Tomorrow Evening » Experiment

File Drag

Colin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:19:04 +0000

Over the past 2 or so months I've been using Flex for all my AS projects. Usually when I need to figure something out, I'll create a new FLA document and throw all my code into the timeline until it's been worked out, then bring it back into the class files. However, I've found this to be a big pain in the butt when creating AIR applications. For some reason it only lets me test AIR applications a few times before the adl file freezes and I need to force quit to get out. Well, seeing that I had never messed around with creating a Flex Project, I decided to give it a whirl and learn to put my code into MXML and go from there. In doing this, I discovered I no longer had the adl freeze issue!

Since I'm currently working on Generator in my spare time, I decided to create one of those test files in a Flex Project. This was the result:

You can download the source here.

Webcam with processing

Colin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:41:02 +0000

So apparently bringing a webcam into processing is not as easy as I thought.

I run Windows Vista at home and Mac OS X at work so I tested at both places. I feel slightly retarded for not seeing this before, but this is on the processing docs page:

Because Apple only supports QuickTime on Mac OS and Windows, other platforms (such as Linux) are not able to use the video library.

You also need video driver software for translating from the proprietary format of your video source into commonly used video functions. You can get this software from the makers of the video hardware.

If you are using a Windows operating system, you will also need a video driver that translates from your hardware to the video functions used by QuickTime. This software may be included in the software provided by the maker of your hardware, or you can download the software. Search for "vdig" using an online search engine to find the software. There's more information about this below...

I finally got the webcam running in both locations today, so later on when I get a chance I plan on converting my AS3 motion detection class to processing. I plan on trying to implement Z space into this project and maybe exaggerating that depth through audio wavelengths... More to come!

Processing Pixel Swarm

Colin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:00:04 +0000

This version of pixel swarm attracts pixels based off the distance (Pythagorean Theorem) between the points and the mouse. I've added gravity and dampening to it so that the pixels bounce around the mouse movement.

In this version of Pixel Swarm I reversed the velocity of the pixels so that instead of adding it's current position to where the mouse was, I subtracted it, giving it this magnifying feeling. I also removed the gravity field so that it's more bouncey and animated. Both versions of the Pixel Swarm in processing display 2,500 movable pixels. The first displaying in a grid and the second using the Logarithmic Sprial. I also changed how the pixels were written. The first was displayed through drawing a rectangle:

noStroke ();
fill (#FFFFFF);
rect (sx, sy, 1, 1);

The second written:

point (sx, sy);

Processing handles drawing points a lot faster than drawing rectangles. The downside to this is that you can't (as far as I know) change the color of the points in processing.
Last, but not least, I added a rectangle under each iteration of the draw function. This gave me control so that the previous point coordinates would echo and visually fade the other pixels out.

Pixel Swarm

Colin — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:38:14 +0000

Click the stage to begin. I plan on converting this code to processing as soon as i get a chance