Simon Heys

Decided to redesign the site so the blog areas are on a white background. I’m planning to write a few tutorials over the next couple of weeks and this design will make them much easier to read. Portfolio and Archive will be receiving some attention soon too.

Heart-felt thanks to the heroic Ole Zorn who volunteered to translate the clock into German, not realising that he was about to experience a grueling 3-day schedule of testing and round-the-clock correspondence. Thanks Ole!
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[ZIP] Download Pottery with source code

To use: draw a simple ‘S’ shape on the left-hand panel. Then experiment. Note that it’s fairly crude and only renders convex surfaces properly.

This was a quick mockup I made at the end of last year to try out an idea for a Christmas Card. It was originally going to be for making baubels, and would have the addition of automatic smoothing, concave rendering and mapping a christmassy texture onto the surface. Probably saving, galleries etc. might have followed.

I like simple interactive toys like this, where you can understand what to do straight away and there’s an immediate reward and a sense of play.

I’ve been making blue-prints / cyanotypes of various kinds for quite a while. The appeal has always been to make photos without using lenses or carefully controlled photographic processes. I’ve never been a big fan of photography; the equipment and techniques are now so honed and precise leading the majority of photographs to appear somewhat mechanical and soul-less. I want the surprise of the accidental rather than the boredom of the deliberate.

I originally bought the base chemicals from the excellent Silverprint in Waterloo but used them up long ago. Inspired by the recent sunny weather I thought I’d try one of their alternative process kits which includes various bits and pieces like a measuring cup, syringe and coating rods which make the job that much easier. Rather than the usual contact prints with plants or other stuff, I thought it might be interesting to try a pinhole camera.

Of course since the kit arrived the sun has gone into hiding and consequently I’ve not been able to make much progress. This was an exposure I took yesterday. I couldn’t class it as a photograph at all, but I like the way it turned out all the same.

I’ve decided to start releasing bits and pieces of source code just for fun. The first one is the Vector Field demo I wrote ages ago.

First, the source code

[ZIP] Download Vector Field source code

It’s easy to change the size, colour and ’splat’ graphics. This is totally free for non-commercial use, but I kindly ask that you contact me if you wish to use it for something commercial.

Part of the reason I’m posting this is because it has a bug which I can’t figure out how to fix. To explain what the bug is I need to explain how this works. So here goes.

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One of the problems I had when writing Flash Screensavr was sharing preferences between two separate and different SWF files - the Preferences panel and the Screensaver itself. Obviously a job for SharedObject.

However there is a trick to creating a SharedObject that behaves how you’d expect.
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Having recently parted with my aging G4 PowerBook and upgraded to an entry-level MacBook, I couldn’t resist the temptation to install Windows XP (spit!). Well, it’s good for games at least.

I was also excited to discover a free version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Express. Have only played with the tutorials but have to admit that it beats XCode so far (Tiger, haven’t tried Leopard yet); the interface is far more mature and better organised.

Plus one of the tutorials is… a screensaver! So, Windows screensavers coming soon(ish)…

Screensavr has been Approved by the Authorities and is available on Yahoo Apps. Does this mean I’m now a fully qualified geek?

I once did a quick experiment into creating drawings from nothing but code, but based on natural phenomena. The first thing I tried was gravity and it gave some results which I really liked. Here are the PostScript drawings it made.

As I’m on a bit of a Cocoa Screensaver mission at the moment I spent a couple of hours creating a Gravity Screensaver. Just a bit of fun really. Here it is:

[ZIP] Download for Mac (Universal)

So here it is, one month on: the first Mac-native Cocoa version. Built on ObjectiveFlickr.

[ZIP] Download for Mac (Universal)