Open Source

In my opinion, the Open Source approach does not have to conflict with the commercial interests of running a business. Having mainly self-taught coding skills I've to an extent always been reliant on the knowledge of others and that available in the public domain. PostSpectacular as concept refers to a participatory culture and as such is relevant to that of Open Source. With my work, and whenever possible, I've always taken an open approach and been sharing code and knowledge with others.

So far there are only a few projects listed here, though soon this part of the site will list more various contributions, small and bigger to these commons… Stay tuned!

toxiclibs is a constantly growing library collection for Processing & Java users, licensed under LGPL. The development of the libraries is indirectly funded through PostSpectacular's commercial projects, which in turn are often only made possible/feasible through the utilization of the libraries so far. For more information, please visit the project website/blog at http://toxiclibs.org/. A showreel of projects produced with these libraries is below:

onedotzero is an international moving image festival, showcasing a variety of work from innovators across the globe. This year's festival identity was created collaboratively by myself with Wieden+Kennedy. All identity assets were generated using a tailor made design/visualization tool I developed, which has also been adapted to create a large scale (48m wide) interactive installation at BFI Southbank during the London festival. The installation allowed users to submit their own messages and manipulate them through gestural interactions using various features of the new Maemo/Linux based Nokia N900 device. The software client for the phone was developed by Gary Birkett and will be available under GPL (TBC) soon.

To complete the community ethos of our identity concept we decided to open source the entire generator, installation software & tools in the hope to encourage further discussion, educate and hopefully see some wonderful new additions/re-renderings of the whole concept…

The entire identity generator software, including user guide & lots of developer documentation, is now available as open source downloads for Mac OSX, Windows & Linux on Google Code:

http://onedotzero-ident.googlecode.com/

Art-Net by Artistic Licence allows for sending DMX512 data via IP/UDP and manage connected DMX devices. This library is implementing the basic protocol & core features for Java applications.

Currently supported features are:

• Device/node discovery & automatic updating of node configurations
• Java typed descriptors of nodes & node properties
• Listener support for various events
• Sending of DMX512 data via UDP broadcast or unicast

This project is currently still in pre-alpha stage, so currently only source access via hg. Be also aware that large parts of the codebase are still undergoing major changes.

http://artnet4j.googlecode.com

fid.gen is an opensource fiducial marker design generator for reacTIVision based projects. The layout of the markers is physics driven and realised by a network of springs. There are numerous parameters to adjust the size & complexity of the markers.

This tool has been used to design hundreds or thousands of unique computer vision markers for previous installation projects (e.g. LCF Graduate Show 2008 and Lexus Luxury Lounge at NAIAS 2008 in Detroit).

If you require custom markers for commercial use, please get in touch for consulting services to obtain the best results for your project.

is.gd is a great URL shortening service, especially useful for heavy Twitter users and/or posting links in emails. I've created a little Firefox plugin to make better use of this service. Please visit the add-on's homepage for more info:

• is.gd creator @ addons.mozilla.org