Does this come from the heart, the mind or the belly?

I can’t help but be proud of my high score in Rob Faludi’s Social Genius game (built with processing, of course). See, hard work really does pay off. . . . Check it out in the upcoming ITP Show.

Para paliar en la medida de lo posible mi acusado diletantismo y evitar al lector aguantar mis desvaríos en tantos temas diferentes, acabo de habilitar feeds rss para cada categoría del blog. Esto significa que ahora puedes subscribirte sólo a los temas que te interesan.

Junto con la actualización de wordpress a 1.5, la habilitación de permalinks (ahora pueden acceder a los posts de una fecha determinada poniendo en el navegador la url del blog mas las rutas /año/mes/dia/), y algunos otros cambios menores, forman parte de una serie de (”)mejoras(”) que tengo en mente para hacer más agradable la experiencia del despistado que caiga por Hola, mundo.

Actualización: Gracias al consejo del amigo miguel, de processblack, acabo de añadir una pequeña utilidad para mostrar el idioma de los enlaces salientes. Así, siempre que muestre enlaces a páginas en otros idiomas (casi siempre inglés por aquí) se verán tal que así: Codetree.

Para paliar en la medida de lo posible mi acusado diletantismo y evitar al lector aguantar mis desvaríos en tantos temas diferentes, acabo de habilitar feeds rss para cada categoría del blog. Esto significa que ahora puedes subscribirte sólo a los temas que te interesan.

Junto con la actualización de wordpress a 1.5, la habilitación de permalinks (ahora pueden acceder a los posts de una fecha determinada poniendo en el navegador la url del blog mas las rutas /año/mes/dia/)Los he deshabilitado porque fastidiaban los comentarios., y algunos otros cambios menores, forman parte de una serie de (”)mejoras(”) que tengo en mente para hacer más agradable la experiencia del despistado que caiga por Hola, mundo.

Actualización: Gracias al consejo del amigo miguel, de processblack, acabo de añadir una pequeña utilidad para mostrar el idioma de los enlaces salientes. Así, siempre que muestre enlaces a páginas en otros idiomas (casi siempre inglés por aquí) se verán tal que así: Codetree.

As you probably know by now Flash 8 allows us to dynamically load transparent PNGs and GIFs. That’s great in theory - in pratice you might run into the same issue as I did: size. Transparent images of photographic content, like people or product-shots can become quite big when saved as PNGs. That’s because the PNG compression algorithm is better suited for images with limited color palettes like type or illustrations.

In a project I’m currently working on I have to load lots of transparent product shots into a gallery. The problem is - each of these images is about 500K in size. And even with broadband that’s out of the question. So this is where the capabilities of the BitmapData class come to my help: instead of loading one transparent image I split it up into two components: one part is the RGB image which I save as a JPEG and the other part is the alpha mask which I can save as a GIF (I could save it as a JPEG, too, but especially at the hard edges of black and white masks JPEG might give us undesirable artifacts). After I have loaded both parts I use the compositing capabilities of the BitmapData class to create a transparent image again. The gain? The JPEGs are about 55K in size, the GIFs are about 8K which means 63K instead of 500K - not bad. Plus I circumvent the image antialiasing problem that happens when loading images into Flash 8.

I’ve written a little MaskImage class to automate the image assembly for me. Here’s an example how it works. The original transparent PNG (800×600 pixels) has a size of 645K. Split up into the RGB part and the alpha part they look like this:

(800×600 pixels: 44K)

(800×600 pixels: 11K)

You can download the MaskImage class and the example here.

Continuing my tradition of being the last to report exciting news, here’s a link via Generator.x to an interesting project that aims to create a network of source code for visual programmers working in Flash and Processing.

This seems to me like a very useful tool, since it allows and encourages the community as a whole to share solutions and novel approaches to problems. Which got me thinking about my own creative process, and the value of a project like CodeTree therein:

In my personal work, I tend to avoid seeing what other people have done with a problem until after I’ve given it a shot. Indeed, try to limit myself to researching a problem in the abstract, rather than trying to see what other people have done in the same medium. I gave a talk at FlashBelt last year outlining my creative process. I called this purposeful separation from outside influences Encapsulation and it’s one of six parts of my process:

Simplify
Diverge
Mutate
Transplant
Hybridize
Encapsulate

By Encapsulating, I am trying to encourage novel solutions to projects, which I think arise more freely when I am not influenced by what others have done. This is drastically different from my approach to commercial projects, where time limits demand that I don’t spend countless hours re-inventing the wheel. However, in a creative and exploratory project, reinvention can make thee difference between the typical and the sublime.

But is this encapsulation really helpful at all? Or would I be better off biting the bullett and realizing that some of my supposedly innovative projects are downright redundant?

Or maybe I should stop blogging and actually *make* something for a change.

Das ist doch mal was. Fabchanell bietet über 400 Konzerte, Festivals und Vorträge als Stream. Und es gibt nicht Robby, Britney und Co sondern Bloc Party, Starsailor, Madness, Magic Numbers, Roisin Murphy, Baxter Dury und The Wedding Present. Außerdem haben die die Puppetmastaz. Bei den Vorträgen hab ich erstmal nur …

Das ist doch mal was. Fabchanell bietet über 400 Konzerte, Festivals und Vorträge als Stream. Und es gibt nicht Robby, Britney und Co sondern Bloc Party, Starsailor, Madness, Magic Numbers, Roisin Murphy, Baxter Dury und The Wedding Present. Außerdem haben die die Puppetmastaz. Bei den Vorträgen hab ich erstmal nur einen Stream von der Spark […]