At this weeks WebTuesday in the AdNovum offices in Zurich I presented node.js, the much talked about framework for writing event driven servers in JavaScript. It's an interesting approach to develop asynchronous applications with completely non-blocking input/output without the headaches this usually involves. From our perspective it's especially an interesting tool to develop the server side of Comet-like applications in a language that most developers are already familiar with.

You can find the slides containing an introduction to event loops in general and a few code examples on slides.liip.ch.

The next Webmardi will be held on Tuesday, March 9, at the Liip Fribourg office.

We will have the chance to discover the promising New Zealand made Silverstripe CMS, presented by Manfred Pürro. Please feel free to join us, everyone is welcome!

Liip's Zürich offices recently got featured in TEC21, a renowned Swiss architecture journal, under the title of "Atmosphäre des Digitalen". Apart from discussing some special features of our operating base, the article critically ponders the notion of "intellectual sensualism" as well as aspects of the relations between architecture and the kind of stuff we do - we use architectural design patterns, they give us software-generated tapestry (picture above). If you're interested: here's the PDF of the entire article - enjoy.

Credits: OOS (architecture), Dominique Wehrli (photography).

We want to mark an event for the highlights of this eventful past year. And we definitely want to have a drink with all the people who contributed to our success: our clients, partners, friends and the entire Liip team. And of course, as promised, with everybody that helped winning  this year's Master of Swiss Web award. So we're inviting all of you to our Award Night, in order to say thank you, to celebrate and perhaps even dance a bit!

• Venue: EXIL, Hardstrasse 245, 8005 Zürich
• Date: Tuesday, December 1st 2009, door opens at 19:00
• RSVP until November 22nd 2009 at awardnight.liip.ch

We are looking forward to having a great celebration with you!
Do sign up now!

Yours truly,
all the Liipers

The 28.th User Group Meeting of the SFUG (Swiss Flash User Group) will take place next Tuesday, October 20th, at the Liip office in Zurich.
Michel Wacker, Sandro Ducceschi and other members of the Liip team will attend as well, and are looking forward for you to join us to discuss the latest news from the Flash world:

Topics are:
1. Showcase: "Postfinance Eventmanager" - Sandro Ducceschi (Liip AG)
2. Review: "Adobe MAX 2009" - Tiago Dias und Marcel Vogt (both Publicis AG)

More details can be found here.
New group-members are more than welcome, just come by and join us! See you there.

What used to be a school right in the heart of Switzerland's capital, is now a bustling space for the arts. A couple of years ago, the city of Bern granted this building be used temporarily as studios, performance venue, exhibition space and offices for art professionals and institutions. This space called PROGR has become renowned and appreciated throughout Switzerland for it's lively scene and events programme.

The temporary lease ends next month and the art space is to make room for a private investor's health center. The current inhabitants have organized themselves and managed to come up with enough funding to match the price the private investor would have to pay. The city council reacted favourably to the idea of making the current art space a permanent thing and now it is up to the citizens of Bern to vote.

Liip is already supporting PROGR financially and we are naturally in strong favour of keeping this great institution alive.
We call on anyone able to vote in Bern to put in a YES for the artists initiative "Pro Progr" and a NO to the health center "Doppelpunkt" on May 17th.

Visit the initiative's website

On Tuesday April 7th Liip will host the second Webmardi in Fribourg, where Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard will talk about the Web Of Things.

After having attended several of the notorious Webtuesdays in Zürich, some of us thought, we might get that spirit into the "IT Valley" of Fribourg. The first event was quite a success. Roughly 25 participants were present when Joël Bez gave an introduction to HTML5.  Check out the recording of Joël's presentation on vimeo.

The event ended at Le Transformateur and was quite a joy indeed, so we're all looking forward to next week's meeting. More information and registration on the Webmardi Homepage. See you in Fribourg.

After having finally switched to Leopard during my paternity leave (thanks again Liip for that :)) I started using Time Machine for my backup needs. Since I had an almost-always running Popcorn Hour with some spare space, the wish to use that device was kinda obvious. While not officially supported by Apple (for whatever reasons) setting it up on the samba share was pretty easy and it works pretty flawless since then.

Back at work I of course didn't want to miss the hourly backups anymore and needed a solution there too. So I did the same with a disk attached to our airport. Worked equally flawless and since Time Machine seems to handle different and changing backup disks correctly all I had to do was to switch the Time Machine disk every morning and evening. I now have two full backups of my disk, one at home and one at the office, geographically separated by approx. 2 kilometers, which should be enough for most possible disasters. And if that's not enough, then I'm not sure if I care about my backups anymore :)

But the switching every day between the two disks was cumbersome and easily forgotten, so I wanted to automate that. With some googling I found out, that the destination disk was written in the " /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine BackupAlias" property and could be read with

defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine BackupAlias

This gives you a rather long string starting with something like <00000000 014e0002 .... That's what you need for later. And for both disks.

Next I wrote two little shell scripts, looking like this:

#!/bin/bash
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine BackupAlias '<00000000 014e0002 ....>'

and started them, when needed. No more half a dozen mouse-clicks and typing in that password every time, just calling that script was enough, but still not perfect. Jiayong Ou to the rescue, which made me aware of the context-and-location-aware and free application MarcoPolo. A little bit of configuring and I have now a fully automated backup solution at home and at the office. I additionally added the line

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper -auto &

to my script and a delay of 30 seconds in MarcoPolo, so that my backup started immediately when I'm online again and after the disk preference actually switched. Doesn't work always, since it's aborting a maybe running old backup, but seems not to do harm either.

That was it. A cool little application and a 2 line script is enough for making me forget about doing my backups :)

And as always: This works for me, but may completely destroy something on your side. And it's not officially supported by Apple and may therefore break with the next update. Use at your own risk

After a long summer break the Swiss Flash User Group (SFUG) is finally coming back to life. The meeting that ended the break in the middle of October was a quite enjoyable get-together with two liipish presentations on an experimental development with ZINC and an internally developed workflow approach called AssetMapping to ease the work between designer and developer (stay tuned for more news on these two topics).

Since ActionScript 3 started a whole new era of Flash development, many ideas and concepts are only about to take shape these days in form of frameworks and libraries. Many of them even are open source, so, no surprise, the next SFUG meeting is already scheduled to cover some of them and we're happy to announce that Liip will be hosting it for the first time at our office in Zurich.

It's free, it's fun, it's Flash - and there also will be beer. So make sure to be around November 18th (yes, that's next Tuesday) at 7pm to learn more about fascinating Flash topics such as the GAIA framework for designers, the Alive PDF library and fZip. Interested? Then check out the details at the SFUG Blog and do come join us!

Good news for all conference lovers:
<head> web conference is coming to Switzerland. From the 24th to the 26th of October we'll host a so called hub at our office in Fribourg where attendees can gather, exchange ideas and knowledge and, of course, watch life streams of the conference sessions. Plus, Liip is giving away 5 tickets to join the hub Fribourg for free (further details below)!

But what actually is the <head> conference?

<head> is the first large scale and global conference that completely takes place on the internet. For three days, over 70 speakers from all over the world will present on design and development topics in a whole lot of interesting sessions. The sessions can be watched on any computer with a highspeed internet connection or at a conference hub together with your colleagues, friends and brain mates.

Now that you know what <head> is, we would love to see you join the hub at our office in Fribourg. Here are some details on where and when:

Location:
Liip AG
Route de la Fonderie 7
1700 Fribourg
Switzerland

Capacity: approx 100 chairs + footings

Time and Date:
24.10. - 26.10.2008
The hub will be open during all three days of the conference.
Drop in and out as you wish but make sure to have your tickets ready.

Opening hours:
Friday: 17:00 - 1:00
Saturday: 17:00 - 2:00
Sunday: 11:00 - 0:00

Catering:
We'll be offering free softdrinks, coffee and snacks during the opening hours of the hub. And since the crowd is not too huge, we'll be cooking a dinner each day.
There are also restaurants, pizza places, kebab dealers and even a chocolate factory within walking distance.

If you want to bring a couple of beers or some chips along, feel free to do so. The crowd sure won't mind ;)

Accomodation:
Fribourg is a beautifully situated university town with a wonderful medieval touch. Besides hotel beds there are many free couch-surfing spots in Fribourg: http://liip.to/sleep_in_fribourg

Tickets:
If you still want a ticket, email to .

Contact:
(french requests)
twitter: shvi

(german requests)
twitter: starnut

Phone: +41 (0)76 540 35 38

Notes
The event will be trilingual (English, French and German) and we're hoping to welcome folks from all over Switzerland.

You can attend any number of days - the ticket prices are the same and they are pretty cheap at that.

If you're planning to join us, please tweet or email or so we get an idea of how many people will be attending. Also, if you're planning to attend as a group, please let us know as soon as possible so we might get you a discount on ticket prices.

As we arrange things, we will continuously add information to this very blog post and broadcast it via twitter. In time, additional information on event details, accomodation options and the program we're planning to offer besides the conference sessions will be provided through these channels. So make sure to follow us on twitter or check back with this page regularily.

Stay tuned and hope to see you all in Fribourg on October 24th!