When a project is created in Android Studio it contains several auto-generated files containing skeleton code for our project. In this video we look at what function these files perform and when and why we would edit them. Loading the player…
Continue reading %Watch: Structuring an Android Project%
Clingify is a jQuery plugin that allows you to easily create “sticky” or “fixed” headers, navs, and other page elements. Once you scroll past the targeted element, the plugin will toggle a CSS class that gives the element a fixed position, pinning it in place on the page.
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100% Javascript realtime chat like facebook/gmail web style built with jQuery UI, Node.js, Socket.IO.The jQuery Chat plugin can be used to add a JavaScript-based chatting system to your site, allows webmasters/developers to add a fully-working chat room on top of their site.
The post JqChat : jQuery Realtime Chat with Node.js appeared first on jQuery Rain.
A small Jean Genie snuck off to the city,
Strung out on lasers and slash-back blazers,
Ate all your razors while pulling the waiters
Last week I saw the 'Bowie Is' Exhibition at ACMI, and the lyric above from his 'Jean Genie' (1973). I have no idea what a 'slash-back blazer' is, but, like lots of Bowie's best lyrics, it's a fantastic sounding phrase.
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And for all the chunky guitar riffs, martian make-up and gender-bending outfits, my favorite part was probably some footage of Bowie explaining his fantastically nerdy song-writing process.
It works like this: Typically he would take a pile of newspapers, cut the sentences into strips and then reassemble the pieces into brand new random sentences. Later in the 1990's, Bowie worked with a programmer to create a system (the 'Verbasizer') that automated this newspaper cutting/joining process.
So what you end up with is a real kaleidoscope of meanings and topics and nouns and verbs all sort of slamming into each other. - David Bowie
While most of these generated phrases mean nothing, others becomes the seed for bigger ideas and stories.
And I find that even maybe four words in here would… ‘The top kills himself.’ That sounds like a boss, doesn’t it? And suddenly I get a vision of a boss in the 30s throwing himself out of a window in the Great Depression. That might be enough to set me off writing a song about that. - David Bowie
While this partly 'gives away the magician's trick', it also shows that often the true value of the random isn't really its 'randomness' – it's the 'accidental sense' that WE make of it.
Whether it's seeing faces in clouds or our future in tea-leaves, humans seem to be hard-wired to search for meaning–even in completely meaningless things. We can't help it.
I think that fractals are like a visual equivalent of Bowie's random sentence masher. Though they emerge from a meaningless world of numbers, we can't help making our own connections with them. And, like Bowie, software can help us with these too.
Tom Beddard's Sub.Blue has been a home to great fractal experiments since the mid-2000s. In 2011 he teamed up with Kai Krause (of Kai's Power Tools fame) and Be Weiss to create a new kind of graphics app.
A year ago they released an iPad app called Frax that can generate incredible imagery with very little effort. The Frax interface is very minimal – it's mostly swipes and pinches – so this is as close as you'll ever get to 'fractal fingerpainting'.
If you've got an IOS device, this is a fun introduction to fractals.
Chaotica is a fractal generation application available for most OSs. I'm not going to lie – you'll probably need to read some tutorials to get real value out of this application. While the interface isn't busy, it probably uses some concepts you may not be familiar with right now.
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However I think it is worth a small time investment as it's more versatile than Frax and has a strong, super-enthusiastic community behind it.
Chaotica Studio is $99 and Chaotica HD is $33, but the free version is very capable. The only limitations to the free edition are:
Certainly there's nothing preventing you from creating great, original work like the piece below.
Continue reading %Getting Random with David Bowie and Fractals%
Prime Holdings Co.,LTD. is a Japanese company that expands a variety of businesses on the basis of the philosophy – “We think about ‘you’ foremost.”
In my previous article on time-saving tips for Pythonists, I mentioned that Python is a language that can inspire love in its users.
One reason for this is the number of time-saving libraries available for this language. A nice example is the Python Imaging Library (PIL), which is the focus of this article.
PIL is a free library that adds image processing capabilities to your Python interpreter, supporting a range of image file formats such as PPM, PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF and BMP.
PIL offers several standard procedures for image processing/manipulation, such as:
One issue with PIL is that its most recent version, 1.1.7, was released in 2009, and only supports Python 1.5.2–2.7. Although the PIL site promises a forthcoming version for Python 3.X, its last commit was in 2011, and it appears that development has been discontinued.
Fortunately, all is not lost for Python 3.X users. A project called Pillow has forked the PIL repository and added Python 3.X support. Given that most readers will probably be working with Python 3.X, I'll focus on the Pillow update in this article.
Since Pillow supports versions of Python back to Python 2.4, I'll only focus on installing Pillow and not the older version of PIL.
I'm currently writing this tutorial on a Mac OS X Yosemite 10.10.5, and thus will describe how to install Pillow on a Mac OS X machine. But, don't worry, I'll provide a link at the end of this section that describes how to install Pillow on other operating systems.
I just want to note here that Mac OS X comes with Python pre-installed. However, the version most likely will be prior to 3.X.
For instance, on my machine, when I run $ python --version in the terminal, I get Python 2.7.10.
A very easy way to install Pillow is through pip.
If you don't have pip installed on your machine, simply type the following command in your terminal, and you're all done:
$ sudo easy_install pip
Now, to install Pillow, simply type the following in your terminal:
$ sudo pip install pillow
That was easy, wasn't it?
As I promised, for installing Pillow on other operating systems, you can find the instructions for that here.
Continue reading %Manipulating Images with the Python Imaging Library%