…in the immortal words of the great Rolf Harris. Probably not at the moment, admittedly, but all will soon become clear. It’s part of a much bigger thing I’m building, but I wanted to post this as I’m quite pleased with it as an exercise in interface building. Have a play here.

There’s loads going on behind the scenes that (hopefully) isn’t immediately obvious, like proportional positioning on window resize, reordering as they’re dragged around, lots of .graphics operations – which I’ve not really messed with before, nice scaling, fades and so on as each one’s born, a nice litle colour selector (albeit with tiny sliders), pretty gradient fills, blah blah blah.

Anyway, lots of fun to make and much much more to do. Any idea what it is?

August 31st, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, flash | 3 Comments »

It may not be too clear here (and I couldn’t find the titles anywhere on YouTube), but this has to be the most mainstream example of a Flash 3-style shape tween I’ve ever seen. It matches right down to the nasty colour choices and dodgy outlines. At least it’s eased.

God alone knows how this ever came to be, but looking at the rest of the film’s frankly terrible titling…

…when the tween came up after 5 minutes nothing would’ve surprised me. Looks like they just used the default settings in some dodgy old 90s video titling package for the names, so maybe shape tweens were a step up for the main title.

August 27th, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the flash, stuff and nonsense | No Comments »

In the interests of building my little generative art App, I’ve decided I need some sort of window/palette system that’s robust and re-usable and looks, well, pretty cool. So I’ve made one and you can see it here.. The windows are (obviously) based on Apple’s nice little black translucent inspector windows, versions of which crop up in Aperture, Quicktime and so on. They drag from the top and bottom bars, they scale, open and close and they’re depth-managed.

There are two classes involved in all this: a WindowManager class that handles depths, focus and that very Appley drop shadow, and an Inspector class for the windows themselves. And it’s dead easy to use. Just instantiate WindowManager, add it to the stage and then tell it to create a new window with the settings you need, like so:

That 0.2 in the newWindow() call is the fade speed in seconds, in case you were wondering. Here’s a zip of the source with the FLA as an example and the Classes.

UPDATED: They should now have the close button on the right-hand side automatically on a PC. I’m happy to say there’s no PC here to test it on, but it should work. Updated the zip too.

August 20th, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, flash | 11 Comments »

It seems that if you want to publish content for Flash Player 10, you must first do away with all those silly, old-fashioned preconceptions about publishing being something that happens within the Flash IDE. I managed to avoid these problems when Flash Player 9 first appeared by just not doing any of the new stuff till the IDE was available. Well that’s not happening this time. Change has, after all, proven itself to be A Good Thing of late, what with AS3 and all, so here we go: time to relegate FLAs to the status of content containers and jump right in.

Having followed Lee Brimelow’s great intro to publishing for FP10, I was ready to publish via the terminal and view in Safari. Which was OK – if a little long winded – until I needed to trace stuff out. Googling yielded Arthropod, written in AIR and dead easy to write to from AS. Seems there’s no way to extend the trace() function, so this is my best bet. There’s the new setup above: Safari, with Terminal below and Arthropod on the right, TextMate living in another Space just below this one. So the process is just hit up and return in Terminal, then refresh the browser. Maybe I can get all this stuff going with Automator and a TextMate shortcut at some point. That’d be slick.

And it’s surprisingly good. For one thing, error messages seem much clearer in Terminal. It (usually) shows me exactly where the errors are, instead of making me guess with line numbers only. And the traces in Arthropod are smaller and clearer and can even be coloured if you fancy it. Here are some now:

…and as you can see, my new PrintCanvas class has made an A2 bitmap at 150dpi (actually it’s made two, one of which holds the perlin noise for directional bias in my generative painting stuff), which you can see in Safari above, with a red rectangle in it as a test. PrintCanvas can natively produce print sizes from A8 to A0 at present, plus Letter, Legal and Tabloid. I’ll add more sizes as they occur to me, but the important thing is that all this works at any dpi you choose, the only limitation being memory, which Flash’s BitmapData eats like you wouldn’t believe. It also handles saving the canvas directly to the local HD, which is why I needed to use FP10 in the first place for the new FileReference class updates. I’ll upload PrintCanvas with a full explanation and source very soon.

And yes, that’s Zippy and Michael Caine in the corner. What of it? I’ve got another drive called Reggie Perrin, so there.

August 17th, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, flash | 1 Comment »

I’ve finally revisited the generative art code I was playing with back in February. The painting system I worked out then is still all set up and sound, so it was really just a case of tweaking the various values in the algorithms and changing when and how subtly each part of the system kicks in. 

All along I was wanting to aim for something more organic and painterly than the somewhat spiky results I got before. I don’t want people to realise immediately that what they’re looking at is flash-based generative art, if that’s at all possible. I mean all it should really take is careful refinement and experimentation, right? Lots of time, in other words.

So here are 4 finished pieces from last night’s tweaking:

Moth

See it? Flying to the right, with eyes, mouth, antennae and massive hairy bit in the middle, leading back to blurred wings, with legs hanging below and a long yellow body. Pretty freaky really, considering this is all just tweak and hope. There’s better to come too…

Stuck

Jellyfish Blob

Firefly

This is much more towards the painting effect I’ve been after. Much more layered, less spiky and more organic-looking. And a bit like a glowing fly. A little bit.

NB. You’ll find the bigger images (up to 1440-wide) up on Flickr for you to grab and linked from the images above, for backdrops or just to see the lovely detail.

August 8th, 2008 by Ad.
It's all about the experiments / r 'n' d, flash | 3 Comments »