apps for artists

web apps designed and built by brenton simpson

408.966.3979 - bsimpson(a)appsforartists.com

platform: flash - django

Recently, Adobe invited a bunch of Flash artists to its San Francisco campus to play with advance copies of CS4 and see what we could do with Flash Player 10. I used Pixel Bender to remap a 360-degree video into VR format in real time. Check it out here if you have Flash Player 10.

actionscript 3

• 0-360 UnWrapper redesign

  

  Client: 0-360.com

  Role: Designer/developer

  Problem: 0-360.com needs an easy-to-maintain, cross-platform image processing application that transforms a "donut" image taken with the 0-360 Panoramic Optic into a virtual tour-friendly panorama. The application must be dead simple to operate, as the target customers are computer novices.

  Solution: An AIR app where the user can drop in 0-360 donuts. 0-360's current offering requires a series of adjustments before the user has a useful image. For most images, my solution analyzes the donut and produces the final image with no configuration. The original adjustments are now offered as enhancements to fine-tune the image as needed.

  Status: Prerelease - active development

• Story Stash collaborative storyboarding system

  

  Client: Personal project

  Role: Sole creator

  Problem: All artists care about is telling entertaining stories. To create a TV cartoon, they are currently stuck relying on clumsy paper-based storyboards, which are not only difficult to organize, share, and store, but are also vulnerable to accidental destruction.

  Solution: A web app that allows artists either to draw directly into their Tablet PCs or to scan and upload images. From there, the artwork can easy be arranged and shared with other collaborators to gain invaluable feedback.

  Status: Prerelease - moonlighting

• The Illustrated Life drawing gallery

  

  Client: Personal project

  Role: Sole creator

  Problem: Uploading images into a personal gallery is tedious and time consuming. Many artists go long periods of time without updating their sites.

  Solution: An online gallery that automatically includes and organizes artwork uploaded into a given folder.

  Status: Live

• Amazon SimpleDB library for AS3

  

  Client: Bought by Amazon.com

  Role: Sole creator

  Problem: Every ActionScript developer who wanted to use Amazon's SDB service had to write their own code to do so.

  Solution: An easy-to-use, extensible library that provides access to SimpleDB in an ActionScript-friendly way. Amazon bought the code and posted it on their Developer Connection as a community resource.

  Status: Live

• Scrolling Images Flash library

  

  Client: Warm Butter Design

  Role: Flash developer

  Problem: Warm Butter specializes in HTML/CSS website design for film composers. Many composers would like to have the album art and/or movie posters of project they've worked on scroll on their pages.

  Solution: A Flash-based scrolling image gallery that can be easy included on a page without any knowledge of Flash. The gallery takes a series of settings from the parent web page to control the speed, spacing, and playback of the animation.

  Status: Live

• eyePoke multitouch library for Flash

  

  Client: Open-source project for Natural UI Group

  Role: Sole creator

  Problem: Existing multitouch libraries for Flash aren't compatible with mice, tablets, or other traditional input devices.

  Solution: eyePoke uses a camera to detect when and where the user is touching the screen. The resulting TouchEvents are an extension of MouseEvent, which allows mice and tablet stylii to interact with multitouch applications.

  Status: Live

• lighttpd Vista Sidebar gadget

  

  Client: Personal project

  Role: Sole creator

  Problem: Web designers have no easy way to turn their local web servers on/off in Windows Vista.

  Solution: A Vista Sidebar gadget that detects the presence of http://localhost/. If the server is off, clicking the gadget enables it and vice-versa.

  Status: Live

django

• Doodle Warrior online drawing game

  

  Client: Personal project

  Role: Sole creator

  Problem: Illustrators need to draw frequently to keep their skills developed. Most online drawing games are restricted to a few preselected participants.

  Solution: A competitive drawing game in the spirit of Photoshop Tennis and thesuperest.com that allows anyone with a Facebook or Google account to play. The game is simultaneously hosted on Google App Engine and the Facebook Platform.

  Status: Beta - moonlighting