waaaaaay back in the year 2009 i made this procedural mesh that i called zipper. i was inspired to do something that was like a bunch of layers pulling apart with spiky breaks.

awhile back i was thinking it'd be fun to try that again with spheres instead of planes.  i haven't gotten it to look at all like i've been picturing in my head yet but here are a few of the WIPs...

the way it came out so far made me think it'd be fun to animate it and have the different layers rotating around. this turns it into a horrific blender of sorts haha :)  using imagemagick again as i did with random particle fun i made some animated gifs for this guy

each gif is 48 frames and the layers rotate in different directions and speeds but ensure that after the 48 frames they are in an orientation that gives the exact same appearance as where they started. this way it just goes on forever and ever (always ready to blend up a strawberry smoothie or something)

so as i mentioned it's not what i had in mind yet so i'll be doing some more experiments with the zipper ball and post further updates in the future... perhaps 2017? :)

it’s cool you can now do easy links to the iOS App Store via appstore.com.  instead of funky random itunes ids you now just use the name of the app - pretty minor but nice and convenient too. by the way here are a few really important ones!  :P

http://AppStore.com/SketchClub
http://AppStore.com/FireSkull
http://AppStore.com/PlasmaEffect

woot! released version 1.17 of Sketch Club this past month! \o/

it was refreshing doing a bunch of native UI with this update. most of the community stuff has been web based with UIWebView and that’s definitely nice for fluid layouts and such but it’s rather slow and dealing with three languages (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) is a headache. that’s in comparison to native using just one language (Objective C) and getting nice fast hardware accelerated views and animations. maybe doing UI in HTML canvas could be a good way to do things in the future instead of wrangling silly markup and styles but at that point the Objective C APIs are again much better, run faster, and have better tools supporting them…

another thing that was quite nice is that the App Store review times have gotten really short!! it used to always take five to seven days for an update to get reviewed and approved but now updates are flying through in under a day each! soooooo much nicer!! some things about the App Store have gotten worse though. previously doing an update would reset the ratings and reviews, but would show total ratings across all versions of the app for a couple days. that actually provided a nice boost in sales before dropping as the ratings reset. now it seems to reset to 0 immediately so sales are squashed until enough people start rating the new version. iOS6 also removed the section that displayed new and newly updated apps so you don’t get that boost from updates anymore either. oh well i hope they improve this stuff with iOS7!

i knew i wasn't going to be able to make it out to pixelj.am 2012 but i at least wanted to contribute an entry to the demo compo.  i asked basementdigital to see if i he'd be up for doing a tune.  we'd been wanting to do a demo together for yeaaaaars so finally made it happen!  with only a few days i thought it'd be fun to try doing a browser demo with javascript and planned to do it friday before the party on the weekend.  it was like wednesday night after basementdigital sent me the track he made that i found out remote entries were actually due the following morning!! yikes!  i loved the tune he did and couldn't let him down so stayed up to quickly put together the code and visuals for our entry.

it's a browser demo so the code is in javascript though i actually wrote it in coffeescript which then compiles to javascript.  i had coded demos like n-0505 and the blockparty invite in python so it was great to find coffeescript and replace a lot of the wackiness of javascript with something cleaner and more familiar feeling.  the 3D is hardware accelerated with webgl (so requires a newer browser like google's chrome to view) and uses the sweet three.js library by mr. doob.

since i only had some hours i kept things very simple and used only colored lines for the whole thing.  the letters and symbols are rendered also as lines and are glyphs from the hershey vector font.  i had fun just typing in wacky equations to get some motion then semi randomly tweaking until i'd get a nice happy accident that looked nice to me.  each of the scenes was done that way.  for sync with the audio i used the time honored technique of hitting a button on the keyboard each time i heard something interesting in the audio and gathering up all those time offsets from the debug console to toss into the code.

i like how it turned out in the end.  very short and simple but pleases my eyes and ears. :)  i hope you like it too!  you can watch it on vimeo or youtube or even better run it directly in your browser!  if you have a pouet.net account be sure to rate and leave a comment!

had some fun messing with particles the other night.  i made them fly between nodes switching once getting close enough to their target and all the while leaving behind trails.  i thought it'd be cool to kick out animated gifs and found the imagemagick convert tool made this super easy (convert -delay 1 image_*.png test.gif)

you can check out some more on my flickr particle set