First Amoeba Video

From APIDesign

For a while I am publishing API Design Tips on this website, but today I felt a bit sorry about having just the audio, no appropriate video. I know there are sound visualizers like goom, but still I wanted to do something related to TheAPIBook. What is that? Well, one of the suitable visualizations could be based on the Amoeba Model. Nervous, shaking amoeba could be good visualization for a sound.

Thus I created a life Java component that can shakes like amoeba (as drawn by HP guys). It took a while, but Java2D is powerful and as soon as one learns to provide proper coordinates to Bézier curves, one can get really nice, rounded shape. Enjoy the Media:Apitip06-year-of-annotations.mp3 with video:

Then it is just a matter of converting such shape from Java's Graphics2D into a movie. For a while I was struggling to find the simplest way to do it, but at the end I found nice Java application/library that knows how to store sequences of BufferedImages into .avi movie. This clearly shows how important good libraries are. I am completely clueless about the .avi format, yet it was just a matter of few lines of code to produce it.

Now I am becoming a Java video processing guru. If you are interested in more details about that part of my life, leave some questions here.

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