Stefan Goodchild

Novation Launchpad – Note number to XY Coordinates and back again.

First thing I did with my new Launchpad? Nope, I didn’t hook it up to Live and jam. I hooked it up, fired up Processing and worked out how to light up the pads and recieve the notes so I could hack it to do anything I wanted to.

One thing I noticed straight off the bat is the note numbers are not incremental. Each row starts 16 higher than the last - I assume to allow for the same firmware to work in a 16 x 16 layout model - and there is a very simple way that reminds me of the technique of bitshifting I used back in the bad old days of DVD authoring to convert from one to the other.

// To go from XY to the note number
noteNumber = y * 16 + x;

// To go from the note number to the XY
x = noteNumber % 16;
y = (noteNumber - x) / 16;

Hopefully that will save someone ten minutes of head scratching.

Jiva Technology

The new Jiva Technology website template for Wordpress with custom Twitter feed and Project carousel.

SweetTweet

The anti-Cursebird. A realtime feed of people telling others they love them via the Twitter service. From conception to deployment took about 6 hours.

www.sweettweet.co.uk

Farewell, Real World. Hello Jiva

It’s day two at my new home - Jiva Technology - following a rousing send off from Real World. My seven years in the Real World were both enjoyable and challenging but we all have to move on at some point and I felt my time was now.

My new home at Jiva is a startup company building web services to help people find other people who can help. The first product is a website called Beanbag Learning and it’s purpose is to help parents find tutors in their local area for their children. Moving the ‘word of mouth’ culture onto the Internet in short if you will.

I’m excited to find out that my first project is an Adobe AIR application built round communication. This is something very interesting to both design and build as the technologies and UI paradigms involved are pretty well defined these days so the basics of the interaction are pretty much in stone and assumed so that leaves all the fun stuff. The details.

Processing Camera Classes

Inspired by the feedback from my latest vimeo video I’ve finally got my simple ‘Chase’ and ‘Sphere’ camera classes tidied up and available. Probably not the greatest programming feat of the decade but may help some of you starting out with Processing.

You can see a simplified applet and get the source code here.

If you have any feedback or suggestions to how to improve them please get in touch.

WOMAD

The replacement WOMAD site following our decision to drop the old Lasso site after the server theft. A new OO based forum code is the main new feature on the code front.

Nothing really new up front as yet in terms of features but - like Real World Records - the site has been designed to be extended easily over the coming months with plenty of scope for custom areas.

Standards based, with proper separation and where possible semantic markup this is the final Real World site to move to PHP from Lasso and the final missing site after the theft.

www.womad.org

Real World Records

I had the majority of the site built and working locally before the server theft but with no design or UI in place. The design came together very quickly and was designed from the ground up to be easily improved upon.

This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.

www.realworldrecords.com

Realworld Records New Website Live

Finally managed to get the replacement Realworld Records website online last friday. It was the website that along with WOMAD’s website that was based on a very old version of Lasso that we decided to finally put out to pasture so this new version is based on a LAMP backend.

I had the majority of the site built and working locally before the server theft but with no design or UI in place. The design came together very quickly and was designed from the ground up to be easily improved upon.

This is a temporary site and as such there are some rough edges but I think for only a few days work on the UI and design it holds up pretty well with a simple and clean design, free from Web 2.0 clichés, a full search, clean URLs and sound samples for every track in the Realworld catalogue so in many ways is a vast improvement on the original site.

None of this would have been possible however without the hard work of the Records staff who have spent some of the last year on data entry of the catalogue information into the new discography system, so many thanks to Jon!

Cubescape

Amazing piece of HTML/CSS/jQuery hackery by Cameron Adams that just begs to be played with. It looks like my future will mainly involve creating nostalgic Q-Bert landscapes.

Cubescape