Silk – Interactive Generative Art

bromagosa 13 years ago |

It's great, but it'd be even greater if it had a gallery where you could browse through people's drawings!

mjn 13 years ago | |

A variation on that I've run across, which imo works better on mobile, is to keep a gallery, but instead of displaying it directly as a gallery, have a button in the app where you can load a random creation from the gallery "live" into the app, and then use it as a starting point to edit. An app some friends of mine made, Sketch-a-Bit, uses that in a way that I think works pretty well: http://sketchabit.adamsmith.as/

yurivish 13 years ago | | |

The idea's very much to the lines I've been thinking, and something like this will likely make its way into a future update.

And thank you for the link! Very cool.

olalonde 13 years ago |

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4797236

spyder 13 years ago | |

Yea, and it seems the old URLs of the drawings aren't working anymore :(.

atjonasnielsen 13 years ago |

Drawing the most artistic vaginas on the web

joe5150 13 years ago |

That's incredible. I used to do a lot of work with Apophysis and I think I've been reinspired to start up again.

What's more incredible is that it runs on my rather outdated machine. I'm so used to these Javascript-HTML5 canvas projects to cause my computer to eat dirt, but this was as smooth as I could possibly have expected.

yurivish 13 years ago | |

Thanks!

thiderman 13 years ago |

That probably gave me the most instant "wow" feeling any web page has ever given me. That's _really_ impressive!

jello4pres 13 years ago |

As someone who is just fascinated by symmetry, I could play with this forever.

gruseom 13 years ago | |

As someone who is just fascinated by symmetry

Do you know Jane Siberry's charming song about it?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkpg0tlcAZw

spot 13 years ago |

nice drawing effect but the copyright claims are pretty dangerous: they claim any art created with it must have a creative commons attribution license. this is total BS.

olalonde 13 years ago | |

They should probably make this more obvious but other than that, I fail to see how it is total BS. If you don't like their licensing terms, don't use the product...

GhotiFish 13 years ago | | |

It's not like stuff made with the GCC has to be GPL. I'm not even sure they can enforce this.

yarrel 13 years ago | | |

Their licensing terms are dubious. You're using their tools to make original art.

saidajigumi 13 years ago |

I really like this trend of mobile apps with a fully functional experience on the web. Adrift for iOS is nice example of using this approach for a trial/teaser experience. It's worth checking out the fully playable demo on the game's site at http://www.playadrift.com/, and the base app is free if you want to compare/contrast that to the mobile device experience. Beautifully done, IMO.

itafroma 13 years ago |

The output leaves something to be desired: only 1375x918.

I imagine it could be a popular tool to generate custom desktop/device backgrounds, but the low resolution combined with incorrect aspect ratio (not 16:9, 16:10, or even 4:3) makes it unappealing for that use.

(Edit: actually based entirely off how big your window is, see child comments)

yurivish 13 years ago | |

Hi itafroma,

If you go fullscreen (there's an icon for it right under New), you can export a background that's exactly the right size for your browser.

Right now the output is exactly the same size as the input, but it's a good idea to let people download cropped or scaled versions.

~ the silk creator

itafroma 13 years ago | | |

Ah, yeah, I just figured that out after trying to piece together why it was such a weird dimension. Standard sizes would definitely be helpful, especially since doesn't seem to take into account retina/HiDPI displays. MacBook Pro set to "Best for retina" produces a 1440x900 image.

yurivish 13 years ago | | |

Hmm... What browser are you using? I'm on a Retina Macbook, and just successfully saved a Retina-quality image using Chrome.

itafroma 13 years ago | | |

Safari 6.0.3.

Semaphor 13 years ago |

Pretty awesome:)

Can't save the Thumbnail in Chrome 27.0.1448.0 dev-m though. It only allows me to copy the image and paste it somewhere (which is enough) but I thought I'd mention it in case it's a bug in Silk and not in Chrome Dev.

icoder 13 years ago |

I'm thinking an API where you supply random seed nr, image size and optionally color and are returned an image. Useful for avatar creation :)

mnicole 13 years ago |

Loved the site when I first came across it a few months ago, but I'm really into the new interface and color mixer. Nice job!

swamp40 13 years ago |

I wonder if perhaps the universe was designed using an app such as this?

kyrias 13 years ago |

No Google+ '+1'? :(

lefinita 13 years ago |

The music just beautiful, boost my productivity :)

yurivish 13 years ago | |

Thanks! It was composed for the app by Mat Jarvis, of http://microscopics.co.uk. :)

Torn 13 years ago |

Dies on chrome for me, ouch!

yurivish 13 years ago | |

Silk creator here – what version of Chrome? I haven't had a single browser crash for me during testing and development (with testing in the latest Chrome/Safari/Firefox), but I'd like to look into it.

(Edit: Also, a tip for Hacker Newsians – you can double-click the ? in the corner to hide the big app advertisement in the corner.)

dreen 13 years ago | |

same here, last time it was posted it worked well :(

borisvish 13 years ago |

Cool app!

camus 13 years ago |

crashed on chrome (latest) but cool!