Here comes Stella Mail

A lot of our clients were in need of a simple, clear-cut mailing tool. Something they could use themselves without a manual of 50 pages. A client's wish is our demand, so we started our research. What are the basics a mailtool should do? And what features can be made redundant? The result is a straightforward application which allows you to create your mail template, personalise the mailing, import an excel with users and push the send-button! Afterwards, you can check how many people received your message, how many of them opened the mail and clicked the links in it ... The bare necessities, and sometimes that's all you need!

How Merry Christmas ends up in Happy 2008

Being responsible for the Stylelabs planning, I decided to start a bit earlier with my new year resolutions. I promised myself we would get our wishes out before Christmas. Deadline for final tests: 15/12/2007.
Alas! I’m one of those people who already broke a resolution before 2008 even got a change to start. Guilty, I am…


However, I would like to make a plea for a shared responsibility with the technical department & Silverlight.
The dev team wanted to do something ‘exciting & new’ for our Christmas card. This resulted in the idea of creating a Christmas game programmed in Silverlight. Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Flash, or – the way I have interpreted – a technology which makes it acceptable that developers get their hands dirty on the thing called ‘design’(but that’s by no means confirmed by anyone official ;-) ).

The Silverthingie was actually still in alfa. Seemed harmless to me, so the dev guys got it their way. All went quite well, till I started testing and noticed they had left out the ‘submit your score’ part.
They had encountered some issues…
Turned out that ‘text boxes’ don’t exist yet in Silverlight!

Having a game without being able to submit your score is quite stupid, so we had to spend some more time to find a solution. The solution being found, I started testing again. I submitted my score, tried to insert my e-mail but for some reason the thing didn’t want to accept the characters for which I had to use the shift button… Not really handy indeed .
And thus we encountered another issue…

I will spare you the technical details (Tom can bore you with that if you’re interested), but after a frustrating period of searching, we had to accept our defeat. A mini keyboard was added and you have to select the characters of your name and e-mail by clicking it with your mouse.
Since we would have the same shit with the S2F, we decided not to make that form in Silverlight.

Today we will send our wishes, and actually the result looks quite nice. It was an interesting experience for our team and we hope our clients will be willing to download Sliverlight on their computer to enjoy our New Year game (and we hope our clients fully comprehend this is alpha technology, with all it's flaws). It’s a great opportunity for them to see a real life application of this new technology (of which they surely have heard a lot already).


Enjoy the game!

Some comments on Silverlight

Here are some comments of the people who worked with Silverlight on our New Year Game project (also read post “How Merry Christmas ends up in Happy 2008”):

Dev A: “ The MS beta’s don’t really do it for me”
Dev B: “It’s alfa dude!”
Dev A: “Even worse!”

Designer : “We could have developed our Christmas game in flash. It would have been a half-day job. But then again, it wouldn't have been extensible to include any possible new employee, any next Christmas or any possible SAP or Bluetooth-enabled dishwasher that we may want to cater for in the near future.”

Developer: "Silverlight doesn’t have all components you are used to having, so that can be quite annoying. But in the future it will be a good rival for Flash. The greatest feature for us, programmers, is the fact you can work in an evironment you’re acquainted with. So, hell yeah, I'm all for Silverlight, just waiting for the full release!”

Way to go, Knorr!

Since the Belgian "Week of the Soup" is coming (12/1 to 19/1), Test Aankoop/Test Achat decided to take a closer look at the quality of this delicious* dish. They elected one of our client's soup as Best Buy: Knorr Lijn Tomaat-selder. Knorr is also the organisor of the yearly "Week of the Soup". This year, 6 known Chefs, together with 5 Belgian schools will each make an incredibly large bowl of soup (+/- 300L/bowl) wich is handed out to the Voedselbanken. During this week, you can also spot various Knorr Soup Bars which are traveling around the country. If you see one, go and have a closer look since they will hand out free soup. Check out their calender if you digg some nice soup!


* This is, of course, my humble opinion. I must confess I'm a bit of a soup-addict.