I love HTML5 Boilerplate and use it a lot as a basis for web projects. Sometimes however, I find it still does a little bit too much for my needs and I end up removing a lot before I can get started.

Most importantly for me though, it still currently doesn’t support building with Google Closure Compiler which I tend to use both for it’s advanced code optimisations and for coding better Object-Oriented JavaScript (not to mention generating JavaScript documentation from the very same comments I write for the compiler).

So What’s Springboard Then?

Springboard is an ultra minimal JavaScript / CSS and HTML project template (or springboard).

It features a very useful ANT build file which, among other things, can:

• Refactor template files to match your project’s namespace so you’re ready to code in seconds
• Combine JavaScript and CSS libraries to reduce HTTP requests
• Compile JavaScript using the Google Closure Compiler (simple or advanced)
• Minify CSS using the YUI Compressor
• Generate JavaScript documentation using the JSDoc Toolkit
• Sanitize HTML and inject variables at compile time

Also included is a simple JavaScript Model-View-Controller (MVC) template (based on Alex Netkachov’s) which can optionally be used as a basis for your project.

Hopefully No fluff – just the very basics you need to get a project or experiment started.

Check out Springboard on github

Quick Setup

To get started, first clone the repository:

cd /your/workspace
git clone git@github.com:soulwire/Springboard.git YourProjectName

Run the setup task and enter your project’s namespace when prompted:

cd YourProjectName
ant setup
Enter the full project namespace for this project: com.domain.project

This will refactor the project template to match your namespace. You’ll then be given the option to delete the GIT metadata and disconnect from the Springboard repository…

You can build your project with the default ANT task, build

ant build

And when you’re ready, generate documentation using the jsdoc task

ant jsdoc

You should also have a look at the build.properties file as here you can add your credentials and tweak the various build settings to your taste.

A Quick Note About Blocks

Springbard uses HTML comment blocks to figure out how it should build the project. There are different types of blocks you can use:

• CSS:LIB » Third party CSS files (combined and minified)
• CSS:SRC » Your project’s styles (combined and minified)
• JS:LIB » JavaScript dependancies (combined but otherwise left untouched)
• JS:SRC » JavaScript source files (combined and compiled)

Any linked JavaScript or CSS resources outside of these tags will simply be cloned into the build directory and left untouched for flexibility.

Springboard will look at all of your pages when it builds and combine all files in all blocks of the same type. There is then a generic document ready handler, which initialises scripts for a page based on the id tag of it’s body. This is best illustrated in this example.

A Quick Note About Externs

If you’ve used the Closure Compiler before, you’ll be familiar with Externs. Externs tell the compiler not to refactor certain methods and properties, because doing so may break your code if they reference a third party library or code not being compiled. Springboard currently ships with an externs file supporting JQuery 1.5, just to get you going. You can easily generate more for your favorite libraries using this great tool by Laurentiu Macovei or others like it.

What Springboard Doesn’t Do

The primary intention of Springboard is to provide a simple but powerful project template and build file, which integrates with the Closure Compiler as well as doing the basics which you would expect; such as file concatenation and CSS minification. It’s intended to be extremely light and minimal, allowing you to take the project kernel forward in whichever way you need; whether it’s a large site build or a quick JavaScript experiment. I would imagine that future updates will strip it back and optimise it even further, as opposed to adding features.

So to be clear, it is in no way intended as a replacement for the amazing projects out there such as HTML5 Boilerplate; simply an option if you need less rather than more in certain situations.

Now fork off and start making nice things…

Related posts:

1. What The Fuck Is My Mashup?
2. Hello Dynamic Sprite
3. Perlin Noise Flow Field

Music is Ybe 76 by Subheim

I’ve been trying to find more time lately to experiment with C++ and get more familiar with the OpenGL API and to achieve this have been using the excellent Cinder library. I’m a complete C++ novice and, coming from a Flash background, it’s immediately apparent how much of the hard work had been done for you in higher level languages like AS3. Learning about pointers, memory allocation and fumbling your way around undescriptive compile errors is bit of an eye opener, although thankfully libraries like Cinder and OpenFrameworks help take a lot of the pain out of the transition and ultimately function as very exciting and inspiring tools to work with.

Up until now I’ve been keeping most of these experiments to myself (although some crop up on my Flickr stream from time to time), but I’ve decided to start sharing the processes when I can – so that you can tell me what I’m doing wrong and teach me the right way! Or, if you’re like me and are used to languages like AS3, JavaScript and Processing / Java, but are wanting to take your creative coding into other environments; maybe you can learn a little bit from what I’ve been trying.

Either way, the Noise Sphere experiment, though not particularly original; made me realise that the processes involved spanned many of the key aspects of programming that I’m both interested in but also keen to learn much more about.

The plan is to release a series of relatively quick tutorials, taking you through the process of creating the sketch you can see in the video above (and far beyond, into OpenGL shaders etc) and in doing so cover roughly the following topics:

• Setting up Cinder
• Geometry: Vectors & Matrices
• Movement & Dynamics
• Procedural Mesh Generation
• OpenGL: GLSL, Vertex & Fragment Shaders

I’m certainly not claiming to be an expert in these topics, in fact in some I’m only just getting started. But my hope is that I can share my discoveries as they happen and pass on knowledge I’ve picked up from the community, in case it helps other developers travelling along similar trajectories to myself. I’ve found a lot of amazing resources for learning, but have often felt that some of them would benefit from being translated for interactive developers such as myself, who come from more of a creative than technical background.

Pester me if part one isn’t out soon!

Related posts:

1. AS3 Particle Node Sequencer
2. AS3 Music Visualisation
3. Perlin Noise Flow Field

The fruits of a Sunday hangover; What The Fuck Is My Mashup? is an idea generator for ridiculous (but sometimes plausible) mashups.

Inspired by What The Fuck Should I Make For Dinner by Zach Golden, WTFIMM is a simple JavaScript based randomiser that takes a series of templates and a corpus of words and turns them into concepts that utilise the latest technologies, APIs and social media platforms.

I’ve abstracted the code into a simple framework which I’ve called the WTF Engine, that allows you to create a generator for any subject.

Here are a few of my favourite generative mashups so far:

• Blackberry application that generates poetry based on Yelp data
• Platform for building Wii controlled, memcached dashboard widgets for Open Frameworks enabled devices
• Windows optimised GMail configurator for social microblogging
• Podcast that generates poetry based on Google Earth data
• Scalable, PHP based Feedburner API explorer with a hand tracking front-end
• Feature detecting blogging platform for Lingo, Haxe and AS3
• Pascal based kiosk to replace data visualisations and hook into GMail via Twitter and Google Maps
• Multi-touch, open source Digg microblogging utility powered by Slashdot and the Google Gears C# API
• Platform for building dynamic, Wii controlled iPad applications for MATLAB enabled devices
• Python based Del.icio.us and GitHub mashup, designed for generative gaming
• Objective C interpreter for creating dynamic microblogging experiences in JavaScript
• Scalable, Wii controlled GitHub shopping utility powered by Foursquare & the Yahoo Pipes API
• Ajax based platform for rapidly developing kiosks based on Google Gears data
• Perl based platform for rapidly developing art installations based on GitHub data

The WTF Engine code and this particular implementation is available in my GitHub repository.

Have fun, and if for any bizarre reason you make one of them, let me know!

http://whatthefuckismymashup.com/

Related posts:

1. Introducing Springboard
2. Smack My Glitch Up
3. AS3 Particle Node Sequencer

Here are my contributions:

you.push(new Christmas(State.MERRY, Size.LITTLE));
you.getOrgan("heart").setDensity(0.0);
you.troubles.setVisible(false);

My take on GrumpyWookie‘s tweet:

if(weather == "frightful") {
	fire.setState("delightful");
	us.velocity.set(0,0,0);
	for(i=0;i< 3;++i) {
		weather.snow();
	}
}

This was picked up by simon_watkins who later added some logic:

for each(Angel angel in angels) {
	angel.addEventListener(AudioEvent.SING, hark);
}

Technically, this would see them ascending into space, but you get the idea!

Vec3 v;
for each(King k in kings) {
	v = star.position - k.position;
	v.normalise();
	v.scale(k.maxSpeed);
	k.position += v;
}

What Christmas would be complete with out a bit of Wham! (that's rhetorical).

heart = you.hearts.pop();
for each(Person someone in world) {
	if(someone.isSpecial()) {
		someone.push(heart);
		return;
	}
}

And if you thought all this Christmas cheer was unbefitting of an Atheist, here's my take on this one:

try {
	God.getInstance().rest(merryGentleman);
} catch(TheologyError error) {
	log("God not found");
	Christmas.abort();
}

I'm not sure whether anyone is archiving these, as they did with SongsInCode but for now you can see more here, here and of course here.

No related posts.

Sometimes it’s good to break things…

During a recent project I needed to find a way of simulating digital interference on an image / video stream. At first, it seemed the best approach might be to use the graphics API or Bitmap effects, but why imitate when you can have the real thing.

The principle is incredibly simple. Corrupt / alter a byte (or several bytes) in the ByteArray of a JPEG and then load this back into a DisplayObject using Loader.loadBytes(). Because of the way in which JPEGs work, the image will still display but the corrupt bytes will mangle the output to varying degrees, depending on how many bytes have been corrupted. The result is an interesting glitch pattern, a bit like those which were accidentally created when my webcam drivers lost the plot.

It is also possible to corrupt other image formats (png, gif etc) in the same way, by first passing the image ByteArray through a JPEGEncoder.

I’ve implemented this technique in the Glitchmap class, which you can download and play with at the bottom of this post. I hope that it will provide a few moments of fun, if not a practical use (I’m thinking image gallery transitions or music visualisations).

The small gottcha is that it isn’t desirable to mess with the JPEG headers, so when the clean ByteArray is passed to the Glitchmap class, it will determine the length of the header by reading through the bytes until it finds the SOS (start of scan) declaration (0xFFDA). The next two bytes represent the length of the SOS, so it skips forward by this amount – the resulting position in the ByteArray should be the end of the header, and so between this point and the EOI (end of image) the data corruption takes place. I’m not sure whether this is the best way of determining the JPEG header size; perhaps any CS graduates / students out there can help me out?

After I posted the webcam glitch images, Jon used them in his title sequences for the 48 hour film gala. If you find a similar creative use for this script or the glitch generator then please let us all know.

I think the next step is to experiment with merging the bytes of multiple glitched images in order to create transition effects. I may also build an AIR app and see what the best way of outputting video might be (using NativeProcess for screen capture perhaps?).

You can also download the Glitchmap Class and the Glitch Generator source code from the soulwire code repository.

Related posts:

1. Webcam Glitch Art
2. ASE (Adobe Swatch Exchange) Encoder
3. Recursive Polygon Subdivision

I’ve been off the web radar for several months. The later part of 2009 saw many changes and, despite being extremely busy with several interesting projects and personal studies, I have somewhat neglected this blog.

Without wishing to bore anyone with the details, I may still post a summary of what I am / have been working on recently – at some point – though for now it will suffice to say that I’m broadening my horizons – getting deeper into Processing and OpenGl and learning C++ with OF, as well as Objective C and the Cocoa Touch framework. As more projects using these technologies arise I hope to share this learning experience with you.

Design

With regards to the re-design; this is by no means the finished article, however I felt it best to push the current theme live so that I can start posting again. I hope that you find it more user friendly than the last edition, and please do leave any suggestions for improvement – it is like most things simply a work in progress.

Objectives

My aim is to continue posting content on a much more frequent basis, though with the philosophy that quality precedes quantity. That said, I will be adding tools to help aggregate my more continuous online activity in an attempt to share more of the work and ideas of others who inspire me, with you.

Now that the site is live, I will post a few catch-up entries over the coming weeks and from there hopefully find a more natural rhythm.

So, for those of you kind enough to listen, that is the egocentric chatter over! I look forward to resuming the dialogue with you – see you around.

No related posts.

Just a quick (and slightly belated) announcement.

The distinguished Bandcamp has recently been regaled with another round of audio-visual snacks. I’ve had a lot of fun working on them, and there will be even more in the not too distant future.

The whole Bandcamp site in fact is bursting with more and more tasty new features which you should check out. In terms of my little contribution on the music visualistions front, there are currently four new full fat flavors to feast on…

Ribbons » which uses my Papervision3D Ribbons Class and is designed for crunching riffs and hard beats.

Strata » which was inspired by stream-graphs and rock formations, and flows like a charred pizza in a log-flume along an imaginary Teflon oven dish.

Plughole » which comprises of disembodied appendages and iconography encapsulating the zeitgeist of generation stupid – mashes the aforementioned archetypes up into crumbs before offering them to the esophagus of oblivion.

Hypno » which was designed to bring about universal harmony and spiritual equilibrium but accidentally caused the credit crunch.

You can see them in action by visiting an artist’s page (such as Hot Bitch Arsenal or Pattern), hitting play and selecting a visualisation from the pop-out menu underneath the cover art.

Related posts:

1. Bandcamp Music Visualisations
2. AS3 Music Visualisation
3. AS3 Particle Node Sequencer

The other clinching factor was it’s plugins, notably Subversive for SVN browsing and team collaboration goodness.

This evening though, I tried checking out a Google code project and got the following error:

SVN: ‘0×00400006: Validate Repository Location’ operation finished with error: Selected SVN connector library is not available or cannot be loaded.
If you selected native JavaHL connector, please check if binaries are available or install and select pure Java Subversion connector from the plug-in connectors update site.

If connectors already installed then you can change the selected one at: Window->Preferences->Team->SVN->SVN Client.

Selected SVN connector library is not available or cannot be loaded.

If you selected native JavaHL connector, please check if binaries are available or install and select pure Java Subversion connector from the plug-in connectors update site.

If connectors already installed then you can change the selected one at: Window->Preferences->Team->SVN->SVN Client.

Basically, it was banging on about connectors, so…

In case anyone is experiencing the same thing, here’s what I did to solve it:

1. Open up the Software Updates and Add-ons dialogue (Help > Software Updates)
2. Click Add Site and enter the Polaron SVN Connectors update site URL:
   http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/
   (I found this on the Polaron download page)
3. Open up the Subversive Connectors Site node, then Subversive SVN Connectors
4. Download the following plugins:
   • Subversive SVN Connectors
   • SVNKit 1.1.7 Implementation

Restart Eclipse (or FDT standalone) when prompted and that seemed to do the trick.

I’m new to FDT and Eclipse, so let me know I was missing something.

No related posts.

Original image by Edwin Tofslie

I was having a few gradient alpha mask disabilities today and thought I should share my misery and consequential solution with anyone who might run into the same problems!

Update: TF pointed out a very simple solution – cacheAsBitmap WILL work, providing you cache the Bitmap as a Bitmap, as you would if you were working with two vector drawings. Why a Bitmap wouldn’t be cached as a Bitmap I don’t fully understand.
Still use the copyPixels method if you want to create a single object and discard the mask, but otherwise don’t listen to me overcomplicating things and do it old school!

As you know, since Flash Player 8 we’ve been able to use an alpha channel when masking display objects. A common implementation is to first draw a gradient that fades from white with opacity 1 to white with opacity 0 and then tell a display object to use this as its mask.

Apparently, however – it’s not always that simple…

In this instance, I was using an embedded image (though the same would be true for a loaded one) which was in PNG format and contained an alpha channel. The alpha channel was crucial as the image was an icon with a transparent background and faded edges. I needed to dynamically mask and fade out this image to create a reflection via code, rather than doing this all in Photoshop. The resulting Bitmap would be sitting on top of a colour changing background, and so transparency was needed on both the original icon shape and the fading reflection – a common enough requirement.

The “cacheAsBitmap” Approach

The simplest way to do this and the technique that I immediately reached for, is to create the mask – being a Shape object with a gradient drawn using its instance of the Graphic class – set it’s cacheAsBitmap property to true and then set the embedded Bitmap’s mask property to use this gradient.

The result:

The code:

[Embed(source = '../lib/image.png')]
private var image:Class;

var myImage:Bitmap = new image as Bitmap;
addChild( myImage );

var matrix:Matrix = new Matrix();
matrix.createGradientBox( myImage.width, myImage.height, Math.PI / 2 );

var gradient:Shape = new Shape();
gradient.graphics.beginGradientFill( 'linear', [0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF], [1, 0], [0, 255], matrix );
gradient.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, myImage.width, myImage.height);
gradient.graphics.endFill();
gradient.cacheAsBitmap = true;

myImage.mask = gradient;

However, presumably due to the fact that the bitmap already contained an alpha channel, the alpha channel of the bitmap-cached gradient shape was ignored, and the result is a mask which is simply the entire area of the gradient box, much like the pre Flash Player 8 mask behaviour of being either on or off and nothing in between. (

The “CopyChannel” Approach

The next approach I tried was to draw the gradient to a new transparent bitmapdata and then use the copyChannel method to copy the alpha channel of the gradient bitmapdata to the bitmapdata of my image.

The result:

The code:

var gradientBitmap:BitmapData = new BitmapData( gradient.width, gradient.height, true, 0 );
gradientBitmap.draw( gradient );

var channel:uint = BitmapDataChannel.ALPHA;

myImage.bitmapData.copyChannel(gradientBitmap, gradientBitmap.rect, new Point(), channel, channel);

Again, an undesirable result – I was left with some kind of graphic monstrosity that was a Frankenstein combination of my wonderfully smooth faded source image and a gradient showing through wherever transparency should have been in the original.

The solution (CopyPixels)

The approach I used in the end was to create a new transparent bitmapdata with the same dimensions of my image, then to use the copyPixels method to copy over the pixels from my source image to the new bitmapdata. The copyPixels method also accepts a parameter for alphaBitmapData, so I passed my gradient bitmapdata to this. Finally, copyPixels also takes a Boolean value for mergeAlpha, so set this to true and the result is a brand new image with the RGB pixel data of the source image and an alpha channel which is a combination of the alpha channels from both the source and the gradient bitmap.

The result:

The code:

var gradientBitmap:BitmapData = new BitmapData( gradient.width, gradient.height, true, 0 );
gradientBitmap.draw( gradient );

var result:BitmapData = new BitmapData( myImage.width, myImage.height, true, 0 );
result.copyPixels(myImage.bitmapData, result.rect, new Point(), gradientBitmap, new Point(), true);

addChild( new Bitmap( result ) );

I’m sure I’ll be mocked by my fellow developers for having been kneecapped by this quite basic problem, but having glanced at a few forum posts it seems common enough. Therefore I felt sharing the solution might be of some benefit.

Full source code:

[Embed(source = '../lib/image.png')]
private var image:Class;

public function Main():void
{
	drawCheckerboardPattern();

	var myImage:Bitmap = new image as Bitmap;

	var matrix:Matrix = new Matrix();
	matrix.createGradientBox( myImage.width, myImage.height, Math.PI / 2 );

	var linear:String = GradientType.LINEAR;
	var colors:Array = [0xFFFFFF, 0xFFFFFF];
	var alphas:Array = [1.0, 0.0];
	var ratios:Array = [0.0, 255];
	var spread:String = SpreadMethod.PAD;

	var gradient:Shape = new Shape();
	gradient.graphics.beginGradientFill( linear, colors, alphas, ratios, matrix, spread );
	gradient.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, myImage.width, myImage.height);
	gradient.graphics.endFill();

	var gradientBitmap:BitmapData = new BitmapData( gradient.width, gradient.height, true, 0 );
	gradientBitmap.draw( gradient );

	var result:BitmapData = new BitmapData( myImage.width, myImage.height, true, 0 );
	result.copyPixels( myImage.bitmapData, result.rect, new Point(), gradientBitmap, new Point(), true );

	addChild( new Bitmap( result ) );
}

private function drawCheckerboardPattern():void
{
	var boxSize:int = 8;

	var pattern:BitmapData = new BitmapData( boxSize * 2, boxSize * 2, false );
	pattern.fillRect( new Rectangle( 0, 0, boxSize, boxSize ), 0xCCCCCC );
	pattern.fillRect( new Rectangle( boxSize, boxSize, boxSize, boxSize ), 0xCCCCCC );

	graphics.beginBitmapFill( pattern );
	graphics.drawRect( 0, 0, stage.stageWidth, stage.stageHeight );
	graphics.endFill();
}

Related posts:

1. Fit DisplayObject into Rectangle
2. BitmapData Average Colours
3. BitmapData Colour Palette

One of the most interesting projects I have worked on recently has just been launched!

It’s called Bandcamp, and is the brain child of Ethan Diamond and Shawn Grunberger, both from Oddpost (which you’ll know these days as Yahoo! Mail).

In short, Bandcamp is a “free hosted publishing platform for musicians”, although there is much more to it than that, including…

• Design customisations and clean, SEO and user friendly URLs for every band
• Automatic transcoding of uploaded tracks to a variety of formats (including lossless)
• The option to give away tracks for free, or to sell them (at either a fixed price or one nominated by the fan who’s buying it, they call it “Name your price”)
• A stats page in the band’s CMS, which shows all complete and partial track listens, incoming links and the general state of the band’s internet rep’, whether it be blog mentions, reviews or who’s embedding their Bandcamp player and where.
• Cool music visualisations as part of their player (more on that in a moment)

…And it’s FREE!

My job was to help make the site even more unique (and sexy!) by creating a library of music visualisations – these provide some eye candy whilst you listen to tracks on a band’s page (or in their embedded player). We strived to avoid the clichéd, generic approach to visualisations (you know what I’m talking about) by giving the user something a wee bit special to gawk at. It wouldn’t be fair if ears got all the love!

Here’s a few quick screengrabs of the first 5 visualisations (more visualisations are on their way soon)…

The power behind the visuals is a customised version of the AS3 music visualisation engine I’ve been working on for some time now, which includes beat detection and a whole host of other methods for interpreting a stream, ready for visualising.

The guys at Bandcamp have been really supportive in allowing me to develop this library with a view to releasing the API in order for Flash developers to build and upload their own visualisations for use within the Bandcamp player.

Furthermore, because the visualiser has been a pet project of mine since the release of AS3, come December I’ll be open sourcing the engine so that anyone can build on it, or simply use it out of the box to produce some optical delights of their own.

Anyway, I’m really excited that Bandcamp has been unleashed on the public and I encourage you to check it out, especially if you’re a musician, or like music, or pretty visuals, or cool technologies, or great ideas, or websites…

Want to know more about Bandcamp?

Then watch the screencast (bellow) and chat about it on Vimeo, browse on over to bandcamp.mu, peruse the FAQs and see it in action!

Related posts:

1. More Music Visualisations
2. Disabed Algebra
3. AS3 Music Visualisation