Thanks Adobe! (second place at AIRCamp==iPod nano)

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

About a month ago I had the pleasure of representing nascom and participating in the second Belgian Adobe AIRCamp. Yes, the Summer event where 40 nerds travel to the beautiful nature and surroundings of Dinant, only to hide in a basement where frantic AIR hacking takes place for unhealthy durations of time…

the geeks of aircamp Dinant 2008

After a random brainstorm, I teamed up with Jeroen de Vos from Amaris to create “Shifty Chess” (yes, that would be the two highlighted mugs in the pic). Behold the unmatched graphic design skills invested into the splash screen:

shiftychess splash screen

The idea is to shamelessly slack off at work, in plain sight of colleagues. The game generates a set of “folders” and “textfiles” (seemingly) on your desktop (using native OS icons for full shiftiness).

shiftychess laid out on desktop

There is a faint checkerboard in the background. Each Folder and TextFile has the name of a corresponding chess piece. Note, these are not actual Folders and Textfiles, just replicas presented on the flash stage.

shiftychess in action

We used LiveCycle messaging for all server/client communication. The “lobby” consists of a real .txt file on the desktop called “lobby.txt”. The Air app updates this with a list of logged in players. To start a match, just open “lobby.txt”, select the name of your desired opponent, copy it into your clipboard and game is ON!

Sure, it can be a wee bit disorienting to look at a mess of folders and files, so there is a fake text file just below the checkerboard. If one just so happened to mouse over it, Tadaaaa :

shiftychess view chess pieces

The idea was that the game could be halted at anytime, and AIR would automatically connect users into their games on startup. We had some difficulties with Life Cycle messaging, and didn’t actually manage to get a running demo of two players getting Shifty…

However, the crowd liked it and we got second place after a techtribe and mediamonks.nl combo. As a consequence, my iPod got a little brother :

ipod mini and classic

with the added touch of an engraving in the back :

engraving of second place winner on the back of iPod Mini

Thanks Adobe, and thanks Serge and Bert !

ps. Big thanks also to Marc Meewis for staying up with us untill 4am just helping out with the livecycle issues!!!!

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