Last week Stewart gave a small talk titled Code Play at Wieden+Kennedy’s London office. They’ve posted a short text and images about it on their blog here: Code Play with Stewdio
The Setup has just posted an interview with Stewart about hardware and software. But the actual content veers off topic a bit. (Easily distracted?) See for yourself: http://stewart.smith.usesthis.com.
Stewart is speaking about Stewdio today at renown branding agency Landor Associates in London at 4pm
This week Stewart will be guest-posting on design blog It's Nice That. Here's a brief interview and links to the posts.
Design journal Core77 has just posted an interview with Stewart by designer / writer Lisa Smith. It's the inaugural piece for a new series called "Starting Out" which profiles designers who have recently struck out on their own.
Because there's really something to listening to the same songs over, and over, and over.
- Up the Down Escalator. The Chameleons.
- Like a Fool. Superchunk.
- Travel as I Wait. Tomas Halberstad.
- Lessons Learned. Matt & Kim.
- Milk It. Nirvana.
- Oh Messy Life. Cap'n Jazz.
- Two-Headed Boy. Neutral Milk Hotel.
- A Chicken with its Head Cut Off. The Magnetic Fields.
- NYC's Like a Graveyard. The Moldy Peaches.
- Tightrope. Yeasayer.
- Sleepless. The Decemberists.
- Running up that Hill. Kate Bush.
- Hounds of Love. Kate Bush.
- Time. David Bowie.
- All My Friends. LCD Soundsystem.
Stewart will be speaking about Stewdio at the Regent Street store.
Monday, 28 June at 19.00 Apple Store London http://stewdio.org/apple
The Scriptographer team has just released version 2.8.050 which is compatible with the all new Adobe Illustrator CS5. (And previous versions too.) Description from the Scriptographer site: Scriptographer is a scripting plugin for Adobe Illustrator™. It gives the user the possibility to extend Illustrator’s functionality by the use of the JavaScript language. The user is no longer limited to the same tools that are used by most graphic designers around the globe. Scriptographer allows the creation of mouse controlled drawing-tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones. But Scriptographer is also a webpage on which users can exchange scripts and ideas. Scriptographer gives the tool back into the hand of the user and confronts a closed product with the open source philosophy.
If that sounds good to you, download it today.
Tonight, Exit (also known as "Terre Natale") opens at the AlhondigaBilbao in Spain. If you're in Bilbao don't miss this opportunity to experience the immersive 360-degree data projection. Exit (Terre Natale) is a 45-minute immersive visualization of human migration data divided into six narratives. Our historical focus is primarily from 1990 through today, augmented by occasional older data points or forecasts into the future. Humans migrate for various reasons. Political turmoil may create refugee migrations. Environmental disasters create refugees of a different sort. Some people migrate to wealthier economies sending micro-transactions, or remittances, home to their native land. We have recently crossed a threshold; 50% of humans have migrated from rural areas into cities. As of 2007 one out of every two people is now an urban dweller. See the Exit (Terre Natale) projection description and links to videos at http://stewd.io/w/exit.
Today also marks 30 years since Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis hung himself.
A few weeks ago Stewart happened upon pictures of Panic Inc's new offices. In the shuffle was a photo of their vintage Apple //e computer sitting at an empty desk. Lovers of vintage hardware can't resist. Stewart emailed Panic to ask if they would "do him the honor" of running the Jed's Other Poem music video source code on it. Despite their tight schedules—including the recent release and promotion of Transmit 4—they did indeed get the code onto their Apple //e and even filmed their own version of the video! Have a look at what we're affectionately dubbing “Jed Panic.”
Jed's Other Poem is a music video for the Grandaddy song of the same name. And (perhaps) the world's first open-source music video. You can download the Jed source code package to run on your Virtual II emulator or even your own vintage Apple II series machine. To do the latter just play the audio from the “cassette tape” source code file into your vintage Apple's cassette drive port. You'll need an audio cable with male mini-jacks on either end. (Read up on Apple DOS and the “LOAD” command, you'll be fine.)
After Panic posted their version of the Jed video other Apple-related sites—such as Daring Fireball, TUAW, and 9to5 Mac—linked to it. The flood of traffic brought down Panic's site temporarily. (We think that's pretty hardcore.)
The design and advertising blog Creativity (formerly AdCritic) has just posted an interview with Stewdio’s Stewart Smith, conducted by Jamie Kim of Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. The two discuss the intersection of art and software, collaborators, personal projects, and the “fake it ’till you make it” ethos. Read up here: Face to face with the brains behind iQuit, Browser Pong and other experiments in digital fun.
Are you on a Mac? Ten minutes from now you will be running your first Ruby-Processing animation, mesmerized by a color shifting 3D cube rotating in space. It's easy.
What is Ruby?
Ruby is a fairly young programming language, conceived in 1993 and first publicly released in 1995. It was created by Japanese programmer Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. And if you're running OS X you already have Ruby installed. Yup, it's already there waiting for you. For more historical info see “Ruby (Programming Language)” on Wikipedia. Ruby gained significant popularity with the rise of Ruby on Rails. (Rails is a web application framework written in Ruby.) In fact, web searches for things having to do with Ruby will usually land you on a page that's specifically discussing the Rails framework. But Ruby is good for more than just building Web sites. We're about to make a spinning cube with it, right there on your Desktop!Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.
Presently, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and “augmented” by the addition of computer-generated graphics. (More from Wikipedia…) This quick guide assumes you have a web cam, printer, and some programming experience.