For exploring the JavaScript API in MAX / MSP / Jitter I decided to port the Harmony Web Application by Mr. Doob. I really fall in love with the different brush styles. MAX / MSP / Jitter is pretty cool for doing audio visual stuff, and I think the different brush style might be nice for this. Fortunately, Mr. Doob published the source code and the code is nice, too! Therefore, it was not so difficult to understand the code. During my porting process I had to consider four things: Read more...
Now I am almost studying Interactive Art for one year. Me, as a Flash and Flex Developer, like coding with audio-visual and interaction-based content. But if I am honest, in the last time I did not use Flash in my projects at all. I had to deal with some other powerful creative coding tools. Some of these tools provide me, as an artist, much more freedom than the Flash plattform can ever provide. For example, creating a visual output for multi-displays applications, programming on hardware (arduino), some real-time video tracking (face detection) experiments, using special Open-GL Renderer for 3D graphics and so on. But I also ran into problems, which I would never have with using Flash. Especially, when I worked together with unexperienced programmer. For this reason, I will describe some of these creative coding tools with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. After this article you should have a good overview about the available tools in creative coding.
For every project you should check your skills before you start. It helps a lot for preventing possible problems and makes the life easier. Thus I highly recommend to do a self-assessment before your start as a Flash Independent Developer. After this self-assessment you should have a very clear picture about your abilities, skills and of course your weaknesses. It is very important that you know your weaknesses because you can outsource some of this problems to your network buddies. An independent team-oriented working approach works in this case very well, because it replaces your weakness with a strength of another person. It works like the Captain Planet or the A-Team metaphor
Skills-Mindmap Flash Independent Developer
On the mindmap you can see the 4 core skills: Design, general knowledge about New Media, Programming (Computer Science) and soft skills. As an employee it is not so important that you have skills in each of these core skills, but as an Independent Developer you have to be an allrounder. gSkinner wrote a nice post about the must-have qualifications as a Flash Developer. I would like to add the points doing project management and creating networks to this list. An (Flash) Independent Developer has to be fancy to do project management tasks and get in touch with other people. If you don't like it, then you should not become an (Flash) Independent Developer! But I think the completely different charakter of the tasks make the life of an (Flash) Independent Developer so much more interesting. Read more...
I have already mentioned it in an earlier blog post that I am still working on a vimeo component for the Adobe AIR environment. Now I have created version which is stable enough for a intensive testings. So if you would like to use it for your Air Application, don't hesitate to use it. I would be very happy about some feedback messages from you.
Now I describe some special functionality compared to my FlexVimeo Player component. Because of the incompatible command Security.allowDomain() in the Adobe Air environment (which is essential for working with the Vimeo Moogaloop API ), I had to create a seperate remote player. This remote player receives control message and send control messages via LocalConnection to the AirVimeoPlayer Component. So if you use my AirVimeoPlayer Component, you must always use my remote_vimeo.swf File for controlling the Vimeo Moogaloop API. It works in the same way as the youTube AS3 API Wrapper.
The other not so nice thing is that I ran in some perfomance issue because of sending to many messages via LocalConnection. So I had to put down the amount of update message for the PlayingState.Playing, but that should not be problem for you. In my cases it works fine.
More than 2 years ago I wrote a blog post about Flash Game Programming. Since this blog post until today a lot of actions happens in the Flash Game Community. Some Flash Game Developer created great classes, libraries and frameworks, which makes our life as a Flash Game Developer so much simpler. In this blog post I would like to give a short overview which tools are available at the moment.
General Frameworks & Classes
In this category you can find tools, which solve some common problems like resource management, loading processes, screen management, level management and so on
