Because a picture says more than a thousand words (especially as my english is not the best ;) here there are the highlights of my flickr-stream showing yesterday’s Flash Camp Berlin.

On my way to the location I met these guys in Hamburg and had a very nice time with them.

Speakers were Matthias Kannengiesser, Cedric Madelaine, Andre Michelle, Sven Claas, Duane Nickull and others.

The attendees were all nice and the food was okay as well.

That was the first time for me to see flash community members in person and it was definitively worth it. Unfortunately the next big City Kiel has no Flex User Group, but there is one in Hamburg (flexughh) and I’m looking forward to attending their meetings in the future.

Today the Software Challenge finals took place in Kiel and I’m proud to announce that our team won the challenge!

The task was to create an AI for a simple game. Initially there were 38 teams who comped against each other in the first phase of the Software Challenge. The best eight of them were present at the finals today.

Each encounter was made up of six games.

The quarter-final was very thrilling, but we managed to win four out of the six games. In the semi-final we did a superior 6:0 and the finale then was 4:2 again.

During the play one member of each of the two teams was on the stage, interviewed by the annotator. Our team let me go for that, because I’m most familiar with the strategy of our AI. So I stood in front of all the spectators, being totally nervous and watching our client win. That was so cool!

We got that big cup, 1000 € for our school and some more money for us.

Additional resources

• official Software Challenge homepage
• newspaper article on the finals
• flickr photos

This seems to be the first post after almost two months of silent nothingness. There are some topics I’d like say something about without creating a seperate post for all of them, so here they go.

Software Challenge

Tomorrow is the big day! The finals are on, which means that the eight best teams (we’re #2) will compete against each other. It’ll be public in a big shopping mall in Kiel, so everybody can come and spectate the event. We submitted an update to our client just yesterday evening and are curious to see how it’ll work against our opponents.

Flash Summer Camp Berlin

Yup, I’m attending the Flash Summer Camp in Berlin (Germany) next Sunday! That’s a big thing for me, because I’v never been to any Flash conference / camp / meeting, so that’s my first time to see flash rockstars like Andre Michelle and Sven Claar live. To get to Berlin, I’ll have to go to Kiel by car, take the train to Hamburg, there I’ll hopefully meet some guys from the Flex User Group Hamburg (flexughh) and go with them to Berlin by train. I’m so excited!

SmoothDeck (Twitter Client)

Two months ago I posted about a twitter client I was working on. I was so deep in the project that I even created a twitter account (@SmoothDeck) and registered a domain (http://SmoothDeck.com) for it. But than the problems with memory became bigger and bigger and I stopped developing it more or less. On SmoothDeck.com there is an alpha version with some screenshots, if you’re intersted.

There are some reasons why I tried to make my own twitter client.

First, I don’t like the style of the existing ones. TweetDeck doesn’t contain a single color gradient I think and I don’t really like Seesmic as well. Tweetie and Nambu would be fine, but unfortunately they’re Mac-only.

Another reason is the url-lengthen feature. Since I used it in my own client, I can’t live without it anymore. Look at this screenshot of SmoothDeck.

Those short URLs are so pointless, having access to the long URL right in you twitter client helps a lot. You now can see that it’s a gizmodo article and since most sites today are using search-friendly URLs for search optimization you get an overview of the content without clicking on the link.

The good news is that I haven’t totally given up the work on SmoothDeck. Maybe I’ll find more time in my summer hollidays, starting in six weeks.

Until then I plan to put my effort into smaller projects and experiments, so that this blog gets a bit more active. I’ve got some old stuff I’d like to publish here, too.