Paris Graphics

I’ve recently Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artistswritten a review of Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists at Amazon. If you want the bottom line - I gave it five stars and highly recommend it. Slightly off topic but worth mentioning is that for the first time one of my reviews on Amazon has been edited! The paragraph where I wrote about the last section of the book “Extending Processing” , mentioning how much I liked this section and how important I thought it was has been replaced by this: [...]

The somewhat longer story follows…

I’ve been watching the development of Processing and the community for several years and often recommended it to people. Why? My reasons have been:

• It’s Open Source
• It is full of functions which are useful for the arts
• There is a large community of users
• Your end product can be run in a web browser

Oddly though, I didn’t do much of anything with Processing myself. This was mostly because I was interested in creating visuals for live performances which could run full screen on my old laptop rather than something for the web. Processing, being Java based was too much for my laptop. From the laptop I moved on to coding for the GP2X and the Gambeboy Advance using these for my visual performances. Then recently, I started talking with some friends about a project for their website. One of the things we talked about was a browser-based version of the “Pattern Maker” type of programs that I write for the hand held consoles. Although it could probably be done in Flash, I would prefer to use Open Source tools, so I decided that it was time to give Processing a try again.

I started by looking at the reference pages on the Processing.org site. These are really great however I wanted something more. When I saw that this book was available and written by the authors of Processing, I thought it would be a good way to go. What I was expecting was a sort of extended reference and maybe some tips and tricks. What I found was much more!

This book is really well written and although I have programming experience myself, I would guess that someone with none at all could read this book and get it. It’s actually a really good programming book in general (regardless of the language used). In fact, I think it would be great to teach a programming class with this book. Why? Well, I learned programming by sending text to a terminal window or maybe writing to file and that’s fine, BUT, I think it’s much more fun to have graphics functions built in so you can SEE what happens when you implement various programming techniques and structures (e.g. conditionals, loops, math operations, etc).

The interviews with various visual artists who use and create their own software are an interesting addition and I think would be great to see updated on say a companion website.

The last section of the book talks about “Extending Processing” - here you will find lots of cool stuff. Of particular interest to me were the electronics applications (via things like “wiring”) and “mobile processing” for phones (love it!).

So what about my application? I haven’t spent that much time on it yet - just enough to know that it can be done. It works and just like the console versions users can control the patterns with user input mapped to variables in the equations. The type of operations that I do (writing pixels to the screen) is slow - no matter what you do. The implementations I have done in C are faster for sure but… at 320×240 the Processing version is not too bad and a person doesn’t have to have a GP2X or GBA to play with them.