"Hey Thomas, do you want to meet Joshua Davis?" Thus it began. But let me start from the beginning. In 2007, I saw Joshua Davis present at a conference in New York where he spoke about the concept of digital, generative art. I really enjoyed his talk and hoped that someday we could work together

Fast forward to San Francisco, 2010. I was working with some great agencies to build HTML5-based applications for the Internet Explorer 9 beta launch. Another evangelist (IE9 guru Giorgio Sardo) had worked with was Joshua Davis Studios, who collaborated with Branden Hall to build an awesomely brutal app called Endless Mural. Endless Mural allows you to build digital, generative murals without a plug-in using HTML5 and the <canvas> element. It also runs blazingly fast in Internet Explorer 9 because of its hardware acceleration.

When Giorgio asked me if I wanted to meet Joshua, Branden and the rest of the crew, I jumped at the chance. Among other topics (Endless Mural, Vans shoes, Halloween costumes), we talked about Okapi, the framework that makes Endless Mural possible. Joshua told me that his Studio planned to make the Okapi code available to anyone and everyone. I knew then that I’d found the perfect group for MIX Online to collaborate with.

Enter Okapi

A previous collaboration with Mike Swanson on the Adobe Illustrator to Canvas Plug-in helped web designers, developers and builders build HTML5 canvas-based applications that work across all canvas-enabled browsers. So we already had the science, but needed the art. That’s where Okapi comes in.

The Okapi framework allows you to do things in HTML5 that have never been done in the browser before without a plug-in.

Enter To Win The Endless Mural Contest

We also created a contest to see who can create the best mural using Endless Mural and Okapi. Here’s how it works:

• Follow @mixonline on Twitter.
• Create a mural with Endless Mural (we of course prefer IE9).
• Send us a tweet about your Mural.
• That’s it!

Make sure you check out the specifics of the contest and the FAQs. We’ll announce the winners December 17th,2010.

Learn More

If you’re interested in learning more,I recommend you:

• Check out what Joshua and Brandon have to say about creating digital art.
• Check out what Okapi is about and download it today.
• Enter our contest. It only takes a few minutes.

Finally, follow us on Twitter for more information and updates about Okapi. And if you only do one thing, please tell a friend about Okapi!