Keith Butters's Barbarian Blog

Cinder!

keith@barbariangroup.com(Keith Butters) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:31:36 -0400

We are incredibly excited to announce that Cinder (formerly known as Flint) has now officially been released into the wild as an open source project. As described on the main page at libcinder.org, “Cinder is a community-developed, free and open source library for professional-quality creative coding in C++.”

So why did we do this, you might ask? Well, it originated as a solution to a fairly kludge-y work-flow we were using to create music visualizers. We were basically designing in Processing, porting to C++ and testing; repeat. At one point we even considered developing a magic-box type macro that would convert a Processing sketch into C++ and then to an iTunes visualizer. I had also coded a basically blank iTunes visualizer that piped FFT data to processing. Good times, but not ideal. At all.

Instead, we started an internal project codenamed ‘Flint ’ (not only because we liked the name, but because the namespace sounded cool: fli::Surface, etc). The project had two main goals:

First, when we needed to be in C++ (for iTunes plug-ins etc.) we wanted to have our creative coders be able to make things directly in C++. It needed to be approachable. For a while, we called this “The Robert Case” after Robert Hodgin, who was a driving force in making a ton of amazing stuff here at TBG.

Second, we wanted to make sure that any approachability enhancements did not prevent the more hardcore developers from doing the “bare-metal” programming. That was the “AFB Case” after Andrew Bell, who wrote the majority of Cinder here, and has been writing C++ code for ever.

We’ve used various incarnations of Cinder on projects like the augmented reality issue of Esquire Magazine, a music visualizer for Relentless, and Magnetosphere, as well as several internal experiments.

I would also like to reiterate some things that we’ve said in the FAQ of libcinder.org. One, we cannot say enough great things about Processing. It’s not only a great way to dip your toe into the waters of creative coding, but also a powerful platform for doing advanced and amazing things. Another incredible project out there is openFrameworks, which is led by some amazingly talented people and has a great community surrounding it.

I am so glad that we were able to make Cinder open source. Andrew and I both expected a certain amount of internal resistance attempting to do so (a lot of hours went into this!), but that resistance never materialized. We have been the beneficiaries of too many open source projects to list, and we all felt that giving back was the only move we could feel good about.

Check out the cinder website here: http://libcinder.org
Grab the source here: http://github.com/cinder/Cinder

Flint C++ Tools

keith@barbariangroup.com(Keith Butters) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:55:34 -0400

There have been a few mentions of our internal C++ library (codenamed Flint) around the web over the last week or two. Over the years we’ve had opportunities to work on some really interesting installation projects and data visualizations, and along the way we decided it would be a good idea to use some common bootstrapping, so that we can get the art side of things rolling a whole lot faster. That bootstrapping has turned into a somewhat larger scale library that makes it easy to do a whole lot of amazing things that used to take us a good deal of time to get working. It goes all the way from simply creating windows and draw-able contexts, to shaders, VBOs, and the once-feared (for me) Quaternion.

At the moment, Flint is very much in Alpha. We haven’t made any plans to release it to the public, but we also haven’t made any plans to not release it either (apologies for the double negative). We should have more news in the upcoming months, as we add necessary features and fine tune everything. We highly recommend checking out OpenFrameworks and Processing if you’re interested in doing high-end graphics or other interactive projects.

Oh, and if we do decide to release Flint, leave a comment and we’ll try to get you on the beta. Again, we still don’t know what the future holds, so no promises ;).

Teach Yourself Flash

keith@barbariangroup.com(Keith Butters) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:52:41 -0500

This past summer I was approached by the folks at Wiley Publishing to author Teach Yourself Visually Flash CS4 Professional. I accepted, unaware of the complexities involved in writing such a book, and having no relevant experience other than my knowledge of Flash. After many balmy picnic days spent indoors writing while the sun was shining, and nights soberly gazing over my laptop screen at an unopened bottle of Tuscan Syrah, I completed it.

It was totally worth the effort.

From wiley.com :

If you are a beginner-to-intermediate level Flash user, this book will get you up and running fast as you dive into the tasks of building animation sequences and using ActionScript to create interactive Web page components

Contains 150 useful and interesting Flash tasks presented in full color that demonstrates how easy it can be to design rich and dynamic content for any Web site

If you’re new to Flash and are looking for a good way to get started, I highly recommend it (of course). Or, if you work in another aspect of our business and want to gain a better understanding of what that guy on the 17th floor with the Elvis Costello glasses does for a living, it may be worth checking out too. Feedback is welcome. Many thanks to Jody, Sarah and the rest of the Wiley team.

Teach Yourself Visually Flash CS4 Professional