We hope your new year is an animated one! This year has been a busy one for MakeSweet. From time to time, heavy traffic has forced us to limit generation of animations on our site. In 2010, that should be a thing of the past. For a preview of what is to come, see our New Year 2010 animation generator.

When you add your pictures or words to the animation, you’ll find a new “movie” button. This creates a custom GIF animation that you can save on your computer. So far, so familiar. What is new is that all work is done on your computer, rather than ours. So we can keep this service free for all to use as they like, without bankrupting ourselves. And your photos never leave your computer, so you can be even more sure of your privacy.

And, for distributors of MakeSweet generators, this removes the last requirement for special server support. Now all you need to host a complete, stand-alone generator is a regular webserver. We’ll be updating MakeSweet Live in the new year to reflect the new possibilities.

Happy New Year! (P.S For those that way inclined: our popular Christmas Ornament generator from last year is going strong).

Big tattoos, big billboards, big ornaments - we are happy to announce that high resolution mode is back to MakeSweet and better than ever!

If you know Blender, you can now sign-up at live.makesweet.com to be on call as a designer for people looking for generators. Sign-up is free and requires no commitment. Thanks to those who already signed up before we even advertised this!

MakeSweet Live is a service that converts Blender designs to interactive flash widgets. Think of it as a new medium (and market) for your art. Interested? Sign up here.

Want to make a picture of a nice shiny shrink-wrap box for your software? It is sometimes useful to make even the most abstract of virtual products tangible. There’s lots of programs out there to do it, but MakeSweet lets you do it live and online. Just click the big “plus” button to add your picture to this box (requires Flash 10):

(don’t see anything? go here).

This design is just a simple test of our new Blender to Flash workshop; if you know how to use Blender, you can upload a design and have it converted to a Flash generator automatically.

We are experimenting with a new interface to our generators. Here’s a (slightly out of season) version of our christmas ornament - requires Flash 10:

For maximum fun, click-and-drag on the ornament itself. Enjoy!

You can make a slideshow of zooming images with our slideshow tool. It gives you an easy way to set up controlled Ken Burns effects, rather than the random zooms and pans of other tools. Here’s an example:

Now that Flash lets you process webcam images, lots of strange and wonderful things become possible with a browser that until now were only possible with specialized computer vision software. It feels a little bit like the early days of the web, when people were creating lots of mostly useless web scripts, some of which were the seeds of the blogs and googles we use today. I’m trying to collect some highlights of Flash webcam experimentation. Here’s what I have so far:

1. Grant Skinner’s Webcam Snowstorm, takes the webcam view and superimposes a light snow fall on it. The best part? The snow builds up into drifts on edges. Very pretty.
2. As a contrast, Skinner also made Webcam Fire, where anything in motion ignites.
3. Quasimondo’s Minority Cube - spin a cube through motion in front of the webcam (or by moving the webcam itself). Hard to describe, but fun. Tip: press the space bar. There’s also a webcam kaleidoscope.
4. Our own Webcam Hat gadget that tracks an object around, putting a jolly hat on it.
5. Our own Webcam Ambush, which will play a prerecorded sound when it detects someone entering the room.
6. Cameroid.com, which takes pictures, applying the kinds of distortion or framing you might get in novelty photo booths, and lets you download or post the result.
7. I’m not too clear on this one, because it is all in Japanese, but apparently the Laughing Man Camera tries to detect your face in the video stream and put a stamp over it. It didn’t work so well for me, and had an annoying feedback overlay I couldn’t get rid of.
8. DustyPixels has an “ASCII-cam” and some basic filters. Also, a more advanced ASCII-cam version developed later.
9. There’s a few more basic filters (mirroring, pixelating etc.) at a Sound and Software Art Workshop 2006 page (in Japanese).
10. The Motion Bubbles game. Like Skinner’s Webcam Snowstorm, but with bubbles instead of snow, and in game format - you can use your body to pop the smooth bubbles and avoid the spiky bubbles.
11. In Shockwave, there is PlaydoCAM, which has a few game demos. (Link via lessrain).
12. Everybody seems to love bubbles. With BubbleMaker you can blow bubbles (by breathing into the microphone) and then pop them visually. How… odd! (Link via lessrain).
13. Add a funky reflection effect at Pixelfumes.
14. Flash webcam DVR at Zero Point Nine. Records video, but requires a lot of memory to do so.
15. Using your webcam like a wii-mote (via Digg).
16. An interactive piano.

In looking around for these, I see the web is littered with advice for Mac users that I might as well repeat here: if your webcam doesn’t seem to be working from Flash, right-click (or control-click) on the Flash animation, select “settings,” and try choosing a different video source. The default is not always the right one.

Got a webcam, some spare time, and a friend you want to annoy? Lay a trap for them with our webcam ambush. This is an image change detector implemented in Flash which triggers whenever there’s motion in the field of view of your camera. When it triggers, it plays a sound of your choice.

So the scenario is: you leave your computer, webcam, and the ambush page running in a room. Later, your friend walks in and boom, the star trek “intruder alert” alarm goes off, or a mysterious voice laughs darkly, or there is a fanfare greeting, or … well, you get the idea.

It is like those 20 dollar gadgets you can buy that do basically the same thing, except now with extra internets!!

This gizmo was inspired by Guy Watson’s tutorial on Flash motion detection. It is in the same series as our webcam hat put-er on-er.

The epic saga of Harry Potter versus Snape, summarized in one short flash animation. These people are having a little bit too much fun with puppets. Bother bother bother.

We remember being impressed by the (now apparently defunct) Fez Pigeon site, which added a cute little hat to a webcam view of a pet pigeon. We are pretty confident that most people, if they reflected for just a moment, would find that this is exactly the service needed to fill that gaping hole in their lives they don’t even know they have. To evaluate interest in the automatic putting of hats on things, we’ve developed a webcam puppet that does exactly that. Plug in a webcam, load the puppet, and click on something in the scene that would look better with a party hat on it. And behold! The hat appears, following the object as it moves. You’ll have better luck if the object is nice and simple, with good color contrast with the background.