Seth Sandler» Code

NodeBeat: Generative Music Application for iOS and Desktop

SethSandler — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 03:09:40 +0000

It’s been a while since I posted and my guilty conscious is saying “now’s the perfect time”.

The past few weeks, I’ve been working on my first iOS application called NodeBeat.

NodeBeat is a collaboration between myself and Justin Windle. It’s an experimental node-based audio sequencer and generative music application for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and TUIO devices.

What’s NodeBeat do?

By combining music and playful exploration, NodeBeat allows anyone to create an exciting variety of rhythmic sequences and ambient melodies in a fun and intuitive fashion.

It’s been an exciting project and everyone has been very kind in the process (from development to beta testing to deployment).

Release!

NodeBeat was officially released today (April

Community Core Vision (CCV)

SethSandler — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 04:57:47 +0000

Community Core Vision (CCV) is a computer vision framework for multitouch and other emerging interaction types. I co-founded and developed CCV for Google Summer of Code in 2008. It has since been downloaded over 250,000 times and utilized by companies, researchers, and hobbyists around the world.

Javascript to AS3 – Blobby blobby

SethSandler — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:05:16 +0000

Ever since I saw Jeff Han’s lava lamp multitouch demo, I’ve been interested in ‘blobs’ or ‘meta-balls’. There’s a great new HTML5/javascript demo of interacting with blobs (moving, splitting, merging, etc) http://hakim.se/experiments/html5/blob/03/.

The code is opensource under a MIT license so I decided to try porting the little application over to actionscript 3 to see how straight forward it is to port from javascript to as3.I know the trend is moving the opposite way – AS3 -> html5/js, but this is more a proof of concept of how easy it can be to move from one to the other. After about 2 hours messing around, I was able to port 90% (minus the window interaction and skinning). 85% of

Drupal 6 – Creating Activity Stream with Views Custom SQL Query: Merging multiple views – Part 1

SethSandler — Fri, 21 May 2010 05:26:47 +0000

If you’re using Drupal, you’re probably using views. If you’re using views, than you’ve probably wanted to build a view that involved combining content and found out it was hard or almost impossible through the views UI.

For example, if you’ve ever tried to build a single view of all content (posts, comments, flags, relationships, etc) into a single list, you’ve probably found that you can’t. However, you can easily build independent post views, comment views, flag views, and relationship views. Since that’s the case, why can’t we merge all these views into a single view through the views UI? Well you can, and this article hopefully will give the basic information needed to start merging your views

Argos: Super Cool Multitouch Music Interface Builder

SethSandler — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:05:32 +0000

If you’re familiar with the Jazzmutant Lemur, you’ll want to get familiar with Argos Interface Builder by Dimitri Diakopoulos using the great c++ framework openFrameworks.

Last summer I took part in Google Summer of Code as a mentor. Dimitri proposed a multitouch music interface builder and I thought it was a fantastic idea. An opensource lemur; who wouldn’t like that??? Dimitri was chosen as a student for GSoC and I was able to mentor him as he developed Argos. It’s come a long way, and with a little help from the opensource community, it has potential to be incredible!

Take a look at the video below to see Argos in use. You can find the source and a

Who Doesn’t Like Lava Lamps?

SethSandler — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:48:02 +0000

If you’re familiar with multitouch, you’re probably familiar with Jeff Han’s TED demo. In it, there’s an example of a lava application that shows an interesting use of multitouch.

A few months ago, I was trying to work on something similar.

The following is what I came up with. I never had the chance to finish and was only able to add mouse support at the time. So, here’s a preview of what might come to a multitouch screen near you at some point in the future.

It’s pretty slow since it uses bitmapdata and filters and the code is a bit of a Frankenstein of information I found online about ‘metaballs’. If I get a chance, i’ll see

Introducing AS3 Multitouch Gesture Demo Application/Utility

SethSandler — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:26:19 +0000

On my last project I had to use a gesture to initiate an event. Due to this, I recently started experimenting in creating a simple multitouch version of some gesture engines that are available. I’ve come across three that are already available in AS3 and chose to start with the $1 gesture algorithm http://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/dollar/. It only seems fitting to start with this one since Andy Wilson of microsoft research (and many multitouch devices) had a hand in it’s development.

Like most algorithms, this one matches points drawn with a template that’s already stored. After the gesture is finished, it is matched up against templates in the database and given a percentage of how much it matched it’s closest template

Flocking around with AS3 and Multitouch

SethSandler — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:31:53 +0000

For a while I’ve been interested in emergent behavior where simple rules can create complex behavior. One of the most known examples of such behavior is Craig Reynolds ‘boids’ where a few simple rules can recreate the flocking behavior of birds.

I recently came across a great and clean example of some boids code by soulwire (make sure to check out his whole site; it’s great). Since we’ve seen various examples of this behavior on multitouch tables (like on the iBar), I decided to add some basic touch support to soulwire’s example. So, now we have it…multitouchable boids!

Right now, the demo only supports multitouch (TUIO), but mouse interaction can be easily added back in. I’ve purposely left this demo

NUI Group announces Multitouch Technologies book release!

SethSandler — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:16:45 +0000

The long awaited Multitouch Technologies book authored by members of NUI Group (http://www.nuigroup.com) has officially found it’s first release! As one of the co-authors of the book, I am proud to see a final initial version come to fruition. The book, which consolidates articles from the NUI Group Wiki, includes sections on how to build Multi-touch devices, multitouch software resources, a glossary of terms and more. I believe, as the book develops further, this will be the best resource for multitouch information on both the web and in print.

If you’re unfamiliar with NUI Group, I suggest reading the about page http://nuigroup.com/log/about/. NUI Group is currently the single best resource for multitouch technology and hopefully will

Super Cool Multitouch Actionscript Fluid Solver

SethSandler — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:31:57 +0000

Eugene has just ported Memo’s fluid solver work to AS3 http://blog.inspirit.ru/?p=248. With the source now out, I was able to quickly add multitouch support and it works great! Thanks to cyandesign and simpleex for keeping me on my toes.

Click the above image to play

A couple notes, the touchlib AS3 classes had to be corrected since they currently don’t send dX and dY values which the fluid solver needs to calculate directional velocity. Other than that, things went fairly smoothly and took little time to make touch sensitive.

Download:

Both source code and application are included. The swf is inside the bin folder.

If you try this out, leave a comment here and let me know how things