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.

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?

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

Take a look:

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 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!

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.