Some time ago I decided to rewrite VisDoc from the ground up. VisDoc had started as a personal itch, and over time had grown uncomfortably large, with all text parsing done in Cocoa, and without any unit tests. A recipe for disaster, and something that was taking longer and longer to fix with every incoming bug report (of which I did not get too many, luckily).

I decided to do the new VisDoc in Perl, a language I have learned to love when working on Foswiki. Text parsing comes naturally with Perl, and it is very easy to create unit tests for every bit.

On Mac, the Cocoa app calls the command line VisDoc. Users will never know there is Perl running on the background. And hopefully someone with Windows experience will pick this up to create a Windows app. Or a Linux app. Because in true Perl spirit VisDoc can be used and extended by anyone, using the liberal MIT license. Meaning you can even create commercial applications with it.

Get the code at http://code.google.com/p/visdoc/

I need to dust some corners before I release the Mac app, soonish.

I want to give you a taste of the new version of VisDoc by showing the new icon:

Screencast of the website of HDZ architects, http://hdz.nl, that was online from 2003 to 2008. I created the Flash website after my early prototype in Director that dates back to 1999.

The central idea behind the site is to enforce user engagement by hiding most of the photos and drawings - the user has to choose and drag pictures to 'fill in the blanks'. Because the photos will be overlapping each other or will be cut off, the complete picture is never on the screen and needs to be completed in the user's mind. So it goes against the grain by not giving the user everything at once.

Excerpts from an educational software project by Arie Noordzij. I created the visual language and motion graphics to go along the spoken story. My challenge was to make abstract terms (like "assigning keywords to a catalogue description") easier to understand through a consistent visual vocabulary. Most parts I show here are from the history of information management, that was created as introduction to the contemporary instruction course.

Screencast of the portfolio website for Marcel Christ, http://marcelchrist.com

Visual design by Ingeborg Bloem. Interactive design and ActionScript programming by me. Created with ASAP Framework.

Ever since I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard I experienced problems with dropping Airport connection - to the annoyance of my fellow Foswiki developers on IRC, who saw me leaving and joining every 5 minutes.

Today after reading a couple of forum posts (none with a definitive answer) I tried some Network setting changes. This is the one that solved it for me: changing Using DHCP to Using DHCP with manual address.

I copied the IP address that was generated automatically and entered that into the IPv4 field.

I probably have to change this setting when I am on the road again.

Once upon a time I started a Slovene-Dutch dictionary. It was the time of multimedia, when there was a real difference between Applications and the Web. The Web was minimal and slow, applications rich and fast.

So "Slovar" was born as paid application on cd-rom. Its main strength was the type-ahead - with just a few keystrokes you could find your word, plus the immedate surrounding words in the list. Overall it was built for retrieval speed.

While I could have updated the interface, the project has been laying dormant, awaiting better times.

I think this summer was a good time. During my holiday evenings in Slovenia I have resurrected my old database, migrated it to MySQL, and created a web interface with Foswiki, the open web platform.

My first goal was to make the dictionary accessible again, and free this time.
Next goals are to improve lookup speed and to introduce user interactivity. Although I haven't decided on a model yet, I think the German-English dictionary at http://dict.cc has achieved a way to let users create and verify entries.

Visit the dictionary at sloveens.org (Dutch)