Entries tagged with "flash"
Sunday 13 May 2007
When Adobe unveiled their newly designed array of “two letter” application icons, I was among the skeptics. All programs are now represented by a coloured box reminiscent of an element in the periodic table. Many argue that this makes them indistinguishable from one another - even more so for anyone with a degree of colour-blindness (doubtless this is less common among the design pros that make up Adobe’s core audience, but still).
After some consideration, though, I don’t think it’ll be any worse than before. I mostly use Photoshop and Illustrator, and I’ve confused the two on occasion because, no matter how different the imagery, they’ve been designed to look like they’re part of an integrated brand identity, which means they feel similar. I think part of my brain saw the “PS7 eye” and “AI10 Venus” and lumped them together under the heading “face”; ditto the “pretty pastel nature imagery” from CS2 (actually tinted x-ray photos). Maybe “Ai” and “Ps” will be a better compromise.
Of course, I’ll have to get used to the colours. I’m not much of a kinaesthete, but “Ai” is clearly bright red as far as I’m concerned… unfortunately, red is the traditional brand colour for Flash. And by rights “ID” (InDesign) ought to be gold or brown. At least they were sensible enough to make “Ps” blue!
But we’ll see, won’t we… It may well be that CS3-style icons work well for some people, and pictorial icons for others. I’d like to see some hard evidence one way or another.
Anyway. A few weeks ago, I was shopping and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw a display of colour-coded two-letter packages for, of all things, organic pasta. Red/K for kamut, green/S for spelt, beige/G for durum (
grano duro), brown/I for whole wheat (
integrale). I can’t find any other images of their new packaging on the web - not even on
Felicetti’s site - and I presume it’s a very recent redesign. Was idea-stealin’ involved, or is it just coincidence?
Saturday 12 May 2007
I’ve been messing about with Flash and Actionscript lately, and one of my big motivations was was wanting to finish the Presonance site.
Some months ago, I started trading files with Rezo Largul, and we decided to use the name “Presonance” for our collaboration, and “Mycestene” as a name for an eventual CD. So far we’ve completed four tracks and have a couple of others in the works. The finished ones are now up, along with some pretty little visualizations (yup, there’s the Flash programming coming into play). Spacy analogue waltzes, mysterious orchestral arrangements colliding with mad electronic rhythms, a dose of Casseiopean free jazz…
Have a listen! You can download the tracks there too.
And in the acoustic world, another Toronto lamppost has been graced with its own
built-in bass. Now that I’ve got a new digital audio recorder I’ll have to pay the new “Garrison Creek” bass a visit. All hail RGB for bringing more music to our parks and sidewalks!
Wednesday 2 May 2007
Tonight, Sean’s out of town and M. is performing in a musical uptown, so the house will be free for Flickershow recording, hooray!
Only yesterday I was reading Muffy’s reports from the Open Ears festival and wishing I’d made it back to KW to catch it. I don’t generally get to see many shows, and the reason mostly boils down to Too Damn Busy. Either I’m working late (Sean and I seem to be home at 10pm as often as not), recording or playing with Flickershow, or recovering from the above.
I’m determined to change things around now. Coming home at a more reasonable time, for one thing; for another, working Saturday and staying home to work on music in the middle of the week, when the house is empty.
And I think I’ll have to check out some of the events at Deep Wireless: A Festival Of Radio Art. (Thanks, Torontoist.)
Here’s the
latest version of the particle sim - the particles attract this time around, and have random values for mass.
I’ve cleaned up the source and commented the hell out of it, and collected most of the major parameters so they’re easy to adjust before compiling.
Source plus the containing FLA file:
Particles1_8.zip
Tuesday 20 June 2006
Midsummer’s closed Saturday - a great show, and cast and crew were wonderful. Glad I had the chance to be involved.
No time to rest, though… I was at the office until 11 last night doing a Flash piece at the last minute (a trivia kiosk for the grand opening of a new TV channel headquarters).
So tonight I’ve been taking a bit of a breather and, uh, reorganizing the studio completely. The turntable is now no longer above eye level, and no longer requires me to stand on a chair and put my head in the path of the ceiling fan to find a track. (I’m also happy to report that the bruises and swelling have gone down.) The Electrix units are now stowed in a small rack along with my other dusty effects units. (Yes, I bought the EQ Killer - it looked so lonely there by itself at the shop, and this way I have a dedicated preamp for the turntable rather than madly swapping cables all the time.) And drums and effects are all plugged into a little sub-mixer of their own. Finally, a use for that little Behringer that’s been sitting power-supplyless for months!
So of course, I’ve had random vinyl records playing through the FilterQueen while I work. And when I realized iTunes was still on, in Shuffle mode, I brought up my computer on the mixer to see what was playing. Well, this was it:
Night.mp3
I’ve always loved it when two completely unrelated things happen to be in the same key, or otherwise complement each other musically. The other day, sitting at a restaurant, I was totally spellbound by the sound of a baby squealing with laughter a couple of tables away, overtop of the jazz tune on the sound system.
“What’s up?” asked Sean.
“That kid. Just did the most awesome solo,” I said.
Perhaps I am easily amused.
Wednesday 10 May 2006
The remix site for My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is up. (Unfortunately, while the Flash interface is very pretty, it took a lot of poking before it accepted my registration. I don’t even know what I did to make it work.)
I notice as well that under “Listen”, when you select “Filter”, you can view all the remixes positioned on various axes - due no doubt to Eno’s fascination with “axis” thinking (there’s a mini-essay about it in his book A Year With Swollen Appendices). Neat to be able to view them arranged by those various criteria… and maybe even more interesting, to see where there aren’t any remixes yet. That ability prompts questions like “Why hasn’t anyone done a mix that’s busy but slow?” or “Can you have a piece of music that’s menacing but sweet?”
So now I’ve got the complete tracks from “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody”, on a quest to find out the answers. It’s neat to hear them all like this… like getting to peek into the studio during the making of the album.
Here we go!
Saturday 3 December 2005
On the suggestion of the Spinglobe lads, who are soon to be swamped with a bigass project, I’ve started learning a little Flash, godhelpme.
Just for the hell of it, I whipped this up using a tablet and the brush tool. The drawing is scribbly, but I’m quite pleased with the motion in it. I added sound a bit later using my QS synth and a recording of me flapping a shirt, which I sped up to maybe three times normal speed. *flap*
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