MacPaint meets RSS… A proof of concept relating to several things cooking in my head at the moment like: how to make a “spatial wiki”, and incorporating “live” elements into collage-based editing tools. NB: everything is draggable (including the background to move the whole “canvas”), and texts can be resized (widths adjusted) using a not quite right resize control that appears top-right of the headline. Feed sources are semi-random at the moment (some belgian news sources + BBC & Google News), images come from either Flickr or Getty. And nothing is deletable! So embrace the randomness.

The CGI’s to pull the text + images from the feed are Python using Feedparser and some quick and dirty regex tweaking of the Flickr feed to pull out a small sized image URL.

RUN THE DEMO
VIEW THE CODE

Here a proof of concept for a future teaching assignment (ok ok, also my own “itch” ;)… Build your own media player. Here PyGame is used to make a simple frameless window (which because of the black background *appears* to blend into my mostly black desktop image)… Also, the code makes use of Fabien Devaux’s lightweight python mplayer wrapper (that wraps a python class/object around mplayer’s “slave” mode).
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I was struggling with getting the layering right using a transparent background and ended up making this. In the process, I (re) learned how relative positioning lets elements be both in the “flow” of a layout, and still layered. (I was having the problem “normal” elements would appear underneath the absolutely positioned transparent background layer.)

Sketch exploring how simple BASH (or command-line) scripts could be used as media plugins in an ActiveArchives system. A key issue is how to balance a graphical / “end-use”-oriented interface with the flexibility of text-based scripts.

From the archives, found in the Piet Zwart recycling bin… Author (and annotator) unknown…

A relative value system implemented in javascript

This proof of concept is based on a couple of starting points:

1. Implement a “contour” like frontend for Active Archives
2. Further learn JQuery, in particular, writing with and as a “plugin”
3. Get more into the whole old/new functional-programming style of Javascript