Almer/Blank Labs

We are back from FITC Amsterdam, and it was, as usual, a really great time.

While in Amsterdam, Almer/Blank debuted Synthia, the first publicly usable musical instrument to emerge from Project Ludi at Almer/Blank Labs.

Synthia, on the web, is a Flash 10 application that translates pictures into music — infinite classical canons — using a small set of rules that establish key, restricted notes within the key, tempo, instrumentation and the score. Synthia was actually developed as a demonstration app to accompany R Blank’s talk, ‘Hearing Pictures’, but the results were so fun to play with, that we decided to make it a publicly usable web-application, where anyone can upload any picture, have Synthia turn it into music, and then share it with your friends and embed it in any web page.

We will be posting a lot more about Synthia in the coming weeks, and updating her rules and features over the coming months. But, for now, I’d encourage all of you to play around with the Synthia Composer (just upload an image and listen), or just browse the gallery to hear what other pictures sound like.

And, if while playing with Synthia, you have some ideas on how we might commercialize her, share your thoughts and ideas and have a chance to win an iPad.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Over the weekend I updated both the ZamfBrowser application and the ZendAmfServiceBrowser class that gives the ZamfBrowser information about your ZendAMF services set up.   …read more…

Howdy:

As I write this, I’m also packing up to head off to Amsterdam in the morning, to debut Synthia at FITC Amsterdam, so I will unfortunately have to be brief.

I will be posting more information in the coming weeks, as we, at Almer/Blank Labs continue plugging away, refining Synthia and adding more features to the site.

Until then, I’ve posted a few notes on how Synthia works and how she came about. But, of course, we know that what you really want to do is play with Synthia. So, go ahead, start composing now, or browse the gallery of other compositions.

And, of course, let all your friends know about Synthia!

Share and enjoy,

-r

Some of you may have checked out the courses I posted over on the Adobe Developer Connection on building progressive and streaming video players with the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF).

Unfortunately, even those courses are relatively new, the code in them no longer works, because OSMF has advanced a few sprints. We’re now at OSMF sprint 9, and the framework continues to shift quite a bit.

Because there are almost no examples on the web of using OSMF with Flash (as opposed to Flex), and I’ve had several people email me asking if I had time to update the code.

And, so, finally I did. At least for the progressive player. So you can download the Flash CS4 source code to build an OSMF player with the Sprint 9 framework from the article on Building progressive video players in Flash with OSMF.

Share and enjoy!

A common practice amongst PureMVC developers when creating PureMVC Mediator implementations is the “view getter”, a getter method that returns the instance of the view object that the Mediator is coupled with. As an example I will use an imaginary media player with a playlist. …read more…