stylelabs

Welcome Christoph!

2009-08-04T04:51:00.000-07:00

Stylelabs welcomes a new team member. Since a couple of weeks Christoph has conquered a spot at the Stylelabs office. Many tried to get the seat, but Christoph is the one who hauled in the loot. This enthusiastic bachelor in multimedia and communication technology will surely help us to bring some more exciting projects to a happy conclusion. Christophe can often be found on the carting track, so he's no softy. He even started to learn to speak Chinese, so he likes to take up a challenge. I'm quite convinced this chap will fit in just fine.

Happy 2009!

2009-01-01T06:45:00.000-08:00

Happy New year to everyone!

Congratulations Vlaanderen Vakantieland!

2008-12-16T06:52:00.000-08:00

It's becoming a tradition: www.vlaanderen-vakantieland.be has been elected Travel Site of the Year 2008. Every year the internet magazine Clickx organizes this election. Google was elected as best site of the year.
The website vlaanderen-vakantieland.be should be bookmarked by everyone who likes to make small weekend trips in Flanders. Soon the new weekend deals of 2009 will be online.

Welcome Wouter

2008-10-31T08:24:00.000-07:00

STYLELABS welcomes a new team member. Wouter has been working as webdesigner/developer at an Antwerp firm. He enjoyed his time there experiencing the dark secrets of Interface Design, CSS, Cold Fusion Development en Open Source Content Management Systems, but after a couple of years he decided to change Brabo's city for the real world: Brussels.
At STYLELABS he will enforce our team of designers. He's exactly the CSS specialist we were lookig for.

The only flaw we could notice this far is his horrible Antwerp accent. Some language courses will soon solve that issue.

Hip hip Hurray for Oud-Rekem

2008-05-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

For months, the 15 finalists have struggled and campaigned to get their village elected as Flanders' most beautiful place. At a certain point, the battle risked to get real nasty because villages started to cheat. You thought we wouldn't notice? Think again. However, -so we were told - that was never the intention. Still, even if they would have taken the cheaters into account, there was one overwhelming winner. From now on, Oud-Rekem can officially call itself the most beautiful village of Flanders.
Never been to Limburg's Oud-Rekem? Get to know all about Flanders' most beautiful village now!

Eurobussing Website of the Year!

2008-04-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to the entire marketing department of the Eurobussing team.
Recently, their website were elected 'Website of the Year' bij the FBAA, the Belgian Federation of travel busses. The jury was convinced by the site's strong content and the well ballanced navigation structure. The FBAA was also thrilled by the available functionalities of the webiste, such as the 'trip calculator'.

Decide for yourself, visit www.eurobussing.com.
This website was designed and developed by Stylelabs and was built on the Stylelabs Portal Site. The content is managed by Eurobussing.

The Stylelabs Portal Site V.4.1 is released.

2008-02-21T05:07:00.000-08:00

Some of us have been under quite some pressure the past few weeks and this time we couldn't blame the clients ;-)
The stress-perpetrator on duty: the Stylelabs Portal Site. All kinds of new features were added and usibility has improved enormously.

Here comes Stella Mail

2008-01-20T05:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-09T08:47:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-01-08T04:52:00.000-08:00

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.

Congratulations Toerisme Vlaanderen!

2007-12-21T16:30:00.000-08:00

They are probably getting used to it: The website of Vlaanderen Vakantieland was elected Site of the year in the category travel & tourism during the Clickx Site van het Jaar elections.
At Stylelabs we know that the people at Toerisme Vlaanderen work hard to meet the expectations of their users. For us, it's a pleasure to work with such a dedicated team. A well deserved reward for all their hard work!

Fatal exception

2007-11-22T10:40:00.001-08:00

The MacOs 10.5 Leopard PC joke made it into the RTM version:
Network PC icons have the blue screen of death :-)
Steve probably put this in himself.

usability, likeability, loveability!

2007-11-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

We just visited the labs at humantics where we saw some demo's on how website usability tests are done using the eye-tracker (hence the strange chair ;-)). All eye-movement is recorded as the test person is scanning the screen, in search of the info needed. The result is something like a hotspot-plot which is extremely helpful in re-thinking your page design and navigational concepts.

This is where the Jobat site was tested. The result was so pleasing, so jobat paid for diner afterwards! thanks Lieven ;-)

It's life Jim ... part II

2007-10-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

A designer is know to be creative (developers read: 'lazy') and eccentric. A designer is by default a dreamer and a wise crack.
A developer is said to be intelligent (designers read: 'unnecessary complicated, always trying to blame someone else) and boring. He is by default a nerd and ... a wisecrack.

Is it a cliché, invented to make the understanding of these species less complicated?
In my attempt to better understand my collegues, I want to build a profile of both designers and developers.

Today, I focussed on the designers. Some interesting videomaterial entered my mailbox:

One of our designers visited Fantasialand in Germany last weekend. He's the one with the red shoes (I swear I didn't invent this!)
Put on the sound, 'cause the comments must be a designer's as well (its' "Gents", vré wijs, the city which just breathes design).

So far the cliché on the designers still stands at Stylelabs.

To be continued ...

Gmail goes IMAP!

2007-10-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

Finally Google adds IMAP support to their popular mail service Gmail. Any day now, you will see "IMAP Enabled" in the Forwarding tab on your gmail settings page.
Time to keep all those clients in sync!

Yeah, we saw the dino's

2007-10-29T11:05:00.001-07:00

After 3 years of hard work and 26.000.000 euro later, humans and dino's meet face to face again at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels. Check out the 3000m2 exposition with 35 skeletons (biggest in Europe).
PS: I also tried the Tyrannosaurus Rex sandwich at the dino bar ;-)

Nokia goes iPod

2007-10-29T10:51:00.000-07:00

This week I'm deejaying with the new nokia 5310 XpressMusic at the Nokia customer events in Benelux. Nokia used a new crystal clear audio chip for the demanding music lover, with instant music buttons, all in an extra thin package.

It's life Jim ...

2007-10-26T01:50:00.000-07:00

The battle between designers and developers is a daily struggle at the Stylelabs offices (as, for that matter in many other offices).
Since I'm the only woman who has to get along with them on a daily basis I want to understand them better. Et voilà ... a new project is born: I decided to investigate on the difference between the two races. Since real researchers such as Jambers or Danny V never dared to enter the world of these brave men, I will try to get to the bottom of this stereotypical feud.

Goal
Finding answers to these questions:
Who are they? what do they do? What do they feel? What is going on in those great minds?

We ourselves are quite lucky at the office. We have both developers and designers. Actually, I'm the only strange one in the house... I'm neither. And, we even have a couple of hybrids! They can do both things. The others call them schizzos, but I think they're just multitalented.

Whoever thought life at a web office could be so interesting?

To be continued ...
(My source promised me some video material by next week, so make sure you don't miss it)

Proficiat Mortierbrigade & DGE

2007-10-24T03:46:00.000-07:00

Vorige week vielen Mortierbrigade en DGE in de prijzen op de Mixx award voor o.a. Best Belgian Product Launch. Mortierbrigade had een toch wel verrassende marketing stunt bedacht voor Niko, specialist in electrische schakelingen. Het recept: men neme een doodgewone student en sluiten die een weeklang op bij de Niko stand op Batibouw. De jongeman in kwestie kon je dag en nacht volgen dankzij live webstream. Via zijn blog hield Toon de wereld op de hoogte van zijn gemoedstoestand en dankzij chat konden jan, piet en pol hem de kleren van het lijf vragen. Dat zijn leefruimte beperkt bleef tot een matraske in een expohal kon hem niet deren, want dankzij de Niko domotica moest hij geen voet verzetten. De grote persaandacht en de webcam zorgden ervoor dat deze levende attractie overal te zien was.
Dit geweldig idee dat terecht in de prijzen viel, werd technisch ondersteund door Stylelabs. Het is niet evident om zoveel mediabelangstelling op gang te brengen. En, zoals de Mixx Awards jury aanhaalt, Mortierbrigade is er met "Toon does nothing" in geslaagd om online en offline communicatie als geïntegreerd geheel te gebruiken. Applaus!

And the winner is...

2007-08-07T07:53:00.000-07:00

Today the 15 Flemish villages who made it to the finals of the election for the Most Beautiful Village of Flanders were announced. How do I know? We build the freaking website man!
Check it out @ www.vlaanderen-vakantieland.be/hetmooistedorp
The real winner is only to be announced in 2008, but from September onwards a full campaign including the necessary radio & television attention is started. If you live in one of the selected villages ... this is your chance to become a star. Mail to vlaanderenvakantieland@een.be and let them know that you exist! If you don't live in one of those villages, you might consider moving.
If the camera doesn't want you, you can always soothe yourself by posting a comment or a picture on the website itself. Most thing are published. If that doesn't work ... well ... as long as your mama loves you...

Atom to Dataset

2007-08-06T02:31:00.000-07:00

bij deze is dat dan ook weer in orde.

Ruby on Rails

2007-08-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

Today, we broke the .net monopoly and start experimenting with RoR.

Setting up my Mac Dev environment and an Ubuntu linux, wasn't plain trivial, but all is running sweet now. Did my first scaffold and got to know the MVC dogma :-). Coming from .net, everything looks a bit old school, but on the contrary, we are dealing with a modern full blown framework. No complaints so far. More about our progress later.