The Cosmonauts

Yeah, keep being awesome!

(Vía Blogadilla)

If you happen to be in Madrid on June 29th and 30th don’t miss this mini-music-festival to raise funds for thecosmonaut.org. Get your ticket and become a producer of the movie:

If you understand Spanish you’ll enjoy these promotional videos for the event. They are made by the guys at Riot Cinema. They rock too!

Spot 1

Spot 2

We are about to launch something big pretty soon… Green light was received and the countdown will start right now. In the meantime feast your eyes on this amazing collection of pictures of launches:

Spain.rb: they are the elite of Rails development in Spain, they are proficient in English and I am sure they can kick some asses when it comes to writing elegant code and beign agile at the same time.

We all agree at the office: Bing does awesome at video search, especially for porn. Go check it and then move the cursor over the thumbnails, change the prefered length of the videos, screen resolution…

Awesome!

OMG, this is so exciting!

First things first: Marcelo undoes his tie. In all possible meanings. He works at the innovation department of a big company and wears a suit to work. But just take a glance at what he’s carrying and you’ll notice he’s way apart from the standard MegaCorp Drone.

He’s holding a copy of The Illuminatus Trilogy, a weird hybrid of sci-fi, conspiracy theories and parody. He assures us it has nothing to do with Tom Hanks (absolutely not).

He’s a funny and imaginative person, and sometimes he resembles a late-night stand-up comedian with a red brick wall and a mic as backdrop. We had a good laugh at his prediction concerning the Microsoft’s Surface: its future awaits on the streets, with a goat dancing on it while playing the multitouch piano.

Check out his photoblog, we are all big fans of his photos.

We’ve been condecorated. After a huge load of work we deserved a reward. You don’t deliver/launch three projects in one month and move to a new office all at the same time.

Four beautiful timepieces (just three on the picture) have arrived at the office, each for one of the cosmonauts. They all are the same: the classic SEIKO 6139-7100 Helmet (a.k.a. Darth Vader) a collectors item (Spanish) and a very reliable wristwatch.

These watches were released to the market around 1972 and after more than thirty years they work just nice. Here is a good picture where you can see its beauty. And errr… yes, they also have the “vostok palette”:

Go ahead, ask us for the time!

We just moved to a more convenient office. Our phone number has changed, please write down the new one:

Vostok’s new phone number: +34 91 1823291

Yes, we left the Old Hairdressers’ behind. It’s sad but that’s life.

Un, deux, trois, quatre!

We proudly introduce you thecosmonaut.org and its Spanish counterpart elcosmonauta.es: the website for the movie The Cosmonaut which we mentioned some time ago.

Check it out! It has a cool store where you can buy merchandise and become a producer of the movie. The Cosmonaut is special for several reasons:

• The plot is awesome
• The movie is crowdfunded (anybody can be a producer)
• Everything will be released under Creative Commons license, free of cost
• The list of people who support the idea is amazing (in quantity and quality)

We, Vostok, designed and developed the website (in three weeks!!) falling in love with the project and becoming producers too, so expect a little friendly spam every now and then ;)

Yesterday Cosmonaut Sam Lown walked the talk, showcasing his talent on the unicycle. Sam made it look effortless, but our attempts to ride it were unsuccesful (lets just say “epic fail” was heard more than once).

Sam is not the only computer geek into unicycles: world renowned information theorist Claude Shannon (The guy who puts the S in Shannon & Weaver) was well known for riding his unicycle through the halls of Bell Labs, and was a founding member of the Unicycle Society of America.

Despite wise statistical objections and our tiny sample size (n=2), the vostok team is wishfully betting on a strong link between unicycles and computer science skills.

Tuenti, the leading social network in Spain just semi-released a new version and we, Vostok, collaborated with their design team assessing in usability and interaction design matters. It’s not like we are happy about it, it’s more like we are overflowing with pride.

Tuenti is one of the three most used websites in Spain together with Google and perhaps some online newspaper. Astronomic numbers on usage time, milions of active users and an indecent number of pictures uploaded everyday. It’s the drug our youngsters consume every day in Spain.

The project has not concluded yet and some changes are still to come. Usability testing, user feedback and tons of data help the team make the final adjustments before they release the new version to all users.

The new design includes a few new functionalities, improves legibility and makes easier to do the most common tasks (messaging, uploading pics, creating events…). Most of these changes are hard to see at a glance, they are subtle. They need to be used and *felt*. You know, it’s not just about how it looks but about how it behaves.

Let us introduce you with today’s breakfast at Vostok: Pantera Rosa!

A pastry filled with white cream and covered with soft, sweet, pink chocolate. You can’t find something like that anywhere else in nature. In fact, Panteras Rosas make worth 400 years of advancements in chemistry. Pink ecstasy!

For those who are not familiar with it, the pastry is obviously based on the Pink Panther cartoon and was introduced in Spain 40 years ago (the pastry, not the character). It is indeed the oldest licensed food product in the shelves of Spanish stores and supermarkets.

If you are in Madrid tomorrow you may want to attend the presentation of El Cosmonauta (The Cosmonaut - Kokmohabt) at Medialab Prado. Nicolás Alcalá and the guys from Riot Cinema will be explaining their project of filming an amazing science fiction movie applying the principles of Creative Commons and crowdfunding.

When: Thursday April 23th, 19:30h.
Where: Medialab-Prado. Plaza de las Letras, C/ Alameda, 15 · Madrid (map)

As you may know, Vostok is pretty involved in this initiative which we mentione a few posts earlier. We hope you find it as exciting as we do.

Last week we made a cosmodrinks edition of our weekly lunch with Stuart Robinson, aka sturob, who was visiting from London. Stu is a very talented freelance programmer/interaction designer who develops iPhone applications in his free time. The width and breadth of Stu’s knowledge in both design and programming fields impressed us, and we’re sure the music app that Stu is developing for the iPhone will rock. Some of the stuff we talked about:

• Sam and Stu shared their impressions on programming for the iPhone: it’s hard, unfamiliar, and sometimes you hit against walls that seem impossible to overcome, but eventually you find your way around. It’s an interesting learning experience.
• Train ticket web interfaces suck here and in the UK too. We’re wondering if it is a world wide phenomenon. Solution: hire good designers, or develop an open API.
• Stu posed an interesting dilemma: if you had to choose between saying no to features and saying no to clients, which one would you choose?
• Another thought provoking question by Stu: if design makes things simple, will we come to an age where things just can’t be made any simpler?.

Vostok is also eternally indebted with Stu for introducing our own Sam Lown into the Ruby on Rails world a couple of years ago. The rest of the team is mostly back-end ignorant agnostic, but we sure are glad Sam can bang out impressive stuff in record time.

Today is April 12th and we celebrate the 58th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space on the Vostok 1 mission. It’s also a great day to make the following announcement:

We, Vostok, will be in charge of designing and producing the internet presence for a movie titled The Cosmonaut. It is special for many reasons, being the topic the most obvious one.Also, the movie will be crowdfunded (everybody will be able to become producer for a small amount of money) and released under Creative Commons license. That itself makes it very unique and special, but that’s not it. It will be filmed in Russian and some of the locations will be there as well. But there is more:

The movie is supported by (among others):

• Roskosmos (the Russian Space Agency)
• Richard Stallman
• Cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Boris Volynov
• the Russian Embassy in Spain
• Aeronautics and Astronautics Spanish Museum
• Luis Ruiz de Gopegui (former Director for NASA programs in Spain)
• etc.

The movie is a project by Riot Cinema, to be directed by Nicolás Alcalá, who runs a blog in Spanish with all the progress they are making.

A great day for announcing our collaboration in such a beautiful project. We are extremely excited about it.

Last friday we delivered 3 (yes, three) different projects and today we sort of finish the design part of another one. This is what it was all about:

• Reviewing and improving the usability of cool software application
• Designing a website for a BIG client which will be seen around the world
• Improving some crucial pages for a real state big player in Spain
• Redesigning a retail store with one of the coolest subscription services around

I am satisfied for the work done but it’s been intense and exhausting. We deserve a few days of rest. Cosmonauts will be released of their duties and will travel around a little bit (Madrid, Coruña, Granada…). I will leave the spaceship and get into one of these pods at hotel Aire de Bárdenas:

Enjoy the holidays!

Naoto Fukusawa (ex-head of IDEO Japan, and designer of Muji’s iconic wall mounted cd player) designed this beautiful concept packaging for an exhibition at the Nippon Design Museum in Tokyo.

Worth of notice: the discrete dirt splotches in the banana themed package give it a much more natural look.

Real world production constraints would make it pretty much impossible to mass-produce these items. But it is great example of putting the brand in the background, and let the essence of the product speak for itself.

This week’s lunch was with JJ of Tecnilógica. JJ broke the geekiest t-shirt ever seen in a Cosmomeal record (no small feat) with an xkcd t-shirt about the Cosmic Background Explorer.

But don’t let the geekiness deceive you: when not whiplashing servers, daemons, and minions; JJ navigates death-defying rallies in a 1982 Porsche 911 SC Targa. He also has an incisive sense of humor, saying that we all have faults when he found out I’m vegetarian. We also suspect he eats rocks and shits gunpowder, but this is not confirmed (yet).

Being such a badass and all, we decided to organize together next year’s Yuri’s Night, an annual worldwide party celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s ascent into space. Music, rockets and gunpowder, a winning combination.

Approach A

Windows Marketplace for Mobile (Microsoft)

Approach B

App Store (Apple)