I got to BCT on Monday just in time for our Introduction to Creative Technologies lecture where we listened to some Apple Inc representatives talk about the history of the company, it's success since the second coming of Steve Jobs (though they didn't actually say that bit) and the iPhone and iPad platform and Xcode. While I might have unwittingly entered the reality distortion field over the course of the week I became mildly interested in the idea of learning Cocoa, Objective C and all things related to developing mac, iPhone and iPad applications. This is the great thing about this course, while stuff like that has always interested me, I'd never actually bother to learn it (or have the resources or the mindset) if I was not studying. I think there is potential in the platform, and some people have already seen that potential. I'd also fully prefer to write in native code, as opposed to the Flash environment that Apple recently effectively banned from their devices.

The rest of the day was not going to be productive, I was incredibly tired, and my team mates were still working on the Processing assignment so I went home to get some sleep, although that didn't quite happen.

Our illustrator seemed to be off doing research on cat breeds which I found a bit pointless, and time was swiftly running out so I started to draw our animated cat on my own, and I did this on Tuesday and through the night on Wednesday. It took a while due to difficulty in even starting as I was not comfortable drawing a cat - drawing at all. But I had to relearn my skill and I chose Adobe Fireworks to do the animation in. This is a program I wanted to get familiar with anyway for some website prototyping that I want to do in the future when I have some time (haha), and for this task is was simply a joy to use.

I drew animations for a few different movements, enough to start with, we could add more later if we had time.

I went in in the morning and delivered the artwork and I also experimented with controlling Flash from Max,but being incredibly tired (again) and mildly annoyed that only one team member had come in (in a timely manner) I went home again. While there though I had determined that controlling Flash was probably going to produce a lot of headaches especially as some of the documentation appeared to be out of date and it also made use of Actionscript, the language of Flash. I have a mild aversion to Actionscript and now was not the time to get over it.

It didn't matter, it occurred to me that we did not need Flash anyway. I had made a video animation of a cat and that could be controlled by MaxMSP directly.

Thursday I got in early and started trying to "write code" in Max to play certain frames. This wound up taking hours or frustration as it's never quite as simple as the documentation makes it out to be. While I did this another team member played with certain functions of Max for it's motion sensing. We worked until fairly late then I took everything home to complete it and take over the motion sensing too, and integrate it with my video playback programming. Another all-nighter. Presentation was the next day.

On Friday morning our class presented their various works. Everyone had different issues all arising from time vs ambitiousness vs ability with software. However the main focus of the project was the ideas behind Play. Our cat was not finished, it groomed itself and blinked while there was no interaction and it looked sideways at the participant if it detected some action, but it was also meant to pounce forward and then follow movements with it's eyes. Originally I wanted the cat to play with it's paws and and move closer to the screen to smell if the participant approached the screen. But that kind of stuff was now stripped out.

There were so many  groups on presentation day and by midday everyone had had enough and our group had not yet presented. I let it slide as it became apparent that the critique although valuable was not critical. Our idea wasn't going to be changed in any dramatic way at this point, I had to get the rest of the program working and complete the other parts of this assignment. That's how I've spent the weekend, I've had to simplify the cat's eye-tracking a bit further, and I'm mildly annoyed that all of this work for the good of the group comes at the expense of any personal submissions that I also have to make. Well, it might, there is still a few more hours before hand in.

I'm quite glad this is over, I'd like to have explored some concepts more and not get bogged down in details of how to actually get things working, and while I found my group fairly agreeable I still think I work better alone. Coming up with an idea worried me enough to join a team but I wound up executing a lot of the product anyway so I can probably handle doing things on my own, and with the added bonus of being able to make decisions quicker and not having to commit to be somewhere when it serves no other purpose than to demonstrate that one is actively working on the project.

Demonstration video.