When I launched Gladiator I must say it was kind of a step into the dark. I noticed lots of people talking about how popular mobile would become. We all saw the slides “This will be the year of mobile internet” passing by ( yes, every year ). But when it came down to actually create mobile experiences, not even to mention doing this full time.. That seemed quite tricky, as there were not many people in Belgium doing so. I talked to several people before I gave birth to Gladiator and while some were very positive, I noticed lots of doubts too.. “I think it’s too early” was one of the popular quotes flying into my direction. Nevertheless, I believed in my vision on mobile and I decided to go for it. If the market was not ready, I would do my very best to help open it up.

The time is now!

The last couple of months were a combination of investing time in upgrading my skillset, educating clients and most of all, working very hard to deliver high quality, on time. I saw lot’s of opportunities and cool projects coming my way. Together with Bluetalk, Gladiator delivered mobile design and ux optimalisation for Audi A5 applications. In order to promote the Belgian Beers at the Shanghai World Exposition, Gladiator worked together with The Creative Stores, building several iPad apps. Jupiler Bartender, created together with Famous, became the number 1 free iPhone app in a few days.. That being said I think I can honestly ( and proudly ) say that it was not too early. As mentioned in my opening post:

I noticed that in a world full of innovation, creativity and mind-blowing digital experiences, I still feel like something is missing. That’s why I think the time is now!

Let’s Talk!

So what about Little Miss Robot? Well, they are an interactive agency creating engaging digital experiences, focussing on design, usability, new technology & innovation. They got in touch with me a while ago with a catchy email: “Thomas, let’s talk!” We quickly noticed that there were several matches in both our visions on digital and mobile experiences. After a few good meetings they asked me if I wanted to work together with them, implementing mobile as part of their concept & creation service. They were not looking for someone to employ in-house, they were looking for creativity, passion & ambition. It’s a request for collaboration, no need to give up my own brand, and that’s exactly what teased me. I took a few days to consider their offer and I quickly ran into some pretty interesting advantages. Moving into a very impressive studio based in the middle of Ghent, working together with experienced and talented people, more focus on creativity and innovation.. and last but not least: an active vision and ambition to create stunning mobile experiences! Besides that, this collaboration would allow me to work on bigger projects too.

Gladiator says hi

After a while I noticed more and more excitement on my side. I tried looking for reasons not to dive into this adventure and I must honestly say.. I did not really find any. That’s why I decided to go for it and say hi to Little Miss Robot. I truly feel this is a win-win situation for all parties. I feel that I’m able to offer a more professional service and environment to clients, which can only increase the quality of my work. And for Little Miss Robot, focussing on creative & digital innovation, it’s a big advantage to have mobile expertise and experience by their side too!

We have been working closely together for a couple of weeks now and we really started some exciting projects. If you want to know more about digital innovation and the things we are currently working on, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We are always happy to have you over for a chat!

Together with the talented digital addicts at Famous, Gladiator worked on a must-have iPhone application for all the party people out there: Jupiler Bartender. Have you ever found yourself wondering at the bar.. 2 beers and euhmm.. It might be the 8 beers you already had, or it could be the cute blond girl next to you. Either way, with this application you can start focussing on what’s important: bringing the exact amount and types of beers to your friends!


With this brand new iPhone application you have the perfect assistent to help you manage your order. Simply tap one of the icons and you will find yourself creating a list of drinks in no time! You can add your own custom drinks and arrange their position according to your standards. If you use the autoplay-feature, it will save you from screaming your order multiple times. No longer will you be fighting the pumping disco-beat sound at the bar!

With over 200 festivals and millions of people ordering Belgian beers, the application is becoming more popular every day. It took only a few days for this application to become the number 1 top free iPhone application in Belgium! It may be a big surprise, but Gladiator likes a Belgian beer too every once and a while. At this years edition of the Lokerse Feesten the application already helped ordering quite an amount of Jupiler!

Never order a drink without it!

Interested in this application? Want to be the cool guy who manages the large orders for all your friends? The Jupiler Bartender application is waiting for you in the appstore. Search for ‘Jupiler Bartender’ or just download it here.

As always, Gladiator is happy to hear your feedback. Don’t hesitate to give us a shout in the comments but for now… go order a beer!

When we decided to organize Slide To Unlock, we already knew we were not the only ones waiting for a decent iPhone and iPad development workshop. Nevertheless, we sold out only 10 days after launching the website.. blazingly fast indeed!

So besides bragging about the success, we also want to address people that were too late or missed it.. feel free to get in touch, we would love to find out if a second iPhone development workshop in Belgium would sell out too!

According to the heat wave going over the west of Europe I think we can officially call it Summer! And you know what’s nice about this summer time? Yes, of course we have all the great festivals, sexy people, mojito’s and lot’s of other great stuff coming our way.. but you know what the best part is? Those summer camps! And that’s exactly what Gladiator has been working on.

You may have noticed that mobile development is quite upcoming, even in Belgium. Maybe you have played around with iPhone / iPad development lately, it’s always nice to present a little demo to your favourite client right? But what if you sell the project? What if you suddenly get a magical ”yes, let’s go for it” and you need to estimate the development cost and actually build a decent application. I can assure you, I’ve been there myself, it is still a pretty long way to go. That’s why I got in touch with my friends at Little Miss Robot and together we present: Slide to unlock! A 3 day iPhone / iPad workshop from 25/08 till 27/08. The workshop will cover all the basics and takes you  beyond as well. That’s why we are bringing over one of the best iOS trainers of the world: Aral Balkan!

Interested in a quality iPhone and iPad development course? Want to skip a 6 month learning curve? Take advantage of the early bird prices and see what it’s all about at www.littlemissrobot.com/slidetounlock. You better be fast, because we are only selling 10 slots!

]]> http://www.gladiatormedia.be/2010/07/15/slide-to-unlock/feed/ 0 http://www.gladiatormedia.be/2010/06/07/flash-coffee-antwerp/ http://www.gladiatormedia.be/2010/06/07/flash-coffee-antwerp/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:20:43 +0000 Thomas Joos http://www.gladiatormedia.be/?p=272

A week ago, Serge Jespers from Adobe announced a brand new local event initiative: Flash Coffee Meetup. Finding out what’s new with the Flash Platform has never been so easy. From now on you can join Adobe’s Platform Evangelists from across Europe for a nice cup of coffee, an espresso, a cuppa or whatever your chosen caffein jolt is.


These meetups are local, informal and small and will be taking place at various coffee shops around Europe. There are already two locations announced: on June 9th there is one hosted in Amsterdam and on July 7th they will have one in Antwerp.

I am attending Flash Coffee Antwerp, where Serge will raffle off a copy of Flash Builder 4 Premium. Besides that, Gladiator will give away a few copies of ‘Flash on Devices’. With all these mobile announcements about AIR, Android and Flash Player 10.1, this book might come in very handy to help you kickstart your Flash Mobile adventures!

See you there?

Together with the mobile addicts at BlueTalk, Gladiator delivered designs for Audi’s mobile application promoting the new A5 Sportback. Designed with passion for more than 10 screen resolutions, keybased and touchscreen devices covering the iPhone, Nokia, BlackBerry, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC, and many more.

The new Audi A5 Sportback

In order to promote the new Audi A5, several promo cars were set up at places like the Brussels Airport. All these Audi-spots were Bluetooth enabled and up and running to push a mobile Audi A5 application to passengers with a Bluetooth phone. The applications was build and distributed cross-platform with versions for Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, HTC and more. For the thousands of iPhone users passing by ( with no capability to receive apps over bluetooth ) a special iPhone application was submitted in the appstore. BlueTalk developed this cross-platform experience and got in touch with Gladiator to create the designs and optimize the user experience. A perfect match!

Available in the appstore!

Missed the promo cars? No problem at all, just download the iPhone application and have a look. Feel free to let us know what you think, that’s what the comments section is all about! If you don’t have an iPhone just take a look at the pictures below to see the final result.

I have been doing iPhone and iPad interface design for quite some time now. During that time I noticed several fantastic community designers sharing their design sources, creating free icons and interface elements, … You can buy optimized sketchpapers, stencils and lots of other things to help you designing stunning iPhone application. I have been using several tools & assets for a while now, and I thought it might be interesting to talk about the ones I use daily.

01. Sketching

The iPhone Stencil Kit. ( 24,95$ )

I always start my interface design using the iPhone stencil kit I bought from uistencils.com. This kit contains an optimized iPhone UI Stencil and pencil. I also bought the iPhone sketch pad, which is a printed cardboard with printed iPhones on both sides. Perfect to start sketching and brainstorming on paper!

02. Digital design

From the moment I have the rough wireframes and interface structure in mind and on paper, it’s time to open Adobe Photoshop. My first action is opening a few psd files that will help me putting together the interface. Let’s see what I’m talking about!

Teehan+Lax

This is probably one of the most popular iPhone GUI psd’s out there. The guys from Teehan+Lax did a great job putting together all the important iPhone interface elements. Created with love and passion and free to use! All elements are designed with the exact dimensions and recently they even added an iPad GUI version as well!

Metasparks’ Fireworks iPhone GUI kit

This template is entirely vector based and is made to use in Adobe Fireworks. This approach allows you to quickly create mockups, as you can easily manipulate the interface elements on screen. I usually work in Photoshop, but this file comes in very handy as it contains a few elements which I can’t find in the Teehan+Lax PSD. Small assets like the ‘reply’ icon etc.. Either way, these 2 iPhone GUI kits should get you up and running in no time.

03. Icons

It’s very time consuming to create all your custom icons yourself. That’s why it’s handy to know that there are several free iPhone Interface Icon sets out there. These are the ones I use:

Glyphish

The Glyphish icon set contains 24-bit PNG images used as a mask to generate selected and unselected button states. They are carefully optimized for use on toolbars and tab bars in iPhone & iPad apps.

App-Bits

The App-Bits iPhone icon set holds 64 toolbar icons. These buttons contain beautiful shaded portions to give added depth and to highlight icon features. And just as the Glyphish set, they are free of charge.

04. Visual Presentation

Dropbox

There comes a moment that your client wants to take a look at your design. Presenting a nice and clean overview of the interface helps the client to understand what’s going on. You can dive deeper into certain pages or key elements of the application, answer questions personally, .. Besides this keynote presentation, I make sure the client sees the design on a real iPhone too. That’s why I like to use Dropbox. I simply stash all the screenshots I want to showcase in a Dropbox folder and I use the Dropbox iPhone app to get them on my screen. This way I can showcase the design on a real iPhone, anywhere, anytime.

Go ahead!

That’s it for today, Go ahead and start designing your killer iPhone application! Feel free to let me know which tools, sources and assets you use and if you have a design to showcase.. just shoot it into the comments!

In times of economical crisis, lots of theories happen to appear on the internet. Some say it’s the perfect time to start up your own business, while others think it’s better to lay low for a while. Some say it pushes innovation and opens up opportunities while others say there will be no room for exploring new things. There are those who say it is never the perfect time and those who claim otherwise.

I am no expert in this matter, I have no idea what the impact of the crisis will be in 2010 ( and later ). But what I do know, is that I’m very passionate about mobile. I get a kick out of creating visual prototypes, optimizing a mobile concept and developing mobile applications. I noticed that in a world full of innovation, creativity and mind-blowing digital experiences, I still feel like something is missing. That’s why I think the time is now! I’m launching Gladiator because I want to get out there and make a difference.

Mobile expertise

Gladiator offers a wide range of mobile expertise, focussing on 3 important areas: consult, concept & design and last but not least: development.

Mobile Consult

Gladiator acts as a starting point for any profile that wants to take advantage of the mobile medium. Looking for efficient ways to implement mobile in your upcoming campaigns, interested in mobilizing your services or products? Let’s find out where mobile adds value and how it can help you achieve your goals!

Mobile Concept & Design

Mobile is more than squeezing things into a tiny screen. Specialized in mobile user experience, Gladiator helps you to finetune and optimize your killer mobile concept. From wireframing to designing a beautiful user interface, Gladiator assists you in every step of the way.

Mobile Development

Need a visual prototype or a mind-blowing application? Having a very specific scope or targetting multiple platforms? Thanks to a strong development background we get things done!

Let’s get in touch!

Want to get together and talk? Do you have a question or are you interested in a portfolio presentation? Is it something else? Feel free to drop us a mail via info@gladiatormedia.be

Let’s think, talk and actually do mobile, together.

Thomas Joos