If you’ve been dazzled by some of the motion and interaction design for Max for Live tools I’ve shared lately but don’t know where to start in your own patches, it’s all about jsui. And to get you started, we turn to Estevan Carlos Benson.
jsui is at the heart of some of the more interesting devices I’ve covered lately, like the beautiful Rift:
The default Max for Live tools alone won’t get you there. And what’s the fun of building your own device if you can’t get creative with the UI and visualization? For that, there’s Max’s jsui, a generic user interface object that uses JavaScript for easily scripting visuals and interaction. (That might otherwise be clunky if you used Max’s own object paradigm alone – sometimes text code and JavaScript get the job done more effectively.)
This is relevant to both Max and Max for Live – indeed, using Max standalone will give you a larger canvas for your work. But I suspect a lot of the demand for this will come from Ableton Live users – and this is a great rapid-prototyping tool.
Building up UIs from scratch with jsui can take time, too, so if you want to put some more rapid prototyping in your rapid prototyping environment in your dataflow environment (whoa), then Figma and jsui/Max make a great pair. Check out the stuff Estevan Carlos Benson has been doing:
Here are those tools side by side:
It seems Estevan is planning a more elaborate full-length course, but speaking as a procrastinator / someone who takes on too much – it’s always best to start somewhere. So we already get this excellent short free course, which combined with the spark of the vids above should get some folks making something quick to play around with right away!
It’s just over half an hour – perfect for a lunch break or early evening project – and just requires an email sign-up. (I am keen to hear about new courses, so sign me up.)
Simple Interaction And Motion In Max/MSP
I like the combination with Figma. If anyone else has a workflow they want to share, I’m all ears – and of course not just for Max but other environments, too.
Oh and jsui is capable of other tricks, too – like importing sprites!