(Pre) ANN: Pattern Toolkit Gallery -- 21st century plaids

[Wilhelm Sanke]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Erik Hansen <erikhans08 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> beautiful 21st century plaids
> reflecting the Scottish origin of Rev.
>
> Erik Hansen



Hi Erik and all,

Almost correct:
The Scottish origin needs to be traced back to "Scott" Raney, the 
inventor of Metacard, which is the predecessor and backbone of 
Revolution. You probably know this. Scott, however, is living (or had 
lived) in Boulder, Colorado (see also: website <www.metacard.com>).

By the way, creating (basic) Scottish plaids is a two-click affair with 
my forthcoming toolkit:

Button 1 produces diagonal lines with color increments for a given 
length of color-point sequences with adjacent vertical and horizontal 
color points remaining empty. Start and incremental color values and the 
length of the sequences are randomly generated or can be pre-set by the 
user through sliders.

Button 2 flips the generated pattern horizontally and super-imposes it 
on the original one in such a way that if fits into the "holes" of the 
first pattern.

Violà,  there's the Scottish plaid!

To script such algorithms would be a good assignment for a 
medium-advanced computer class.

Then there is a wide variety of ways to embellish the basic Scottish 
plaid or other kinds of patterns, e.g. you could produce a gray-scale 
gradient (one-directional or multi-directional) with the toolkit and 
again superimpose it over the basic plaid to achieve slight changes of 
colors in the plaid from left to right, top to bottom or other directions.-

Working now and then on the toolkit gives me a nice break away from 
other obligations. At present there is an examination period at the 
beginning of the winter semester for three weeks, and I am brooding over 
voluminous examination papers like on "Progressive Education" (whatever 
that means), "Charter Schools", "Teacher education in the U.S.A" (a 
topic vividly discussed among my American colleagues and in U.S. 
literature: whether such a type of education exists or rather should be 
introduced in the near future) etc. or -  for that matter - in the 
section of technology about "Structures of data systems and data mining".

After all, one of my students, who is due for one of his three one-hour 
oral parts of his M.A. examination next Monday, has chosen a comparison 
of Flash and Transcript as one of his three topics for this section of 
the examination. He had participated in one of my workshop-seminars 
still mainly based on Metacard (another hands-on workshop for the 
duration of the semester is starting next week) and produced two 
content-wise identical applications, first one with Metacard, then - 
under pressure from a colleague for whom he later worked as a research 
assistant and who insisted on a "real programming language" - in Flash. 
Needless to say which was the easier part to program, but there are some 
advantages in the visual appearance of the Flash application.
I hope I can persuade him to present his two applications on my website, 
so we would have another actual example to compare Transcript and Flash.

So far,

best regards,

Wilhelm Sanke, Prof.
<http://www.sanke.org/MetaMedia>