Me and the guys from Bureau BlauwGeel have been working together on their new website: http://www.bureaublauwgeel.nl
The CMS-based website uses video files to create a dynamic, living and breathing background.
Each menu item has a background image that slowly zooms in to keep that dynamic feel.
Although the background and interface always adjust to the size of [...]
One of my hobby projects is building a tourist map of Tokyo. I started out with displaying a RSS feed from Google Maps on my own hand-drawn map of Tokyo. Even though the Google Maps API now allows custom coloring of your map, I still think google’s maps are overpopulated with information and are visually not very inspiring.
Having the system in place for placing geo data on my own map, I realized it should be just as easy to display twitter messages, as long as they include geo data:
Retrieving twitter messages with geo data from http://search.twitter.com/ starts with including a geo location in your search parameters (in this case ‘tokyo’). Still, many twitter messages include geo data that only includes a town and no latitude/longitude information.
For this map, I retrieve 60 messages that were twittered in Tokyo, and then filter out all the messages that actually have a latitude/longitude. When using a map of an entire country you’d get a lot more twitter results so that’s going to be the next step in this project!
Check out the beta version here:
The 1st of january was a special day for Twitterfountain users since the new version of Twitterfountain went live.
The update incorporates:
A list of twitter messages on a slideshow background.
Single twitter message on a photostack background.
For Motion Sickness‘ next VJ Gig, at Hoorspel Amsterdam, I want to mix live Twitter messages into our VJ set. I’ve already built several Twitter tools in Flash, and Modul8 (our favorite VJ tool) supports SWF files.
I started by experimenting with various animations you can apply to the Twitter messages. You can see a demo here: http://www.motionsickness.nl/tweejay/
When the SWF is used as a movie inside Modul8, you don’t want the audience to see the control panel. To solve this I built an external SWF controller. This way the audience won’t see the settings of the Twitter animation. The external controller is opened with the regular flash player, and connects to the flash animation inside Modul8 using a LocalConnection.
I discovered that a SWF inside Modul8 won’t connect to the internet, but this was solved by using the external controller to retrieve twitter messages, and then pass them on to Modul8. The only problem left is that images can’t be transferred this way, so Modul8 can’t use flash to retrieve images from the internet.
This screenshot shows the modul8 environment with the SWF Twitter layer on top of an image. You can see the external controller in it’s own window. (click image to enlarge).
UPDATE 1: the beta test of the tool is downloadable at http://www.eerkmans.nl/bestanden/tweejay_m8_beta.zip
UPDATE 2: Since the SWF movies do not play in a browser they need to be permitted to connect to the internet.
You can do this by opening the SWF files with adobe’s standalone flash player (right click > open with flash player). You will be presented with the following dialog box:
This popup appears when you open the SWF’s in adobe’s standalone SWF player.
Click ‘Settings’ and you will be taken to the security page. In this page, click ‘edit locations’ and then ‘add location’. Browse to the folder where your SWF’s are and add them.
The security settings for standalone flash movies.
If you don’t have the standalone flash player you can go to the settings screen directly.
Or you can download the flash player pack as a zip file here.
I will try to make this process less complicated, perhaps by exporting the controller as an adobe AIR app in the next version.
Our recently developed flash widget “twitterfountain” is being readied for use on as many platforms as possible! We’re using the fabulous service of www.widgetbox.com to make available a ready-made twitterfountain for embedding on facebook, myspace or any other blog. Not only that, but Arno Hoogma has developed a downloadable wordpress plugin that allows you to install a flash twitterfountain on your wordpress site. If all that isn’t enough you can download an OS X Dashboard widget too. Check it all out on www.twitterfountain.nl
Since a few months I’ve been working on a flash widget that uses twitter and flickr. This tool has been used at a number of events (concerts, seminars) to create a live report, filled with photos and remarks of the audience.
Accessing Twitter directly from Flash is quite a pain so I was happy to discover the SWX tool by Aral Balkan. SWX allows you to access all kinds of web API’s (like twitter and flickr) by calling just a few lines of code.
When using this tool to report an event I needed a way to filter out specific messages. At first I achieved this by using Twitter’s “@replies” but this needed the Flash application to be logged in to a Twitter account. Right now I’m using the “summize” API to filter Twitter messages.
The tool was used by Nieuwegarde (8 uur overwerken), Lopend Vuur, Lifehacking academy, Noorderslag and a couple more. The original concept came from deondernemers.nl and lopend vuur. PHP scripting was done by Arno Hoogma.
