Here at Smilebox we make interactive designs that you can put your own photos and videos in. This is my first design here at Smilebox. It’s largely based on the code examples from Keith Peters‘ book Making Things Move.
I did all of the code that makes the photos/videos move around – more about that below. Mark Puskar, a coworker here at Smilebox, did the awesome graphic design. Since the theme is water, and my wife Jill just loves the water, most of the photos are of her. I don’t think anyone will mind. :-)
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Making it move
If you’ve read the book Making Things Move then you can see that most of what’s going on here is stuff from chapter 11: Billiard Ball Physics. The main difference is the interactions that have been added to turn this into a photo browser. And you’ll notice that the small bubbles only interact with the center bubble but can pass through each other. This is mainly do to performance issues because making the small bubbles interact with each other is very processor intensive and Smilebox already has enough overhead to deal with.
Here’s a version that uses MovieClips attached at runtime instead of Smilebox photo components. Click on a circle to make it replace the center circle.
Here’s the main bit of code that handles the motion:
Smilebox creation based on Keith Peter’s : Making Things Move originally appeared on polyGeek.com on November 21, 2007.