Archived entries for Diary

  • September 18, 2008
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TubeTheVote.com

I mentioned in a previous post that I have been working on a new project, and TubeTheVote is finally up and running! This is the new direction Blogform is taking in presenting content.

What is TubeTheVote you say? Well, TubeTheVote is a product that utilizes the new Blogform platform and is focused on the historic 2008 American Election. Tube The Vote is a unique compilation of the best content and debate on the internet about the 2008 election – blogs, videos, debates – presented in a single location. The publication is non-partisan and pays equal attention to – and pokes fun equally at – both John McCain and Barak Obama. Blogform has created partnerships with journalism departments at Michigan State University, Florida A&M and Texas University, where students are providing editorial content that is updated on a daily basis from now until the election in November. Try it out: www.tubethevote.com

The opening page


Now to the bit more geeky stuff :P Basically what you see here is our new AS3 magazine engine. This engine has been built from scratch by my former colleague Paulo Fierro in Flex, using the Cairngorm framework. What you see on tubethevote.com doesn’t look much like a magazine, but the only actual difference between our standard page-flipping principle we have been using up until now, and the “cover-flow” -like presentation used in tubethevote.com is just one class. Thats it! The enigne loads a renderer class depending on the setting in the backend.

Now the renderer displaying the pages of a magazine in the cover-flow manner has been built from scratch by yours truly, using PaperVision3D. This is the first time I’ve actually used PaperVision3D in production, and it was GREAT fun. If you haven’t already noticed, the arrows aren’t the only way to navigate the site. You can actually navigate by clicking and dragging the background just like in the PicLens addon for Mozilla Firefox. Coding this was quite a hassle as my math skills have been deteriorating since high school, hehe, but i managed to pull it through in the end.

Each page in the magazine has a few cool features, which I either built or helped build. Features like streaming youtube videos, displaying twitter feeds from search, quiz, and blog. Below is a selection of clickable screenshots of pages in tubethevote.

Top Flop: Shows a set of videos for each day, one for Obama and one for McCain. The videos are either a “top” as in a favorable video about the candidate, or a “flop”.


Twitter: Searches though twitter feeds, with a search term specified for that day.


Well, i think that is it for now. As you might gather, I am very proud of this product, I have a lot of hours logged on the renderer, pages and updating and upgrading our new fabulous MagWerk Engine. Our clients will hopefully be using this great way of navigating through content in the future.

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  • September 6, 2008
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New York, Barcelona
& back!

Been a long time since last post, but this summer has been very eventful, both personally and business related. Blogform has just expanded to the US of A, more precisely New York. Since most of our clients are american corporations, the company found it necessary to hire people in the states, so the time difference to the clients wouldn’t have such an impact on our workflow. We hired two new designers / actionscripters along with a PM and a few others, so my colleague Eirik and I where sent to New York in the beginning of August to show the people there the ropes.

The view from my hotel room, at 22nd floor:

I can describe very much of New York with one word: BiG! Everything there was big. Avenues with four lanes (and all one-way!), the normal size Starbucks coffee was half a liter, buildings with less than 20 floors are considered “small” etc. However, i was surprised to see a lot fewer big people than expected, hehe. Anyways, we had 6 nights there and alot of work to be done. Not only was i going to teach the new guys, but at the same time we had to finish of a few client projects before i was going on my week long vacation in Barcelona with my wife. Ergo i didn’t get as much time to explore NYC as i had hoped. But i know there will be a trip or two back there, in the near future.

After the week in New York i flew via Oslo and picked up my wife for some shopping, eating and beach style RnR in Barcelona. A fantastic city. It has everything. Beachlife, nightlife, excellent cuisine, shopping streets, culture and history. Definitely going back there again.

The entrance to our hotel room, spooky no?

Comming back to work we had alot to be done, among a new project we have been working on named “tube the vote”. My next post will be more about this new direction of digtal based magazines we are undergoing. Very exciting!

Lastly, I was at the first meeting of FUGN (Flash User Group Norway) this season, and it was good to see all the regulars attend. I was elected to the board (yay!) among a few others. Looking forward to spending some geek time with you all at Flash On The Beach this year.

Well that’s it for now, will post again soon. :)

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