Swim - the game
Dan Ha recently uploaded a fantastic game called Swim, that he built with Nicole Roach and Cameron Teitelman. Complete with nicely-illustrated instructions! When I asked him about it, Dan said:
Dan Ha recently uploaded a fantastic game called Swim, that he built with Nicole Roach and Cameron Teitelman. Complete with nicely-illustrated instructions! When I asked him about it, Dan said:
I spotted a series of interesting sketches by an unnamed author Visa-Valtteri “visy” Pimiä this morning that I wanted to point out. I thought it was interesting to see each sketch build on the previous one. As always, you can do the same, by cloning and modifying any version of any of these sketches. The “clone” link is in the footer of each canvas.
If you’ve been making your sketches in the Studio, you may have noticed a new camera icon in the top-right corner of your canvas. Clicking this little camera will take a snapshot of your sketch that can be used in a few different places. When a canvas is not running, your snapshot will act as a preview of what’s to come. Clicking the button still brings it to life, but now you have a sense of what that may do.
Atul Varna invited me to give a brief talk about Sketchpad and the Programming Visual Media course that I co-organized for the School of Webcraft at the Mozilla Labs Night last week. Knowing the audience, I prepared my slides for the talk as a set of browser tabs (Minefield, of course) to flip between. Mostly for some live demos of the things that a static slide just couldn’t convey. The upside of a browser-based talk with interactive slides is that you can try everything out yourself: kick the tires, make your own variations, etc. So in addition to the screenflow that I recorded while I was talking, I’m including a set of links to each of the demo sketches that I was showing during the talk. For a few of these, you’ll need to be logged in with your Studio account. Hope you enjoy!
I wanted to share some sketches created by students in Doug Holton’s HTML5 course at Utah State University. Nice work!
I’ve been playing around recently with some modifications to canvas footer on sketches, and I’m now settled on a design that I like. It’s modeled loosely on web video players such as blip.tv and vimeo. I liked how Vimeo hides the controller entirely until you need it, but this turned out to be a bit problematic when the thing being controlled, the sketch, can itself be responding dynamically to mouse events. blip.tv offered an alternative model, where the controls are outside of the video itself, but are monochrome and minimalist, so as not to distract from the video itself. The other source of inspiration for the design was from the fine folks at dribbble. On hover, shots fade to reveal a nice overlay. Very snazzy:
Motivated by a recent tweet by John McLear, I fired up Liz’s new Kindle and pointed it’s Webkit-based browser at Sketchpad. Voila! Etherpad and Processing.js both run beautifully. Sketches are editable, the animations are e-inktastic, and the canvas is still visible in sunlight. Fun.
Andrzej Koper created a new sketch on Sketchpad today, and included a question and a bug report in a comment in the header.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// CircleSeq
// by: Andrzej Koper
// http://1000abstractmachines.pl
//
// click to make new circles
// press any key to reset
//
// a bug: if you wait long enough some circles will intersect
// ... I have no idea why that happens
//
// a question: how to prevent from creating circle in circle?
//
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
<iframe id='ifr' width='400' height='335' scrolling='no' style='background: url(//studio.processingtogether.com/static/img/jun09/pad/connectingbar.gif) no-repeat center 60px;' src='//studio.processingtogether.com/sp/pad/iframe/ro.9DyPzmvF9GTcI/rev.747?autostart=0'></iframe>
Anil Dash argues that forking is a feature, and I whole-heartedly agree. Wikis are great tool for online collaboration when the goal is to arrive at a shared understanding or common resource, but it’s important to remember that not all collaborations have this goal of converging on the One True Version. Especially with creative endeavors. The musician who refines their own version of a Bob Dylan song, the chef who “reinvents” the common cheeseburger, and the DIYer who builds an electric shoebox guitar just a little bit differently – each of them knows the joy of taking something that’s already out there, and making it their own. For me, this has been half the fun of building Studio Sketchpad: I started with Etherpad, cloned my own copy, and took it in an entirely new direction.
This sketch was created by hernan and jjjolll in the Studio. I just added it to the Gallery.
The students in Doug Holton’s “Developing Multimedia Applications with HTML5” class at Utah State University have been using Sketchpad recently, and they’ve been building some pretty cool things with it. I bumped into Joel Drake yesterday, who was in the middle of sketching this for class:
I’m not sure who wrote this sketch, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first game written with Sketchpad:
Since Processing.js can only access pixel-level data from images hosted on the same server as the sketch is rendered, Sketchpad (and other IDEs in the cloud) have limited support for images. Over the weekend, I decided to do something about this. You can now upload images (supported file types are: gif, jpg, tga, png) to the Sketchpad server, and access them from your sketches. Here’s an example:
Every few days I take a look at the sketches recently created with studio sketchpad. At some point soon, you’ll be able to do this, too. A sketch by Johan caught my eye, and I wanted to share it. Replaying the history of this sketch, I was struck by (1.) the progression towards increasingly complex behavior, and (2.) the various detours taken along the way. You can check out the full source history, detours and all. Here are a few highlights:
Unless otherwise specified by their author(s), works built on Sketchpad are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. This means that Sketchpad sketches can be cloned and modified by others, both on Sketchpad and elsewhere. This also means that sketches can build on other CC-BY works, such as those built using other wonderful Processing websites, such as SketchPatch and OpenProcessing.
