Dev Shed looks like a great resource for all sorts of programming. I’m sure I will be visiting it for more information on CSS, XML, Java etc.
Monthly Archive for April, 2004
While I have been known to quote Lunenfeld and write about how “unfinish defines the aesthetic of digital media”* and so on, the truth is that I’m finding it hard to post things to this weblog which are unfinished.
When I’m uploading little Quicktime experiments I want them to be finished before I reveal them to the world. Even when I’m just posting a link to a website I tend to store the link as a draft for ages before I write something about it and the post is finished.
I need to do something about this… just post it.
I actually like it when I read someone else’s half idea, or see a work in progress. I think it also makes for more interesting comments and discussion.
So watch for more activity and half finished ideas.
* Lunenfeld, P. (1999). Unfinished Business. The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. P. Lunenfeld. Cambridgw, The MIT Press: 7-22.
This is an experiment in inter-movie communication. With Quicktime a movie can send information from one movie to another. The movie files can communicate when they are either embedded into one web page (like this page) or when they are open in separate windows in the Quicktime Player application (you can download the two movies to test this).
In this case the orange movie on the left sends some text across to the white movie on the right. While this may not seem all that amazing, it could be sending much more interesting information and the movie receiving the information could be processing or interpreting it in interesting ways. I’ve chosen to send simple text just because it it is a very handy way of testing if a script is working.
| CODEBASE="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab"> |
The first movie xtexttestsender.mov is made up of a sprite track and a text track.
The sprite track contains one sprite, which has the following script assigned to the “Mouse Click” event.
MovieNamed(“xtexttest.mov”).TrackNamed(“Text 1″).SetTextEditstate(kscriptediting)
MovieNamed(“xtexttest.mov”).TrackNamed(“Text 1″).ReplaceText(“BANG”, 0, 0)
The second movie xtexttest.mov is simply a single text track. The important things are that the movie is called “xtexttest.mov” and that the text track is named “Text 1” so that the above script finds its target. The first line of the script is telling the track named “Text 1” in the movie named “xtexttest.mov” to make the text field editable by a script, setting it to “kscriptediting“. The second line is telling the movie to insert the text “BANG” into the same text track. The ““BANG”, 0, 0” tells the movie not to overwrite the text which was previously in the track. If we had changed the first number to 2 the first two letters of “Here” would have been removed, if the second number was two the last two letters would have been removed.
I have included the LiveStage Pro .lsd files for the two movies here: xtexttestsender.lsd xtexttest.lsd
So anyone with a full copy of LSP or even a demo can have a play with my scripts. In this case the script is very simple, but I’m starting to post all my .lsd files so you should be able see the scripting getting more complex as I learn more.
[The User] are a Canadian artist collective, formed by Thomas McIntosh and Emmanuel Madan. As they write on their website, “[The User] inhabits the trailing edge of technology”, focussing on alternate uses for obsolete technology. Their most famous work Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers was recently sampled by Radiohead in their excellent radiohead.tv. The work involves the sequencing of multiple dot matrix printers to produce rhythmic patterns of noises. Video and MP3 samples are available on the website.
Their most recent work Silophone opens interaction up to users anywhere in the world through a web interface. ‘Users’ can upload sound files to a server and trigger their playback into a giant empty silo. The resulting sounds are then streamed back to the user via realaudio.
ClownStaples is a source of many interactive flash animations. My favourite (while not strictly interactive) is a pun on the loading of flash animated splash screens. It proceeds in an increasingly complex series of loading screens without end. Unfortunately since the site his hosted by Geocities it is often unavailable due to limited data transfer.
