![\"\"](\"http:\/\/developer.casgrain.com\/images\/Flele_playing_4-5_img1.png\")
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My whole family is very much into all things japanese (including, of course, manga<\/em> and anime<\/em>). The other day, they found a little “sound-playing ghost” called Flele<\/a> (I have no idea what the name means).<\/p>\n \nAs far as I can tell, Flele is a small application that you drop one or more MP3s on, and it starts to “sing” when you click on the character’s hair. I have no idea how it actually works, since it requires Windows and the Japanese language pack. But my daughter and I quickly hashed out that what we could do would be a globally-floating iTunes controller, who would respond to click and animate when music was playing (we’ll figure out the “singing” part later).<\/p>\n My daughter<\/a> drew lots of PNGs this weekend (using Painter<\/a>, of course), and we assembled them in sequences to make animations. The iChibi can blink, and lights turn on\/off on its headphones whenever music is playing.<\/p>\n \niChibi can be dragged anywhere on screen, and will float on top of all windows.<\/p>\n \nClicking on its left ear starts playing in iTunes, on the right ear stops playing. The left headphone goes to the previous track, the right headphone to the next track. \nThe higher the song rating, the happier it will look.<\/p>\n \niTunes support is done through the excellent Eyetunes Framework<\/a>.<\/p>\n \niChibi works on MacOSX 10.5 and later.<\/p>\n \nIf you are interested in following the development of iChibi, follow Since iChibi uses lots of images for animations, and I didn’t want to keep multiple copies of the same image in memory (for example, if an image is re-used in multiple animation loops), I figured I should make a small class to hold all the images, loading them as necessary. I named this class iChibi<\/h4>\n
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\nClicking on the zipper gives a Settings panel, where you can control the its size, opacity and which playlist the songs are coming from.<\/p>\n@ichibiapp<\/a><\/code> on Twitter.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nImageSoup<\/h4>\n
ImageSoup<\/code>, referring to the Newton’s filesystem of course…<\/p>\n