Week 235

On Mon­day I set up my things in the new stu­dio at Vecht­club XL. They had been kept in hold­ing since the move out of Dutch Game Gar­den two weeks ago. With some help from the kind folk run­ning the space I was up and run­ning around mid­day. After a short peri­od of work­ing from home and var­i­ous oth­er places from my back­pack it was a relief to have my good old set­up back, in a great new space. It’s still a bit emp­ty at the moment, but that will change once the guys from Tupil move at the end of the month.

Mean­while, Alper was kick­ing the tyres of Slack to see if it’d be a viable alter­na­tive to HipChat now that it had moved out of beta. He also hacked away at AJI, mak­ing it fea­ture com­plete in prepa­ra­tion for my UI work.

On Tues­day, I had a chat with Kel­li about gam­i­fi­ca­tion. She’s prepar­ing a piece on the sub­ject for Vrij Ned­er­land, which I look for­ward to read­ing. It’s great to have such a sub­ject dis­cussed in a crit­i­cal man­ner in main­stream media.

Lat­er that day, I got start­ed mock­ing up AJI’s sim­pli­fied UI in Sketch. Alper and I also chat­ted with Simon about AJI and oth­er things. He offered his help with the app’s UI design so once I’ve put the basics in place he’ll take over to make things look real­ly good (as he’s done many times before on Hub­bub projects).

The rest of the week we con­tin­ued work on AJI. I moved on to updat­ing the UI in Xcode while Alper fixed bugs and solid­i­fied the accom­pa­ny­ing web app. On Fri­day we met with Dirk, who is also writ­ing some­thing, an essay about cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion in the con­tem­po­rary tech scene, in which he’s plan­ning to use AJI as an exam­ple. We demo’d the app to him and talked about the think­ing behind it. It was use­ful to get our heads out of the prover­bial bub­ble and explain our moti­va­tions to a rel­a­tive outsider.

In between, I was inter­viewed by two stu­dents from Han­nover who are map­ping Utrecht’s games scene and again by a stu­dent research­ing muse­um games. Alper mean­while did the rounds of Berlin’s many events, includ­ing the UX Stammtisch and a games.net round­table about brand­ed entertainment.

By the end of week 235 we had tran­si­tioned over to Slack, since it real­ly does offer an improve­ment over HipChat for us. (Main­ly thanks to its UI and many out-of-the-box inte­gra­tions.) Alper wrote up some thoughts about one thing that con­tin­ues to be an annoy­ance with these ser­vices, though: their user accounts scheme does not accom­mo­date our dis­trib­uted, fuzzy organ­i­sa­tion­al structure.