We recently got an email from Chris Garguilo, an artist and instructor for the New Media Arts program at Kapi‘olani Community College, University of Hawai‘i. He's used HYPE to create artwork for the school's faculty biennial show - which is going on right now at the Koa Gallery in Honolulu.

Chris wrote:

I wanted to do something that visually represented Google's spider and logfile record-keeping of our digital footprints that we leave behind (ie. Google constantly at work... indexing, caching, logging, etc.), and when I came across HYPE, and specifically ObjectPool, I immediately knew that I had found the right solution.

Even though you'd have to travel to Hawai‘i to see the actual installation (oh darn!) you can also check it out online: Google: Digital Footprints.

Thanks Chris, for using HYPE and for taking the time to tell us about it!

Sunday January 17, 2010 / HYPE ver 1.1.1 launched today and Brandan Hall and myself are super excited to release our new class ContextSavePNG which allows you to rip your small Flash canvas to a much larger transparent PNG.

Here is a quick video showcasing it's use. ROCK AND ROLL !

That's right ladies and gentlemen, after a short hiatus for the holiday season HYPE is back with a brand new release! And boy howdy, what a release it is!

First off, the large PNG output is in there and as Josh put it "it's scary easy to use". Check out the new examples in the ContextSavePNG folder and the update docs for more information. There were a lot of structural changes made to support making this feature - be sure to check out the hype.framework.canvas package if you're interested in seeing how it all works.

Speaking of scary easy to use, we made a new rhythm - FilterCanvasRhythm, that makes running filters over time on a BitmapCanvas even easier (our readme has been updated to use it rather than FilterRhythm). A nice by-product of FilterCanvasRhythm is that you can use it with the new PNG output feature. If you do try to FilterCanvasRhythm on a BitmapCanvas that has been setup for large output it will make your code run crazy slow, but what do you expect trying to blur a 6400 x 3600 (or bigger!) pixel image?!?!

We've also updated ObjectPool so it's constructor can accept either a single class or an array of classes. If you pass in an array of classes each time an object is requested from the pool it will be randomly chosen from that array.

Finally, and maybe most importantly to the geeks out there HYPE is now on GitHub, so fork away!

the HYPE Contest Winners :

Johan Lindholm

http://www.jlindholm.com/2010/01/spiraling-spiral-code/

and

Thomas Kräftner

http://kraftner.com/blogplay/experiments/2009/12/hype-chainlayout-and-logo-animation/
http://kraftner.com/blogplay/experiments/2009/12/hype-play-experiment-and-win/

HYPE Honorable Mentions :

Mike Almond

http://blog.madebypi.co.uk/2009/11/19/jpeglitch/

Michael Svendsen

http://thesven.com/?p=209
http://thesven.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/HypeContestEntry.swf

marden72

http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomterritory/sets/72157622624626641/

smallfly

http://vimeo.com/8526768

Artmos / Anders R. Toft

http://artmos.dk/hype/

Sorry it took so long we had no idea how many entries our little contest was going to receive. we're so stoked on 2010 and the upcoming workshops we're setting up to expand HYPE to an even better place.

Branden Hall and Joshua Davis

Why build a visual framework, which uses all the features of AS3... only to be trapped at 72DPI and a tiny canvas size. So I started doing some research on the internet on what types of methods people we're using to render Bitmaps. Even an e-mail volley to Erik Natzke, who has been using this process, shed some light into the pros and cons he has faced.

So Branden and I sat down and outlined how we would integrate the ability to use all the features of HYPE but with the possibility of ripping your HYPE project to a larger format canvas... which could be saved as a transparent PNG.

Yeah... we love you too.

We will be including this in a release after our December 13th contest, with some examples and instructions on how to use the large format PNG output. Is it screaming fast? NOPE... it will drop your frame rate down considerably as it renders your composition across a hidden set of tiles. Then can take another bit of time to stitch the tiles and save out your completed PNG... but does it work? YES.

Branden and I are super excited to bring this to HYPE, and hope you all will enjoy using it.

On October 31st, Halloween 2009, Branden Hall and I launched our beta version of HYPE. Using a ghost as an asset I set out to use HYPE to create an intro animation on the front page of the site. We decided to use this ghost as our base icon/logo for our HYPE project and it would be a great challenge to update the front splash page each month showcasing our ghost in an animation that uses HYPE's features.

Branden has added some great video tutorials, like understanding the Sound Analyzer. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to walk you through a video that documents how I created the first HYPE intro splash animation. So if you have 55min and 55 seconds (amazing and kinda creepy), you can walk through my process for creating the animation and also get a better understanding about how all these small single purpose classes can work together to create something robust and dynamic.

If you're new to HYPE please visit hype.joshuadavis.com to download the framework and examples.

I haven't used vimeo now in almost a year and I thought that building these tutorial videos each month showcasing the featured ghost animation might be a great reason for me to participate here more and trying to get more comfortable with using video for instruction… let me know what you think in the comments… any feedback would be super helpful since this is fairly a new format for me.

I just got done posting a new video tutorial up on the HYPE Vimeo channel - Understanding SoundAnalyzer. It walks you through the what, why and how of the SoundAnalyzer class - the most popular part of HYPE to date.

A few folks have been asking for a video about SoundAnalyzer - so that's what I made. If you have any ideas or requests for future videos please pass them along! Your feedback will help guide both the future of this video series and HYPE as a whole.

CUSP - Multitouch VJ Application - Preview from SENSORY-MINDS on Vimeo.

I just noticed my code said...

for (var i = 0; i < numItems; ++i) {

instead of

for (var i:uint=1; i < numItems; ++i) {

When using "soundAnalyzer.getFrequencyIndex" the range is from 1 to 256 NOT 0... sorry about that. I have re-uploaded the zip with the fix or if you have already downloaded the zip... please copy and paste above to correct the error.

Lee Probert has a new PaperVision and HYPE experiment up... click and drag to rotate the scene... http://rezzynet.com/oscillation/Main2.html