http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/

I am not very good at photoshop but I am still entitled to laugh at them!!

Designer + Developer = Devigner

While musing around the web for possible fixes to the horribly buggy Flash CS4, I came upon Lee Brimelow's entry in TheFlashBlog describing this new term call the 'Devigner.' It's basically a term coined to describe people who can do design and programming. Well, I think I have finally found a more elegant word to describe my job other than 'Interactive Designer' which kinda implies that I need to talk to people while doing design??!

The term devigner has emerged to describe people who are skilled at both design and development and this is exactly the type of person that best flourishes inside of the Flash authoring tool.

-- Lee Brimelow

A Devigner is the kind of person who can draw, layout and make things look nice yet happen to also know how to swim through the murky depths of codes to bring the best to his/her end-users. He/she is basically like super coffee-mix and comes 2-in-1.

Of course, on the surface it looks good to be one but in most cases, like the coffee-mix, a Devigner is simply not as good as their specialised counterparts. Perhaps, it might be a good thing to start out as a Devigner but I ultimately feels that one should specialise in either of the fields to progress in the career ladder. And yeah, 2-in-1 also means 2x the workload.

Anyways I think Devigner is coined to make ourselves feel more shiok because it makes us sound more uber. It's still not widely used yet and I think we will probably hear more of it in a few years to come. By then, kiasu employers in Singapore will all be using this term so they can save money on employees as that are like the super coffee-mix.

In case you are wondering what the heck is this, I made this application out of Adobe's new technology call Adobe AIR. I have been playing around with its features and made this really useless application to test its capabilities. Desktop Sheeps! is an inspiration I got from an odd application I encountered in my primary school days. Basically it lets you drop lotsa of sheeps in your desktop and they will just pace around the screen. Yeah, you can drag them around too. In short, it is a really useless application. Desktop Sheeps! is coded rather sloppily because I am not familiar with the syntax yet and please pardon me because my application is buggy. (Sheeps can get 'lost' and right click context menu placement problem)

The Adobe AIR Logo.

"The Adobe(R) AIR(TM) runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems."

-- adobe.com

To run AIR applications, head to http://get.adobe.com/air/ to get the software. After which, you will still need to install Desktop Sheeps!

Take note that my application is not digitally signed because a verified certificate costs US$300. Figured out it's not worth it to buy now because I don't have any commercial use for it. This warning dialog serves to inform the user that the AIR application is capable of doing really nasty thing should it fall into the wrong hands unverified. If you are not comfortable with installing unsigned files, then it's better for you not to install it. After the installation, you can access the program via the start menu and you are ready to go!

Desktop Sheeps!
.fla source file (Requires AIR plugin for flash)

There are times when I realize my brain is actually not infinite and I am hitting the limit like crashing into a concrete wall. Below is a page flip transition effect that I took half a day to make. Not a good thing and once again, I realize my maths really suck. It's quite ironic that I am an actionscripter but my maths is an absolute disaster.

Anyways, this effect is done with the drawing function and it runs on actionscript 2. The actual function also allows you to customize the colour and has a callback function.

Dralnu, Lich Lord

Been many years since I manually drew something. Really rusty now. I guess I have returned all my skills to my lecturers.

Joshua Davis lives a chaotic life. An icon of web design, a technological pioneer and a digital artist, the 35- year-old's existence in New York revolves around his own commercial studio and teaching at the city's School of Visual Arts. And still, he finds the time to work on more personal projects, exhibit in museums, travel across the world to speak at conferences, and, last but not least, take on our cover commission this month. Chaos, indeed - but, crucially, it's controlled chaos.

Herein lies the key to understanding Joshua Davis. His work is based on the idea of design as chaos theory. Or, to be more precise, he is an artist who develops computer code that randomly creates patterns out of his own drawings. In short, he combines self-created technology with self-produced art.

"I'm still the artist but I like to write programs that take my handmade drawings and generate things," explains Davis. "The idea is that a lot of things can be described as patterns. If you look at our world, for example, it's based on boundaries. There's gravity, there are certain forces like wind, and all of these things play into how our world exists and acts."

What Davis does is to write computer code that duplicates the random patterns he sees around him, and then throws his artwork into that system. He may, for instance, write a program that creates the movement of a tornado inside a sealed box. Off to the side, he'll do some drawings - say, a rooster, some trees, flowers, an umbrella and a cat.

--ComputerArts

The above article is part of an interview by ComputerArts Magazine on renowned designer, Joshua Davis. It basically talks about his views on design and how he uses computer generated codes to generate artworks. Having read up on it, I was also curious to find out if I can emulate his master works. And so I whipped out my Flash and made a simple block of code which will randomly load external images and throw them around the stage.

Coding

300 Layers

With 300 layers, the results didn't look that convincing... looks sparse. Time to crank up the numbers.

500 Layers

This does look more promising, starting to get more chaotic here. Wonder if my ailing PC can still tahan more layers...

1000 Layers

Geez... that's one hell of a mess on screen. Now that's 1000 rubbish on screen! I went on to tweak the script so the items will gather at the middle of the stage:

800 Layers

Lastly, tried to push the limit... 2500 layers. Flash lagged for 1 minute to generate. The end result shows all the bigger graphics (green branches and blue circles) convering the rest of the graphics. I guess it's true that too much of anything is not good. But then, at least I managed to put a name to it... Rubbish in the Jungle...

2500 Layers

Well, these are my preliminary results and I think it looks potential... although I must be gazillion light years away from his level. Going to see how I can implement drawing API on this.