labe.me

There’s something special with Processing and I love testing things with it. But I am not a great fan of Java.

I decided to have some fun and experiment with Scala, Eclipse and the processing libraries. It worked.

But, then I was hit by a question: assuming I create something funny with all this wonderful stuff, how do I ship it to people?

After some really convoluted attempts I found an ugly and half baked solution which still involved hard work for each and every new sketch.

A little bit disapointed, I opened Processing to see how easy it was to ship a sketch as a native application.

Here’s a screenshot of the export panel.

Now, there’s definitely something important to learn from this panel.

I think that Processing works, is minimalist and focuses on helping its user experiment and ship.

Every word is important in the last sentence:

• works
• minimalist
• focus
• helpful
• user
• experiment
• ship

That’s a great lesson a lot of people should follow.

Thank you Processing :)

I am quite fond of Processing, I really like how fast it is to sketch and get a graphical prototype up and running. As far as linux is involved I find it really better than haxe/swfmill combination. The API for instance is really simple, strait to the point and very well documented so people can get the job done fast. Tutorials are also great and give some creative impulse but not as much as the exhibition stuff… and games created with it.

I also encoutered Processing.js and more recently Sketchpad, processing for javascript and HTML canvas and a nice interface to use and share sketches.

I wanted and still want to play with Cinder. Overall, it is the same thing as processing, but in C++ (not ported to linux yet). Just follow the gallery to be astonished by the work of the barbarian group and a bunch of really interesting people…

Another battle is going on with Context free art, and its javascript “port”, play with it there.

There is definitively something going on for a new (or forgotten) kind of artistry, easy tools to produces incredibly graphical and interractive stuff.

The second trend is clearly the all in browser trend. From now on, we like things to run inside our browser, javascript and html canvas only are the opening but clearly flash and java applets are too limited, they do not interact enough with the HTML document, they live in a separated world, nearly petrified in their sandboxed invocation. Not good enough for art, not good enough for the future.

Now just go and create something for ten minutes please, it’s good for your karma.