The article I wrote for Computer Arts has recently been added to the Adobe Developer Center. Check it out here. Thanks for the heads up Sami. I’ve also been informed that some big changes are coming for the API as well. Exciting stuff indeed. It’s great to see all the cool stuff people are making with Kuler.

As a sidenote, A.Viary recently granted access to their color palette generation tool, Toucan. One amazing feature to note about Toucan is the very brilliant “Color Deficiency Preview” tool. This seemingly innocuous panel could be overlooked quite easily… however, if you are developing an application that needs to be section 508 compliant or your user base is known to have color perception disabilities you should definitely consider using a tool like this to help you make appropriate palette choice for functional elements, etc.

Take a look at the very slick interface (the color deficiency ‘protanopy’ is depicted in the bottom panel):

The A.viary is shaping to be a very nice suite of RIAs. Great job, indeed. BTW… I have 5 invites, comment here to get one.

If you are familiar with Actionscript 3 and XML/XHTML/CSS learning Flex should come pretty naturally to you, that said, the Adobe Flex Development team has put together a series of videos that look to aid that considerably. Not only would training like this typically cost at least a couple hundred dollars if purchased from a company like Total Training, you would also need to play them on DVDs or pop them in your computer. These videos play nicely in a BrightCove player and can be gone through at your own pace. For my students reading this… Go through these tutorials! You’ll need it for building mashups!

About a week ago, I sent out a tweet asking for ideas on new APIs that might be worth checking out. You see, I am teaching a mashup course this fall and I need some new source material. I’ve played with Kuler, ColourLovers, Delicious, Yahoo Pipes, Technorati and a couple others (mostly unpublished and just experimental), but I just feel like I was missing something. I needed to check some other things out. Of course the new AS3 APIs for Google maps are out, so those are absolutely on my list, but I wanted some more “content rich” APIs. I spent some time on programmableweb.com (a great source for mashups and APIs) but only found a couple that struck my fancy enough to think about spending what is virtually my nonexistant free time on building a toy.

Rachael Rubin (wildhoney on twitter) was kind enough to point me to the newly revised Last.FM API and I think I will definitely use it at some point, but without a a proper link to the streaming music in their library, building a non playing audio based mashup seems a little less fun that it should be. It seems as though they intentionally make accessing the streams a little difficult to discourage bandwidth abuse.

All that changed today when I came across Govtrack.us on programmableweb. Wow. What a useful API. Fun? Not really… it’s an interface to the mountains of data generated by our Congressional representatives day to day business. Deep stuff. With the ever growing need for governmental transparency in this somewhat crazy time, it’s a fantastic resource to have. Generate clean XML based on what your reps are voting on, meeting about and talking over. Combine this with Google maps or perhaps any number of other rich data sources and you have some amazing potential to bring visibility to a very opaque world. Providing a new or easier to use interface to the insurmountable volumes of legislation might uncover some realizations that may have gone unnoticed otherwise.

I’m definitely going to give this one a spin. Shall we find something out from all of this? It remains to be seen, I guess. I have a few ideas on things I might like to track… how about you?

Many thanks to Darius and everyone at ColourLovers for making a great, easy to use API, also thanks to Juan Sanchez and the Degrafa team for making Degrafa the best way to draw in Flex. The DekafLovers mashup is currently featured at programmableweb.com as the mashup of the day and they have a nice writeup of it here. This mashup uses a similar codebase to Cooler Kreator, but uses the ColourLovers API instead of Kuler.

It’s great to get people making these patterns, I love seeing the stuff it produces.

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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Got notification that I was added as the most recent designer spotlight at Kuler! Very cool indeed. Many thanks to the Kuler team for building such a cool site (I love the new features added recently – create a theme based on a photo, so cool!) and thanks to Stacy Williams for putting the profile together.

Take a look:

Hey, just noticed my CoolerKreator tutorial is now available at ComputerArts.co.uk for download, along with all the source files. Go check it out!

FTA:

With numerous Flickr pools and other sites such as www.generatorx.no devoted to displaying generative art, this creative trend is gaining steam. With some of the more popular tools such as VVVV and Processing being easy enough to use, but a bit esoteric, you may feel left out as a Flash user.

With Adobe’s release of ActionScript 3.0, it’s possible to create beautiful generative pieces using tools you already have in your arsenal. Here, we’ll explore some basic tenets of generative art and you’ll learn how to augment your efforts using Adobe’s online kuler service.

Randomness, fantastic colour themes and some display filters will be employed to create one-of-a-kind compositions. The algorithms we’ll use are simple but effective and should serve as inspirational launching points for your own exploration of the field.

Each step of the tutorial, where appropriate, has an accompanying FLA file (found in the support files) with ActionScript 3 in it. If any of the text isn’t self-evident, open that step’s file and learn how it’s done from the code.

I do love Technorati. Without it, I wouldn’t see that a couple blogs (here and here) have recently posted about my CoolerKreator app, one of them actually making a clone (a very nice one, too)… probably using the source that was included in Computer Arts. It’s great to see people enjoying something you make.

I hope to have some more time to build a couple more mashups and AIR apps soon, though work has been time consuming and the school semester is in full swing. I also recently had to take a couple days off of work to attend a family funeral, so I have been out of the loop a bit… Here’s to hoping for a productive Spring!

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.

Two great conferences are going on this week, and though I won’t be attending either of them, I will indeed be watching the blogs, twittering and news coming out of both of them. FITC looks to have some great speakers lined up and hopefully some of them will make their programs available after the show. 360|Flex looks to be the launch place of Flex 3 and Air 1.0 according to Ted Patrick. A number of other developers are either demoing betas of new libraries, component sets or APIs, as well. A couple contests are set to be awarded at 360|Flex, too, so do your part and go vote! All in all a great week to be a Flash/Flex devigner.

As a sidenote, I hope to have a new gnerative composition mashup completed this week as well. It involves my favorite API, Kuler, of course, and a new one that I haven’t worked with yet. The subject matter involves colors and the emotions they elicit and vice versa. When released, the source code will be published with it, too.