Ok, so I have been shooting any masterpieces. It’s just the wildlife I happen to share my house with, two wild animals named Sophia and Liam. I borrowed a Sony HDR-SR1 from a friend and coworker and have been having a blast with it. I have a camera. It is an 8 year old Sony Digital 8 I bought to use with my Graphite iMac DV SE. Had some fun with that too… Just got tired of the tapes, remembering which were used, losing them, wearing them out, accidentally shooting over top of them, etc. What a pain! Shooting to a hard drive is a lot more freeing. No rewind to review, cue, etc.  Digitization is a snap , too… And with my TimeCapsule (Which is awesome), I have no worries for hard drive storage space, yet. I may need to pick me up one of these! Brett, sell me this one!

I’m sure I’ll get back to posting some stuff about some of the bigger projects we have going on soon, but for now, they are still in the planning stages and can’t really be divulged. One is a video postcard app powered with a Flex frontend using Flash Media Server, the other is a 3 screen synced 1080p interactive installation, and we are also discussing a couple presentation system content management RIAs as well, for a couple different clients. Could be some great stuff coming up. On top of that, we are just days/weeks away from relaunching our companies website. What a busy summer.

Thought we’d have some time for play, but no rest for the wicked.

A previous post detailed the simple algorithm for the underpainting technique I have been messing around with in order to attempt an “impressionistic” style. I have spent a little more time working with it and in addition to the broad brush strokes that lay the base color, I have made progress in creating a layer of definition to help with the image’s fidelity. Using Flash’s convolution filter to do edge detection is something I had never attempted before and so, to Google I went and found a great post at Quasimondo’s blog, his site is amongst the first I go to when I need inspiration on how to do something, and then stumbled upon a couple excellent tutorials on Sobel, Laplace and Canny Edge Detection written by Bill Green in 2002. I was about to attempt to port that code over to AS3, but then found a developer had already done just that. Alex Petrescu’s very cool implementation of canny edge detection seems to be working pretty well, but I’m not done with messing around with yet. Even, so, I thought I might share a couple images created using this edge detection with my pixel painting. I welcome feedback and suggestions. This has been alot of fun, and I look forward to seeing how it progresses.

I have thoroughly been enjoying messing with my wife’s lovely photos the last couple of days. Her studies in the spring flora have inspired me to try to manipulate them to look like some of her favorite painters. Manet, Monet, Degas, Cassatt… on and on. I personally am an abstract expressionism fan, Klee, Kandinsky, etc., but I thought it might be fun to see what I could do with a minimal amount of code and some great source images. While certainly not a complete study, they are at least a nice diversion from some other work I have been doing lately. Read on to see more. (more…)

I’ve been posting color mashups for a while now… just about have that out of my system and ready to move on to some other pattern generation, but first I’ve been working on the output phase of the work. Making something tangible out of those 1s and 0s… So, I’m using that same codebase to produce some large prints on acid free paper with Adobe AIR, and getting them framed/matted. I only have enough $$ to do about 3-4 of them, though. I’d like your advice… which palettes should I choose? I’m going to be putting them in 20×20″ Black matte metal frames on 2″ acid free matte board behind UV reducing anti-glare plexi-glass. If you have Kuler or ColourLover palettes you’d like to see in a high res form, email me, maybe you could end with some high res files yourself… Read more to see the images.

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My LOLCats viewer built in AIR is now available at the Adobe AIR MarketPlace. Check it out. Oh Hai, You Can Haz LOLCats From Da AIR.

Was doing some Googling for Flex tips on how to do something (what it was now, I don’t really recall)… Something about tooltip styling, placement etc for components… Anyway, cames across a link to what seemed like a useful article at a reputable sounding site, “Flex Developers Journal“. Problem was, I couldn’t find it. Everything was covered in or by ads… 3 Video ads (one of which autoplayed audio), A coupleGoogle boxes, a popover interstitial and some other “advertorial” type content. Ugh. No thanks. Didn’t even stick around for the article. On top of it, they set 8 cookies in my browser for this one page. 8! Take a look at this screenshot (click to enlarge)…

I don’t have a lot of time on my hands these days to visit this site, but if you are looking for a great way to blow an afternoon or three and see some fantastic Flash/Flex UI work, go visit Iminlikewithyou.com. It’s pretty freakin’ fabulous. Great design, silky smooth animations and tranistions, quick loading, unique social networking tools and of course, the unforgetable Blockles. (It uses SWFAddress and some other great modern Flex/Flash techniques, too… It’s really really nice). Think of it as a snarky multi-player Tetris clone and you’ve got it. Absolutely brilliant. It’s the brainchild of Charles Forman, aka SetPixel. He’s a great designer/developer I had the privilege of working with as a freelancer at the now defunct iToons, a Chicago based game design and dev studio, and a fun fun place to hang out and work, I might add. A shout out to all the gusy there, Davers, Norm, Kevin, Tony, Juan and JonK to name a few. Ahh good times… but enough reminiscing… go play some Blockles.

If you are a Mac user and are looking for a fun sketch tool to work out some ideas or create quick compositions, go check out Nodebox. Its a python based tool that uses simple syntax to create some really great drawings. Similar to Processing, but perhaps a little simpler, Nodebox has a ton of great libraries as well (Quicktime, Web, iSight, etc.)… Check out this image I made with Nodebox… It combines Kuler and Flickr to make a nice piece. For these I chose a keyword query that pings both APIs and returns a recently entered Kuler color palette and a image from Flickr sorted by number of views. I have a set of them at Flickr, go check it out.

So, I played guitar through middle-high-school and into college. I pretty much lost interest after I got out of school… started work, etc. Well, after spending the last couple months honing my fake chops on GHIII, I decided to take the plunge and clean up the old guitar I had sitting in a closet. I restrung it and cleaned it up yesterday, and today I went out and picked up a little tweed Fender Mini-Twin amp, which was a lot of fun for about 30 minutes, until the input jack started exhibiting a short. I suppose I’ll return it for another one. Anyway… I did plug the guitar into Garageband and played with that a bit. I have to say, I was much impressed with the amp emulators and effects available in such a simple program. Sounded like a ful stack coming out of my Macbook Pro. Too much fun.

I was a little disappointed in the amp I got, but maybe it was just a fluke. Anyway… I suppose I need a non-computer or video game related hobby, so maybe this is a good thing to get back into. I must dig up my old tab books now.

Thanks to the people at MashupAwards for naming my Yahoo Pipes/Delicious Flex site, “Pipelicious” mashup of the day… very cool indeed! I built this a while ago… You might remember from this post here. I need to make some updates to the app, like I mentioned I would… ahh time and motivation, why do you so rarely meet up with each other?