xcode

tresor backstage, 1am, get to the final compile of here+now for the 3am performance. there is never enough time in this world, and for experimental projects on the side doubly so. the dream of just hanging out at a festival…

after a month with a heavy dose of xcode on the side, its up to newcastle clutching two fledgling applications to marry with newcastle library’s digitised photo archive, a bunch of iMacs clustered around a 1080P plasma screen, and the memories of the visiting public. it was a heavy weekend of being there with the installation by day and further coding by night, but out of this a very real and user tested photobank has been born.

as the latest manifestation of my personal practice, and something that will very likely become part of my PhD research, there is much more to say than a quick diary post can stretch to. so the full project page will come, i guess in the meantime its easiest to point the lineage to kinetxt which was - with novak - my first attempt at creating an environment where layers of interpretation are encouraged, and they in turn add up to something interesting and unexpected. photobank tries to address this in a more focussed and repeatable way, starting with a base of media archive, and ending with a flow of illustrated short verse.

at the nuts and bolts level, its a full screen photo browsing and annotation application that can be run on many computers for mass interaction by the public, which are networked to a central computer holding the photo archive and running the central display, which acts as both an attractor for the public, animating through the archive and latest annotatations, and as the writer’s tool for creating and showing mini-narratives by selecting six photos and their annotations, and handwriting short verse around them. all written as native mac osx applications using objective-c/cocoa and quartz composer.

and if chase & status wasn’t enough to be getting on with, there was also a long awaited project with moving brands, of which neither i nor they can talk about beyond saying i sat behind a mac and xcode for a week.

…and now having used it in anger, here we have

• Added bounds feature, to give you all the sizing information you need to block out your calligraphy renderers.
• Fixed a crashing bug triggered by sending a clear all lines signal mid-stroke
• Added an advanced example derived from KineTXT development. Use space to send chunks of calligraphy to the screen, as if you were writing on a horizontal scroll.

…and here is the bugfix release.

• fixed purge last object exception
• removed unused boilerplate methods
• added zPos to animator
• ordered ports (arrange in @dynamic line)
• fixed x,y mis-patch in sample qtz file

KineTXT has spurred many custom plug-ins, generally either esoteric or usurped by kineme or the next major release of QC. the latest however probably deserves to see the wider light of day, and so here is a snap-shot of it having just passed a notional ‘v1.0’. its two patches designed to capture and render handwriting and doodles from a tablet, but they should be pretty useful to anyone who wishes for some form of digital graffiti in their QC compositions.

if you want anti-aliasing, you’ll need to leave the QC app behind unfortunately, but if you can run without the patching editor window its just three lines of code to add to the qc player sample application and voila: this plugin and all 3D geometry become anti-aliased. vade worked it all out and outlines the territory here: http://abstrakt.vade.info/?p=186.

if you want different nibs, pen-on-paper-like textures or suchlike… well i have my needs and ideas, but the source is there. share and share alike!

the plug-in is released under gplv3, and is attached below.

a little sneak peek of a quartz composer plug-in in development: spk-calligraphy, a set of patches for recording and playing back 2d strokes. the basic patch is equivalent to the kineme GL line structure patch, but draws the line as if it were a chisel nib at 45° and with a flow fade-out. the other two are what is going to enable a big part of the next kinetxt development: handwriting to go alongside the rendered text.

and here’s another, in a slightly less formal environment. suffice to say, the tv feature is used a lot more here!

i’ve been somewhat remiss in not posting up the finished mpc screen, but thanks to a little cover work there i had the chance to go round and take some photos of it out in the wild. so here is the one i’ll always remember most as it was the first screen to be was deployed in the wild.

in its menu it has around thirty 1080P showreels and vfx breakdowns of the various film and commercial work, along with the ability to browse documentation pdfs and the mpc client and public facing web sites, and 15 channels of tv to flick between. for anything that isn’t suited to that branded, full screen environment, the last option flips the screen into a mac desktop with finder etc., complete with apple-store style desktop buttons giving quick access to all the apps that might be wanted in a meeting room. best of all, it will time out back to the full screen carousel menu, and then time out to its own screensaver, so as you walk around the building the screens always showing something visually pleasing and branded into the building.

its been quite a project, and that doesn’t even touch the system administration side.

it might not be the most exciting photo, but this desk has seen three weeks coding a big project for a soho production house. “would you like to make something akin to “front row” to aggregate the content and services at this facility, to fit on all the 50” plasmas we’re about to get in the building?” “yes please.”