Announcing Project MaiTai

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.

10 Comments

  1. Wow this is very creative, and looks like a lot of work went into it. Very cool! I was excited to see a JavaFX app doing MP3 visualization. What band, album and song is that? I like it.

  2. I forgot to mention that I launched it from Firefox on my OpenSolaris box and it worked perfectly.

  3. Adrian says:

    Oooh, it’s like QuartzComposer (one of my favourite OSX apps) in JavaFX – well done!

  4. JavaFX Buzz says:

    Hi, great news for JavaFX community. I will publish announce on my JavaFX aggregator.

  5. Frank Hess says:

    Nice looking app. But it doesn’t run on linux:

    Warning: Transparent windows are not supported by the current platform.
    at maitai.engine.PreviewHandler.applyDefaults$(PreviewHandler.fx:31)
    at maitai.engine.Main.doRun(Main.fx:47)
    at maitai.engine.Main.javafx$run$(Main.fx:34)

  6. Jason Young says:

    Are you able to run hudson on a more standard port like 8080? I’m guessing a lot of companies like mine block strange ports.

  7. TJ says:

    Very very .. I mean very nice

  8. ShiChang says:

    This is so cool. It can temporarily cure Lady Gaga addiction!

  9. Dmitry says:

    Nice! Good project.

  10. Dave says:

    Need a facebook page for this stat :)

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