I finally decided to learn Python after hearing good things for years. After a day getting started and playing around with the language I spent another day building a breakable toy app.

The language itself is easy to pick up and produces pleasingly minimal, readable source code. Being dynamically typed I did have to rely quite heavily on both reference docs and runtime errors! I used pydev in Eclipse as an IDE, so was easy to get up and running. App Engine seemed an easy noob option for testing and deploying.

The resulting app is in the iFrame above or here magicmusicplayer.appspot.com with source on github.

I had a lot of fun making something frivolous for family day at the Digital Shoreditch festival with colleagues Thomas and Margaux.

We made an installation where one participant could pump anothers head up into a big balloon! Watch the case study below to see what I mean:

Digital Shoreditch from Stinkdigital on Vimeo.

We experimented with the Kinect sensor using open source drivers, but they proved to be quite unstable at the time. In the end we did something fairly simple using a displacement map and motion detection.

Here’s the (messy) code on if you’d like to see how we did it:

For the Stink Digital season’s greetings card we thought, as you do after a good few beers at Electricity Showrooms, that it might be cool to do some kind of snowball fight where you could record your throw and launch it at your unsuspecting friends via Twitter or Facebook. A month later we’d wrapped a bunch of really intense projects and had a clear couple of weeks to design, architect and build the thing. It was especially fun working with the excellent Red5 open source Flash media server which I’ll definitely be playing with some more in the new year. Here’s the result: http://holidays.stinkdigital.tv.

I’ve been playing with augmented reality in Flash, aided by Saqoosha’s excellent FLARToolkit and Papervision 3D. Here at Stink Digital we decided to develop these experiments to do something fun for an ad in Contagious Magazine.

At first we planned to make a virtual Cannes Lion, along with some fireworks to fit in with the advertising festival which coincides with the issue. After having some problems getting the 3D model to work how we wanted and, moreover, deciding this idea was perhaps a bit too gimmicky I started playing with showing trending Tweets as 3D text. This worked quite well, but we then took it a step further to pull a live feed of all kinds of trending topics from various sources, including Flickr images. The result was a ‘What the internet is thinking’ app where every time you show the marker you get a new ‘thought’.

See it here:
http://www.stinkdigital.tv/makeitreal