When you work for an agency, you need to work hard and work a lot. To help you focus you need to find ways to blow off steam and enjoy a little. We’ve found many creative ways to do that and one of them is the prankwar. The prankwar just started on it’s own between @samzzi and @coolz0r and then started to take over the whole agency … I expect many people will fall victim to our pranks. And since  more people will be involved, we made a small page with an overview of what has happened so far. This way we can tell our stories to our children and their children’s children and … ok nm that

Just go see for yourself: http://labs.thesedays.com/prankwar/

We didn’t only do an internal auction for Music For Life, we also made a little website where we need your help… to kill a mosquito! Check it out and raise money!

During this last week we painted ourselves blue and donned our Microsoft caps. Just so you get the gist; we launched a Silverlight 3 project, we created an open source Silverlight component (that will thoroughly rock your socks ), we hosted a besug event and went to Remix09 (we even ended up on the big screen during the keynote! – we still don’t know how that happened).

Familie meerdijk

Our first Silverlight 3 project and a massive hit to boot. The project was headed by These Days Amsterdam for Microsoft Netherlands. They wanted to show the public how Office can be useful in day-to-day situations so we gave them “Familie Meerdijk”. The average
Dutch family who live their lives and bump into problems on the way. And whaddaya know… Office offers to solve them!

To be very honest… I myself am a huge Office 2007 fan, can’t and won’t live without it. Is this shameless promotion? Maybe… but I just love it that much!

The “Familie Meerdijk” project uses a lot of 3D animations so it was a real adventure to make this work, you can read more about how we got alpha channel in WMV video’s to work.

Maybe you should just head on over to Familie Meerdijk yourself to see it all in action.

SISTR

SISTR is a Silverlight component we made together with our partner Ventigrate. It’s a sIFR replacement that allows you to use rich typo graphics in your websites. Just an alpha version for now but we’re actively working on putting out a more stable release. More info about this project (+ examples, download, …) can be found on http://www.sistr.it

Arturo Toledo @ These Days

Last Monday Arturo Toledo, Product Manager at Microsoft for the UX Platform & Tools, visited the These Days offices for a session with the Belgian
Silverlight user group. The session was about Sketchflow (Expression Blend), a very cool tool that allows you to easily create wireframes using Microsoft’s Expression Blend. This way we had some upclose quality time with Arturo and damn, I for one, am now a totally brainwashed Sketchflow lover It was very nice to see what Sketchflow was all about and have some face2face moments with Arturo.

Some pictures of the event:

Remix 2009

Last Tuesday Microsoft also organised the Remix 2009 event. We attended the event with four These Days people. What all the agencies have been saying for a while now has been re-confirmed by Microsoft; UX is a super important (if not the most important) aspect of your project… That’s why we, at These Days, also spend a lot of time and effort on getting this right. Big props for our four UX experts! (Who are now also planning on giving Sketchflow a try! )

But of course we not only enjoyed the UX tracks, the developer tracks were also very inspirational.

The highlight of the day, for us, was the keynote though. It was nice to see which direction Microsoft is planning to go in the future and to hear about other companies’ usage of Microsoft technologies and even see some demos.

And just to scare everybody away I was also on the big screen in one of the movies.

Some more pictures from the Remix can be found here.

Believe it or not… The These Days production team is back with a brand new blog: The lab! We’re alive and kicking. Ass whooping. Shizzle my nizzle. Aaarrright!