http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea Thoughts and rants by Arthur Clemens en-us Copyright 2008 by contributing authors TWiki Administrator [arthur@visiblearea.com] The contributing authors of things visible - things imaginable things visible - things imaginable http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea http://visiblearea.com/blog/pub/TWiki/TWikiLogos/T-logo-140x40-t.gif http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/About About me, Arthur Clemens I live in with my wife http://dekko.nl/ Karin Arink and 2 children: Miha and Jin earn my money at Boys in Amsterdam as User Experience Strategist work at TWiki The Open Source Wiki for the Enterprise (used to create this site as well) work at Library: an ActionScript 3 library of practical, reusable, pattern based solutions for common challenges in Flash applications created Code documentation generator for Flash ActionScript 2.0, ActionScript 3.0 and Java created Slovar the Slovene Dutch dictionary created programmed http://www.skor.nl/artefact 339 en.html Bump! (C and OpenGL) for my wife Karin programmed the portfolio website of Christ programmed http://www.inn site.com/ created interaction design and did programming of studied at http://www.rijksakademie.nl/ Rijksakademie and the de Kooning Academy View my profile 2008-04-30T20:37:48Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/Designing_a_stereo_sound_control I have been reviving using http://processing.org Processing. I am still pleased with the simple and intuitive audio interface, but what bugs me is the design of the stereo controls. Especially with multiple overlapping sound areas, the stereo circles create "circle noise" it becomes difficult so see which circle belongs to which sound. Time for a little research for alternative designs. The following diagrams show the sound area move control in red, and the stereo sound control in blue. At the left side the left and right channels are in balance; at the right the audio is panned halfway the right. The current stereo control: Possible alternatives... The stereo sound as a masked background: As a curved line segment, with a smaller circle as control: The curved line segment as draggable control: A small draggable line inside (below) the move control: I like the clean look of the last design best. But because of the small size the affordance needs some work. 2008-04-30T20:29:54Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/HEMAandTheWayThingsGo Some months ago HEMA launched a viral animation. A great idea and beautifully executed by the !FlashFabriek at Satama that has attracted a lot of people to the redesigned site of the HEMA. For non Dutch readers: this is the department store where 90% of the Dutch population shops. I was member of the small team at Lost Boys that created the redesign of online HEMA shop that went live summer 2007. As the shop feels (partly) mine, I wished I had created that viral as well! This animation comes with a tradition. Firstly it brings to mind the Honda Cog commercial for the Honda Accord. (for better quality see the res !QuickTime movie) This kind of cause and effect is called a Goldberg machine, named after the famous American cartoonist that created complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways (entry). Of course the goal of these contraptions is the ingenuity of the chains. It is a world in itself where ordinary things and sudden relationships between things become ... 2008-04-27T22:00:47Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/Older_Work_Rijksakademie_2000 The interface I created with Dessislava Karoushkova (concepting) for the Open Ateliers of the Rijksakademie Amsterdam where we did our final year (2000). Created with Macromedia Director. Some notes on the design: Every artist (participant) had one virtual room to show his or her work. They could choose which sides (of 6 ) to use. The images of the work made up the walls. Video works were possible. To show videos in 3d I created 10 second animated GIFs from the movies to show on the walls. On clicking the zoomed image would change into a !QuickTime movie. The QT movies was often smaller than the animated GIF! (ahem) The entrance to each studio was through a name cloud. The cloud had 4 appearances: dense cloud, dispersed cloud, alphabetical vertical list and scrolling horizontal list. A mouse rollover on a name would evoke a piano sound. I created more liveliness by randomly changing the loudness of each note. I built a CMS to manage participant names, images ... 2008-04-27T21:55:18Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/InnSite I would like to point you to the new site for Inn Amsterdam: http://www.inn site.com/ Inn is an international agency for Dutch photographers Marcel Christ and Morad Bouchakour (who has also created the new photography style for HEMA). Design: Esther Noyons. !ActionScript: me. Created with Framework. CMS created with TWiki. 2008-04-27T21:49:38Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/BlogPostList 2008-04-27T21:37:16Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/WebHome All posts: 2008-04-27T21:36:13Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/BlogCategory Interesting VisDoc Cinema Processing ActionScript Interface Art "}% 2008-04-27T20:22:09Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/Sitemap /VisibleArea/$name"}% View sitemap file: /sitemap.txt 2007-09-30T21:19:17Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/RefactoringActionQueue I have been working hard at my ActionQueue for the ASAP Framework. Ironically, because I had written an implementation in Java for Processing during my last holidays, I just found a new way to solve my problem in ActionScript! Read my ASAP post refactoring for ActionScript 3. 2007-09-30T21:12:10Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/HowtocenteraFlashmovie Problem: 1 I want to show a large Flash movie in a small window 1 The movie should not be scaled larger than 100% Solution: use a liquid layout and constrain the scale from small to 100%, not larger. Problem 2: Flash publish settings are not much help to you. Sure, you can set width and height to 100%, and set Scale to "No scale". But that will move the movie past the top left corner when you drag the window small. The actual solution is to manage scaling in ActionScript. It took me a while to work it out properly, so I want to share it with you it may save you considerable time. View the demo movie resize the window to view the effect Of course you can make the scaling rules more sophisticated see for example Volver movie site. The code: // set movie size constants var MOVIE MAX WIDTH:Number 550; var MOVIE MAX HEIGHT:Number 400; // in this example we use an offset on all sides var MOVIE PADDING V:Number 2; var MOVIE PADDING H:Number 2; // invoke "onResize" Stage.scaleMode ... 2007-09-22T13:16:11Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/ProcessingandChucK Update 15 September 2007: I have fixed the code so it will now run on Windows too see also Processing and ChucK 'Hello World' demo A couple of weeks ago colleague Barth mentioned to me. I knew the works of http://acg.media.mit.edu/ John Maeda and Ben Fry from a number of years back, but I found it too small, too closed at that time. Now I was surprised by the growth of the platform and the community. I decided to give Processing a try during my holidays. More about that work later... Linked on the Processing site I found ChucK, a new audio programming language. I see a lot of possibilities to create audio by visual means. I have created a demo application to let Processing and Chuck talk to each other through OSC. The demo loads 4 audio files. Volume and panning values are controlled by Processing and sent to ChucK. ChucK analyses the sound spectrum and sends back analysis data. This is a non interactive sketch, but interactivity would be trivial to add. PS: if this demo looks a bit ... 2007-09-15T20:30:49Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/ProcessingandChucKHelloWorlddemo Update 15 September 2007: I have fixed the code so it will now run on Windows too; when a new process is created it now uses Runtime.exec to set the working directory to data . My first Processing and ChucK demo had a major pain you needed to start and stop ChucK from the command line. No longer! In this new demo Processing sends out messages to monitor.ck . When this program no longer receives any updates it shuts down ChucK. So starting and stopping ChucK is now done by Processing. The demo sends mouse coordinates (x and y) to a ChucK application, helloworld.ck , to change freqency and harmonics of a 'Blit' (STK band limited impulse train). This is how the demo looks like (listen with headphones): Downloads (updated 15 September 2007) Demo application (Mac, Windows, Linux) The Readme text with installation instructions Source code for Processing and ChucK 2007-09-15T18:33:39Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/Wolfsbergen This week I went to see Wolfsbergen, written and directed by Leopold. A beautiful film rich in structure and full of interwoven contrasts using the ordinary to cover major themes of life. I won't repeat the plot here as it has been told elsewhere. Also because this is a movie, and the story is just a small part of the whole experience. Wolfsbergen is markedly visual, using all available means of cinema to bring the concepts across. I think Nanouk has done a magnificent job. The film is just extraordinary. Bias note: I know Nanouk from my former life as an artist. We even went to the same art class, but our work was very different then. And halfway the nineties I went into multimedia and she went to make films. Somehow Nanouk's films strike me as familiar, quite strongly. As a part of me, really. Today I got confirmed. a video interview Nanouk tells us she uses space as a means to express the movie characters. The way I read this, the surrounding space is in fact an intrinsic part of their ... 2007-09-08T20:04:32Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/IntelMacandYES After having worked on my faithful G4 Powerbook for the last 2 years, I finally got a beautiful fast brand new Intel Mac from work this week. YES! First thing I did was to test VisDoc. The latest bug reports I got were all from people using Intel Macs, so I was getting suspicious there might be something platform related. To my dismay I found out my users had been right. And the output very wrong. Something peculiar goes on in Intel's internals. A simple function like (BOOL)isConst { return mType containsObject:@"const" ; } should return a BOOL , right? Apparently not anymore, because inMember isConst now happily returns a pointer and that is never a NO or 0. To get reliable results I need to cast every boolean return value to BOOL: (BOOL) inMember isConst . Redundant but it does the job. 2.0.1 should fix all outstanding bugs for Mac Intel computers. 2007-08-31T21:45:18Z ArthurClemens http://visiblearea.com/blog/bin/view/VisibleArea/VisDoc VisDoc My javadoc style documentation generator for ActionScript. See: http://visiblearea.com/visdoc I have started VisDoc in 2004 when I was looking for a doc tool for our (now Open Source) ActionScript Framework. It is written in Cocoa and runs on Mac OS X. 2007-08-25T00:35:14Z ArthurClemens