abstractmachine

This nice post over at Music Thing about my Rubik’s Cube project has lead to a lot of traffik and linking (cf. here and here, for example). I’ve been a Music Thing reader for years, so that was nice to see. But for their readers, I thought they might be interested in this video, shot by Artfuture last summer during the ZeroOne festival in San Jose in which I demonstrate — in all my true geekiness — the functioning of the first physical prototype. More will indeed follow at a later date, when I’ve finished all my current duties.

I’m preparing for my presentation on Processing this Sunday at Flash Festival 2007. For this conference I’ve adapted a very sturdy presentation system I started in Lingo way back in 2000. The conversion has been relatively painless, except for the occasional details.

Thanks to Marius Watz and VitaFlo I’ve been able to make a nice Mac OS X full screen application that can open other windows on top of it. Usually Processing runs full-screen applications Java-style, i.e. on top of all other windows, including the dock & menu. But since I want my Applet to be a launching-pad for several websites, videos, and applications, I needed a different solution. Marius’ proposition only removes the menu & dock; this allows for many different solutions for what I want, several of which I’m exploring this week.

But one thing that was bothering me was the operating system’s imposed drop shadows. Mac OS X adds these love-em-or-hate-em shadows for a pseudo(d*3) look, but because of my design choices I wanted them gone. I first tried Window Shade X, but that was lame because it’s a system-wide hack. When you think about it, it’s just a simple application parameter; for example, applications built directly in Apple’s Cocoa environment have drop-shadows as an option that you can just check off from within Interface Builder:

So after a quick search in Apple Developer Forums on removing drop shadows in Java, I found the following code that is fairly easy to adapt to any Processing Applet :

import com.apple.cocoa.application.NSApplication;
import com.apple.cocoa.application.NSWindow;
import com.apple.cocoa.foundation.NSArray;


public void setShadow(String windowTitle, boolean isShady)
{
  final NSApplication application = NSApplication.sharedApplication();
  final NSArray windows = application.windows();
  Enumeration e = windows.objectEnumerator();
  boolean done = false;
  while (!done && e.hasMoreElements()) {
    NSWindow w = (NSWindow)e.nextElement();
    if (w != null && windowTitle.equals(w.title())) {
      w.setHasShadow(isShady);
      w.invalidateShadow();
      done = true;
    }
  }
}

You just have to include this code into your applet, and then call:

void setup() {

  size(500,500);
  setShadow("", false);

}

There should also be a way to remove shadows via the info.plist, but I wasn’t able to get the right combination.

If you analyze the above code, basically what you have is a hook to the Cocoa platform that looks through all the windows for the one that contains your Java applet. Once you’ve found it, you can easily deactivate its shadows.

Above are some images of an Apple patent which have just been published by the US Patent Office. It’s an interresting idea: a touch-pad, just like the current Apple trackpad, or a touchable-screen, as in the rumored touch-screen iPod, but that can house different mechanical overlays that convert all or part of the surface into a mechanical device. The more improbable being a joystick (ok, I’d like to see that thing withstand intense gamer pounding), with the more serious being a control surface which is what many people use Macs for already, although they plug in the controller alongside it. These ideas can obviously go in many directions, and I won’t comment them any more here, at least not right now. But while all the (other) geeks out there are salivating, I just wanted to point out that Apple’s idea maybe isn’t all that original, especially when you compare it to this technology I used to play in the 1970’s under the name Magnavox Odyssey (1972):

• presentation: instruments + plateformes interactives
• speaker: Douglas Edric Stanley
• conference: Symposium Audio/Espaces/Réseaux
• organizers: Locus Sonus
• pdf: destanley.pdf

This is a recording of my presentation during the Symposium Audio/Espaces/Réseaux organized by Locus Sonus. In the accompagnying pdf file (destanley.pdf) you will find links to all of the films and interactive animations described during the talk. This talk is in French (why the hell am I writing this in English? I have no idea)

 

 instruments + plateformes interactives [01:06:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download