A journey in visual programming

I've been avoiding this day for quite some time. Alas, some real programming challenges just presented themselves to me. The company I work for presented me with a possible music visualizer for one of our clients to run along side an ad campaign. After a bit of research, I accepted the challenge. For a long time I've been programming web languages with a lean on Flash. I've always looked at other languages and thought to myself, "These languages are crazy. People that know them are mad scientists."

For the last week or so, I've been messing around with processing thanks to a great designer/director Phil Rampulla. I love it. It is like flash, with more performance. Like flash, there is a huge open source community following it and since it is Java, it closely resembles ActionScript 3.0. This site, open processing is quite a great resource to get you started. If you navigate to the browse section, you'll find a plethora of daily sketches posted by users of processing! It's a great resource, but it is Java, so it lacks a bit of performance that you really want to get out of visualizations...

So, my options to get the job done for the music visualizer have now narrowed to c++ and OpenGL because they work on Mac and Windows both. Yikes! I have never even touched this low level stuff, that's for the engineers and super nerds at software companies in San Francisco!

So I found this: openFrameworks! It is amazing! It's just like the processing framework, but for c++! Now we are getting somewhere. There was some time spent on researching this and vimeo was definitely the best resource. Glenn Marshall and Robert Hodgin were two guys I looked at first because they are freaks of nature when it comes to visual programming. The visuals that these guys put out on video from processing and openframeworks is absolutely phenomenal!

I've started quite a few tests and I'm just getting my feet wet with syntax and setup and such, but hopefully I will get some content added to the experiments section of my site soon! As I go, I'll post little snippets of code and hopefully, it will be helpful to someone out there! Wish me luck!

10:37 AM | 0 Comments

FAIL!

Failblog.com is really funny! In fact, it's soo funny my friend and I decided today to make a version in which you could fail websites that you think suck ass. After a rigorous development schedule of 35 minutes, we now have FAILICIO.US. And for good humor, you can fail my labs site by clicking here.

This thing was totally inspired by the tastiness bacolicio.us. But meant more for designer/developer humor than anything else really. Fail all the websites you want, but take a screenshot and send them to failblog.org so that the rest of us can enjoy the humor as well.

11:04 PM | 0 Comments

Domani Studios in the books.

After seeing Domani Studios getting well deserved recognition and attention from Julius Wiedemann in the "ICON" series of web design publications, I'm excited to have put such a lead development role into the Porsche: I can. website that was featured in the newest of the series, ICONS: Web Design Navigation. With such a small development timeline and a mass amount of 3D work, we pulled together to deliver something that keeps winning awards, even 9 months after it's initial launch!

Putting together a website that or application aesthetically and functionally award winning is no easy task. It requires a lot of planning (which usually there is no time for) and an extreme amount of execution skillz. Domani, Big Spaceship, Juxt, Firstborn, Blitz, Schematic, and all the other Adobe fiends are of my personal favorites in the realm of digital visual communication!

Congrats to all at DS.com who have worked on these aforementioned awards and kudos to those who push websites computer programming and design harder than Chris Brown pushed Rihanna!

11:15 AM | 0 Comments