first working day at Nascom with some bug-fixing, refactoring and implementing an error handling mechanism in an AIR application. But none of this boring stuff for this post. This post is about something completely different, my colleagues that I work with every day.

Here’s a picture of my team: from left to right David (aka. Der Schmale), Rien (flying in the AIR), Sakri, Geert, Wouter (kicking some ass), Ricardo, Ilse and myself (with the Lancer Assault Rifle from my favorite game Gears of War, hell yeah). All credits go to David for creating this piece of art.

Flash Team Doesn't Look At Explosions

Before looking at the picture check out the following video. We flash/front-end developers are the ones that can create the explosions and stuff you see in those fancy sites, but remember: cool guys don’t look at explosions.

And that’s what we are ;)

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Jul
08

Pixel art by Kristof

Posted by Alain at 10:35 pm

You might wonder who created the pixel version of myself that you can admire on the right. It certainly was not me. All credits go to Kristof Saelen who has the difficult job at Nascom to create a pixel version of every employee. We use this avatar for email signatures, business cards and I like it so much that I already have a second version of my pixelpeep.

Check out some of his latest work. It’s pretty cool:

Tribute to Michael Jackson by Kristof Saelen

Tour de France Heroes by Kristof Saelen

UPDATE: the pixels got their own site called VIPs * Very Important Pixels. You better check it out for more creations.

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Jun
26

Timy – Time tracking in 7th gear

Posted by Alain at 11:35 pm

timy_logoRecently my company (Nascom) released Timy beta, an Adobe AIR desktop client that we have been using internally for more than a year now. The application has a long history and was initially built to gain knowledge about Adobe AIR and to make time tracking using Basecamp easier to do. I don’t know if any of you use Basecamp for time tracking but it is not the easiest thing to do. Probably most of you use Basecamp for the project management and collaboration features, but you can also use it for time tracking. The web interface doesn’t provide you with a quick overview of projects and todo items.

The main idea was that if we had a simple way of adding hours to a project for a certain day, we could loose less time filling in our time sheets. Development started before Adobe AIR was released and at the time this seemed the perfect technology for such an application. We could leverage the power of Adobe AIR because it uses SQLite for local data, shows notifications, and runs in the system tray so that we don’t forget to fill in out time sheets. The application is built using Flex 3 and the Cairngorm framework. Credits for the design of the application go completely to Kristof who did a great job.

One of the biggest reasons for using Adobe AIR, is that the Basecamp API doesn’t allow you to get the data that’s necessary for the Timy projects tab in one API call. You need to first get all the projects, and then for all the projects the to-do lists, and then you can get the to-do items. If you work in a company that does a lot of projects this can take a while to retrieve. That’s why the application synchronizes this data (projects, to-do lists and to-do items) with a local cached SQLite database. Only when the app detects that there is a new (or removed) project it asks the user to synchronize again. Does this make any sense? Well it did for us and that’s why we released this application as it is. If you might find a use for it or not, it was still fun to develop.

We also track the usage of the AIR application in real-time itself using Pubblegum. So if you see some extra outgoing API calls, then this is what is going on. We don’t log any sensitive data, only basic actions like: open, error, sync, login and close. We also send along the version number to see which versions are running in the field. You can compare it with Google Analytics for Adobe AIR applications with offline support.

Timy screenshotBut before you get all enthusiastic and start installing the app, you should now a few things. Timy is a Basecamp client, so if you are not a Basecamp user then Timy is of no use for you. You also need to use Basecamp in  certain way, and enable time tracking on your to-do lists. It’s pretty easy to do, but if you don’t work like this, there will be no tasks for your users. Also important to know is that we see the to-do item for a project as a profile (ex. Development, Design, Html, …) and not individual tickets, tasks or to-do items that you can check off. This is very important. But you can still use both normal to-do items and time tracking enabled to-do items because Timy only looks at time tracking enabed to-do lists.

You can read more about how to configure your Basecamp projects in the “get started” section, and you can find more info on how to use Timy in the “documentation” section of the site. I don’t normally read these kind of pages either, but I would strongly suggest to read the get started page. If you have any feedback for the app please add it to the feedback forum or drop me a comment here.

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