A long while back, I released a layout organizer library for Flash. The whole project was essentially an experiment-turned-released-code-collection and, as expected, there have been some growing pains going forward. I have been taking the time to rethink portions of the library and try to clean up and extend its functionality. One big push forward was the introduction of 3d layouts — however, it did not quite fit in with the prior structure. Well, I am very close to completing a fairly thorough rewrite of the library, which will be released in a less haphazard way. I have come to depend on this library for almost every project I have taken on — it just takes care of so much for you automatically. Read the rest of this post…
Archive for the ‘Design Technology’ Category
A while back, I published some work on AS3 layout organizers. The basic premise was to use virtual “containers” of a collection of DisplayObjects to create special layouts, such as a grid or ellipse. The project turned out to be quite enjoyable and I have used this library for almost every project I have worked on since I wrote it. With Flash 10’s introduction of 3d, it seemed appropriate to branch out these organizers into their 3d counterparts. In addition, I have spent a considerable amount of time re-writing a large portion of the core code to make it easier to use and more efficient. I was hoping to release the code in this post as well, but it just is not quite there yet. So, consider this a preview of the revamped library. Read the rest of this post…
I truly am loving how I can take a piece of code and begin to have it exist in various mediums. This experiment was actually posted to my Vimeo account quite a while ago, but I wanted to output this project as a vector piece as well. I actually think my previous project would be ended up as a good candidate for vector output as well - I may go back and add that at a later time. This project was just another test on playing with motion preceding my knowledge of the noise() method. Looking back, a similar look in motion could have been achieved with far fewer lines of code. Nonetheless, I think the final result ended up being quite nice.
I hope to continue to have the time to post these projects. I feel as though I am (slowly) getting a grasp on how this whole Processing thing works. My goal is to cross-pollinate any future Processing projects with Flash/Flex projects. I have a few ideas on how that may just happen.
I have really fallen in love with Processing, but I had been had hit a bit of a plateau in terms of progress in the past month or so. I never really have spent too much time with algorithmic motion/drawing. When I jumped into Flash, I went straight towards the Tween class and never spent much time trying to work in the EnterFrame-loop based motion design. Because of this, learning how to work with Processing’s draw() loop has been a bit foreign and one can only find so many ways to implement sine/cosine motion treatments.
Luckily, I ran across the simply stunning work of Robert Hodgin who just happened to offer up his source code. After looking through one of his projects and banging away at it, I ended up learning a quite a bit on how motion can end up looking more organic and sporadic. This particular project used the noise() method as its basis for motion jittering. I had not even known such a method existed. After hacking up Robert’s source, I came up with some really interesting form experiments using Robert’s general motion concepts.
I am putting more work into my Layout Organizers project for various reasons. First, this code has already been quite helpful on a couple projects. Second, it is going to be worked in to a really cool open source Flex library. There are still a ton of features that need to be added and issues that need to be resolved, but progress is definitely being made. I spent time working on more primitive layout organizers that will be more helpful on everyday projects. The four new organizers are not anything fancy, but they will most likely be the most used out of all the ones I write.
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I am also starting to wrap more base functionality into the layout organizers such as the swap positions - there are still a few bugs that need to be worked out with this feature, but it’s moving along. If you have any ideas or thoughts on how to improve this project, by all means, let me know.
