hello you,
the idear depicted in the portrait is based on the
fact that kids today are exposed to computers in
the form of mobile devices of their parents.
during my studies of computer science i was
thinking about an application based on maps.
one of the problems of modern maps is the interface.
people don’t like to read maps - as well as while
driving for instance - you can’t focus.
while maps is incredible hard, i had the idear to
create a simple interface which should be as easy
as possible to use. in german: ‘kinderleicht’
… which means ‘kids’ + ‘easy’. so why not
an app for kids?
i emailed a fellow student which i thought was
the right guy to work with. But Joerg was busy
cause he was preparing himself for an internship
at Cern.
He gave me the email of a friend of him,
who would implement an early android version
with the current working title: ‘Kugel’
(german for ‘sphere’) under my supervision.
the application was a simple button for each
letter of the latin alphabet paired with an
icon. development stopped cause he thought
that he would do all the work while i would
do nothing. in truth i was researching all
sorts of applications for kids - as well as
looking into unicode and backend technology.
the final piece of the puzzle was inspired by
Joy. back at work there was a young women with
a very ‘cool’ name - and colleagues made up all
sorts of nicknames for her. this yielded the
idear to show the first and the last character
of the depicted icon. i love you Joy :*
(in generell the icon reads as |dot|)
this way, kids can naturally pick up font
while looking at the image in the middle.
they will be able to pick up reading faster
cause - as i later found out - humans read
by identifying the embracing characters
of a word and fill in the rest.
long story short - kids will be able to
collect objects via camera
e.g. toys and name them.
due to the simplicity of the initial app
it is possible to easily release it in
different font types and make objects
publishable.
call for artists:
now what has this to do with zbrush?
well - zbrush is the tool to do objects or icons.
feel free to post some here in this thread!
while everybody loves milk please keep in
mind that ‘Kugel’ is for kids 
If you want your icons to possibly appear
(i can’t grant) in the source deck please
agree to the snippet at the bottom of the
post and i will happily consider
your contributions.
the background should be transparent (png),
2d; power of two; no 3d formats as of yet.
if you are crunching hard and immovable
deadlines ahead 
and don’t have time
please follow the project under:
twitter.com/Kugel
call for devs:
though i was taught scheme and java at the
university i was constantly learning python
on the side. while this is probably not the right
forum to look for devs - if someone here is interested
in an open source project and has javascript
skills preferable with unicode knowledge,
feel free to contact me:
Felix.Buetzow@stud.TU-Darmstadt.de
keeping this as simple as possible i decided
to use google appengine as well as the Flask
microframework: http://flask.pocoo.org/
i will post a link to the repository next week
09/05/13!
by fmb
thx
