For over 3 years now, I’ve been employed as an “interaction developer” at Nascom, focused on – what else – developing for the Flash platform. Since some time, however, I’ve been growing increasingly restless. Introspection was unavoidable, leading to one resounding conclusion: it’s time for a change.

Fact is, what I found myself doing on a daily basis at work is not something I fully enjoy any more, and it was definitely not why I started programming a long time ago. This opposed to what I do in my free time, the result of which can be seen on this blog. Trying to do both has caused me doing little else than sit behind my computer screen, coding away for entire days. So, I’ve decided to leave Nascom to pursue a carreer as an independent developer starting mid-June. Focused on graphics programming, I can shift what I love to do to a healthier part of the day. Or at least, that’s the plan

It was great to be a part of Nascom and work alongside so many talented people. Both from a human and a technical perspective, I still believe it’s the best digital agency in Belgium. Thanks for having me, guys!

On a rare occasion, instead of posting code and experiments, I like to post some things I’ve done at my job. Especially when it illustrates a practical use of some of my earlier experiments. So here we go!

For a project for the University of Ghent at Nascom (via Saatchi & Saatchi), I had to create a front-end application to be displayed on a big 12m² billboard, placed in Ghent. Without going into too much detail of the whole concept (which you can read at the official blogpost), it consisted out of a set of mini-applications allowing people to text mobile messages and interact with the display (show messages, a poll, …). being all booked up, I had to sacrifice some free time to be able to work on it. The reason I did was the same reason I decided to use Flash Player 10: a perfect excuse to work on the earlier 2D cloth simulation and turn it into stage curtains on a whopper public screen. Blatant self-exposure? Nah :p

Below, you can see a video recording showing it in action. The curtains open up after someone sends a text to the service, showing a random picture or video. Apologies for the low quality, all we had was a photo camera, and led lights don’t like to be filmed

Thanks to Jan Nikolaas Gijsen for editing the video! And I promise, this will be the last cloth-related post – at least for some time

After a couple months of work, Nascom‘s latest big project for Sony Vaio was able to go live, celebrating Vaio’s 10th anniversary. To read all the grubby details about it, you can check the full blog post at Nascom.

It was a blast working on this project, mainly because it gave me a chance to solve some interesting math-related problems, which tapped right into my main interests as a programmer. Especially custom collision detection paired wall sliding in a game-like manner, and optimising paths generated by an A* algorithm. As A* is tile-based, I needed to remove superfluous nodes by checking intersections between extreme nodes with the map and iterate backwards from there to create a shorter and more natural path. Good times!

Cheers to all people involved at Nascom, as well as to Ralph, who helped us a lot with some invaluable input on do’s and don’ts of papervision, performance tweaks, …, to be able to get most out of it. So cheers, man

To close up, just take a peek and a poke here: http://club.vaio.sony.co.uk/clubvaio/gb/en/vaio10/ . Enjoy!