blacklog

[Update: the tiny icon factory has moved from tiny.media.mit.edu to tiny.tacolab.com]

This an example search form using json, that retrieves the first 252 or less icons matching a given term from the Tiny Icon Factory. I am using Brent's new REST style search API for the Tiny framework. It is very simple to use, you just have to query the server with a URL that looks like this:

http://tiny.tacolab.com/search/[term].[format]

where term stands for what you're searching for, and format can be html, xml, or json (term.js in this case), with html as the default. When using json, you can optionally provide a name for a callback function:

http://tiny.tacolab.com/search/tiny.js?callback=myfunction

You can visit the Tiny Search Documentation page for more detailed information on how to use this API. These are a few examples using html:

http://tiny.tacolab.com/search/obey.html

http://tiny.tacolab.com/search/sun.html

http://tiny.tacolab.com/search/slime.html

http://tiny.tacolab.com/search/lock.html

It is interesting what you get when you search for love:
http://tiny.tacolab.com/search/love.html
You get contradiction.

Here are links to the icons named with the 13 first positive integers:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. Weird.

Other fun things to try: any letter from the alphabet (a, t, or any other), no,
pong, joe, play, martini, jesus ... or anything else (almost).

by Luis Blackaller and Brent Fitzgerald

You can download it here. Brent claims that the experience of drawing icons in the Dashboard is much more intimate than in the browser. I agree.

Brent has published links to a couple of cool cocoa applications written by Florian Jenett that grab the Tiny RSS feed and place icons in the apple dock or in the menubar:

This is what happens when you don’t sleep. Tiny PLWidget, finally running, and soon to be unleashed.

I spent almost a week trying to figure out how to stop the widget from being dragged across the screen when the mouse was down and traveling through the drawing canvas. Conjectures and advice pointed me to look for some javascript event logic error, potentially caused by a conflict between the DOM event implementation, and the Apple Dashblard event implementation. However, after 33.27 (base 60) hours of not sleeping and working with the PLW Cannibals on our one night project for the Media Lab prototype-a-thon competition, I figured out I just needed to define one CSS parameter called -apple-dashboard-region on the div ID I didn’t want to have dragged. The code on the CSS would look like this:

#canvas {
	width: 13em;
	height: 13em;
	margin-left: 1em;
	position: relative;
	border-width: 1px;
	border-style: solid;
	border-color: rgb(204, 204, 204);
	margin-bottom: 1.4em;
	-apple-dashboard-region: dashboard-region(control rectangle);
}

This defines a rectangular region where the widget will not be dragged across the dashboard, letting you concentrate on making drawings, or other things.

Media Lab craftwork by Anita + Marcelo with a laser cutter:

Tomorrow at 6 pm Brent and I will show the Tiny Icon Factory at the Delight by Design show in the MIT Museum. We will open the site again, show some animations and give away some stickers. It has been a good opportunity to look at them and start figuring out interesting ways to get them organized. I find it very surprising how creative people have been when given just 169 squares of black and white and a total absence of individual authorship. Looking at all this icons has been a very pleasant experience.

A rough sample of a sequence of icons is here.

The following pictures feature some blown-up renders of some sample icons with their names and ids. The names were given to them by their creators, and their ids were given to them by Rails, when written as binary strings into a database table.

Brent and I thought of taking the Tiny Icon Factory out from the MIT web domains so we could stop worrying about hosting controversial user created content (as in porn or swastikas) in a university server. We started looking for available domain names only to find out tiny dot everything has already been taken. Tiny dot org features an interesting kind of static website-haiku that prevents you from accessing its hidden content unless you know something nobody I know knows. I wonder what lurks in there. Tiny dot com is owned by a british computer manufacturer and online store called Timeuk. Tiny dot com dot mx is owned by Grupo Tiny, a misterious mexican company that will tell you nothing about itself. We can’t use dot edu or dot gob, and dot tv doesn’t seem to be used but is not available. We have been thinking of other top secret names but we are still not sure what will be the outcome of this adventure. Only time will tell.