Itch Away blog

I tend not to post too much about the innards of the code I’m working with, but I think I ought to, in case it’s useful or interesting to anyone.

I’m currently working on three separate projects in Flash.  With two of them, I’ve been able to bury my head in the sand and pretend that my knowledge of ActionScript 2 is up-to-date.  With the third one, I’m having to take a partial plunge into ActionScript 3 to avoid complete headaches and stupid lines of code.

Anyone familiar with AS2 might know about the setInterval(); method which ties itself to a function, called after the timer reaches the appropriate time.  The problem with this is that it’s hugely cumbersome to combine timers (for example, in my Flash setting for Jena Osman’s Public Figures project, each text transition combined two timers – one a delay, and one a combination of two transition effects, in and out).  This can soon lead to very complicated embedded timers in which timer names (which mudt be individually named!) are nastily close to each other on the line.

Check out this code, in AS3.  It calls the utils, creates a new variable (in MS) for the timer, tells it to call a function after the time is up, and then defines the function.  Sounds similar to the AS2 method above, but importantly the function itself is a lot tidier and makes more sense semanitcally.

import flash.utils.*;

var myTimer:Timer = new Timer(1000);

myTimer.addEventListener("timer", timedFunction);

myTimer.start();

function timedFunction(eventArgs:TimerEvent) {

trace("Event " + myTimer.currentCount + " triggered!");

if (myTimer.currentCount > 5) {

myTimer.stop();

}

}

It also loops by default, so adding the if conditional inside the function says that once it has looped in this case 6 times, stop looping.  Changing the 5 to zero will make it happen just the once.  Or, you can tell the function to go to another keyframe. Or whatever.

Practical applications in an e-poetic sense?  Textual transitions, for one, but importantly, adding a Math:random variable and replacing the timer value with this means that you can easily create randomly timed transitions with only a few lines of code and a more logical-looking layout.

Lee Brimelow’s post on Timers is really useful, and how I learned this.

Under the direction of Johanna Drucker, the Artists’ Books Online project is an absolutely mindblowing resource.  Mindblowing.  It hosts an already sizable and expanding collection of rare (and not to mention in many cases expensive) books, with publication, edition and critical information.

Most stunning, however, is the quality of the online resources available.  To my knowledge (i.e. of all the books I’ve browsed so far) the site hosts books for viewing online in their entirety, using a clean and intuitive Flash-based interface for zooming and moving about the page.  The physical quality is truly astounding.  Obviously, many material aspects of the works so fundamental to their appreciation are lost in online viewing, but the fact remains that finally one can take a more thorough look through some highly innovative typographical / mixed media books, in colour, in high quality.

It’s a treat to see so much of Drucker’s back catalogue up here.  Narratology (pictured), of which I had only ever seen a couple of poorly photocopied black & white pages, is there, and a fascinating work to explore if you are interested in collage, space on the page and the impact of carefully chosen aesthetic qualities (such as font size and weight) and how this affects readings.  This is something also explored in the famous The Word Made Flesh, also up here.

The catalogue can be found here.  If you find any work of particular interest, go ahead and comment about it!

Thanks to the Hayden’s Ferry Review blog — one of the best-maintained literary blogs out there and she-manned by the brilliant Beth Staples – for highlighting Bad Poetry Day, and the very bad poetry website.

Enjoie

If, like Emily Short, you’ve been lamenting at the lack of decent iPhone creative apps having been made to date, despair no more.

Aya Karpinska has finally had her iPhone / iTouch app – the children’s story “Shadows Never Sleep” accepted in the Apple apps directory.  This, to my knowledge, is the first piece of interactive fiction which makes use of the iPhone’s multitouch technology in a non-trivial way – i.e. it relies on the technology to produce readings and experiences in terms of the device’s capabilities, rather than being a case solely of remediation from what would then be a more practical paper-page.

“Shadows Never Sleep” at Aya’s website (includes link to App at iTunes Store)

Admittedly, Karpinska’s use of a somewhat expensive device (with currently pretty much exclusive technological capabilities) for children’s stories throws up a few problematic questions which I needn’t go into here.  More important for this project, I think, is the conceptual step of producing literature in ways which are exploiting such capabilities.  Her ‘zoom narrative’ takes advantage of the gestural features of the iPhone in which direct contact brings the body into a more transparent reflexivity with the device. From the dissertation:

Large digital projections can be shown on any surface: the wall of a room, a building façade, or a sidewalk. This presents interesting opportunities for digital storytelling, but the scenario of laptop plus digital projector lacks some of the small screen’s key strengths, such as the intimate scale, portability, and the ability to be viewed even in bright light conditions. With the iPhone, I had access to an important feature: the multi-touch screen. No mouse, no pointer, no buttons needed to make a story go. Just fingertips. I was particularly interested in the ability to pan and zoom within the display—left and right, up and down, in and out. The iPhone screen is flat like a page, but unlike a page in that its surface can be flicked and pinched to reveal unseen spaces beyond what is immediately visible. New kinds of writing emerged with the transition from scrolls to books. What if turning pages becomes zooming into surfaces and walking your fingers across a screen?

If you are not a child with an iPhone, you can check out the video of the work and a web instantiation of it here.

from this blog is due to extended problems with a project I’m working on.  Debug me, young cock. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. A tip for you, Flash cats. Always use trace to feedback the output of your code when you bugtest.