Monday, April 28, 2008

A Bit a Beta


I've seen some amazing drawings done by the troopers in the last day or two, and hope to get that gallery up before I leave to visit my mother and help her move to a new room.

The evil and wondrous image above is a screen capture from my beta experiment. Informed sources say that Norman drew it.

I had to try one more experiment before I left the home base. I wanted to see if it would be possible to make a drawing dynamically and then import it into Flash. If that worked out, then you could make dynamic Flash greeting cards, for instance, or strangely personalized Flash movies.

So I put some code together, and took it apart, and rearranged it, and lost most of the day on this. Finally it works in a beta sort of way.

Draw a head in the box below. fill the head in- ie no white space or it will look kind of weird. You'll see. If you want to give it a black line, do that after you've filled it in. Press create head.



Then wait about 30 seconds. Press the button in the second app, sound on (or not).
If you don't want to draw a head, just press the button- you'll see someone's head on the body.




I coded it just for one head, so the next person who tries it will overwrite your little head. If you don't see your head, try refreshing the page, or clearing your cache if you know how to do that. I haven't tested it yet in Blogger. It may work better directly from the html page. It may not work at all.

Still, it's a new step when you can put a dynamic image in a Flash movie, and I'm sure I'll try more of this when I have more time.

7 comments:

Linda Davick said...

Oh.
ohohoh
Oh my god.

Namowal (Jennifer Bourne) said...

Ha ha!
Sweet!

Anonymous said...

Gosh I want to try all these things but for once I really have work to do!

Sally said...

The one I just saw is so darn evil and cute, I've got to do a screen shot. Knowing that it works this far, I can see how weird dual character things could go on, especially throwing in some AI code so one character responds to the other, and you have a variety of peronas possible for each of the two characters. You could even upload a photo for the character's face.

changing my mind about this new code--AS3-- though it's a mighty pain to learn, there are definitely amazing options.

Funny thing is, the code behind all this postcard stuff I've been doing is not actually part of AS3 but an add on through google free code. At the Adobe smartpeople offically sanctioned forum no one seemed to know about the google code library that makes this possible.

I realize most of you are not at all interested in code-- you probably even know how to work your remote controls.

Code is cool. You can never be smart enough, not even with smart pills.

Anonymous said...

I love that character at the top of this post! I have been fascinated with code when working on websites. It is magical! It does require devoting oneself to it for long periods of time. You just can't leave it alone till something works!

Namowal (Jennifer Bourne) said...

To me code is like fractal geometry, chaos theory and quantum mechanics. It's a struggle to learn, but it's so cool!

Anonymous said...

Hey nice blog my friend.There is unique web-based system that allows you to send real greeting cards online with a click of your mouse! You choose type message and upload a picture into your card . We print stuff ,stamp and send it!