New Release Is Out

By Josh Marinacci November 22nd, 2009, under Uncategorized

We’ve got a new release of Project MaiTai ready. Improvements in this release include:

  • replaced proportional scrollbars and scrolling code with a brand new impl.
    should be much less buggy and a bit faster
  • replaced the coffee cup icon in window frame on Windows with a proper
    MaiTai icon
  • added right click popup menu to all blocks which lets you rename the block.
  • position newly added blocks in the center of the current canvas viewport
    instead of at 0,0
  • disable editors for input lines when they are connected to an output
  • limit the size of the Stretch-And-Blur block to 600×400 to prevent
    accidental swap death

Oh yeah, and one more thing. If you are running Snow Leopard on a unibody Mac laptop with the large multitouch trackpad you can now use the MultiTouch block to get the X and Y of every finger you have on the trackpad (up to 10).

To test it out try opening this project in the new build of MaiTai, then move your fingers on the trackpad to see a particle effect for each one.

Mai TaiScreenSnapz006.png

Particles from five fingertips

MaiTai can do multitouch thanks to this cool library by Wayne Keenan

Due to some wonkiness between Hudson and webstart I’ve moved the beta download link to here. This beta build will only be updated when we push a release. If you want the continuous build, which could break at any time, it’s still on hudson.

Announcing Project MaiTai

By Josh Marinacci November 12th, 2009, under intro

If you follow my Twitter stream then you may have seen a string of strange videos I’ve posted. This was a series of experiments generated by a new art tool I’ve been building for the past few months. Now it’s time to finally show it to the world.

Project MaiTai

Mai TaiScreenSnapz005.png

MaiTai lets you visually wire up blocks to create interactive graphics. Think of them almost as animated sculptures. There are blocks for nodes (shapes, images, colors), effects, simple logic, and inputs from the mouse, keyboard, webservices (Flickr & Twitter streams), and realtime sound spectrum from MP3s. Once you are happy with the results you can export it as a JavaFX WebStart app or a Quicktime movie suitable for uploading to video sharing websites.

To try it out go to ProjectMaiTai.org, and click on the download link in the right sidebar. Once the app starts you can try some examples from the ‘samples‘ button in the toolbar. Here’s a taste of what you can create with MaiTai.

com.sun.javafx.runtime.MainScreenSnapz013
Mai TaiScreenSnapz004

Mai TaiScreenSnapz002
com.sun.javafx.runtime.MainScreenSnapz014

MaiTai is fully open source (BSD), and built entirely in JavaFX. The current version uses JavaFX 1.2.1 on Java 6. This version is still very alpha, but you can already do some interesting things with it. Please join the roadmap mailing list to give feedback and suggest new features.

Quick bug fixes

By Josh Marinacci November 3rd, 2009, under Uncategorized

I just pushed out a new version of MaiTai which fixes a strange hanging bug when you feed the Image block into the Kaleidoscope block. As a side benefit of my fix the Kaleidoscope block should now be faster in general.

Flickr stream

By Josh Marinacci October 29th, 2009, under intro

After playing with a few million Wordpress plugins I found one that will show a flickr stream based on a keyword. There were several, actually, which can do this, but only this one let you choose larger image sizes. What you see on the right sidebar is currently searching for the tag quartzcomposer, not projectmaitai, only because we don’t have anything in Flickr yet. I’ll hopefully be able to change that before launch.

Almost ready

By Josh Marinacci October 29th, 2009, under intro

I’ve got the website set up and what I hope is the final build for the first release of MaiTai. I’m in Sweden this week for the OreDev conference where I’ll be announcing MaiTai at the end of my session on Wednesday. Now if I can just overcome my jetlag I’ll be set.