I just stumbled upon the Online Journalism Blog. My entry point was a post on how to make money from [online] content. An interesting topic because it appears that much of the money is made indirectly through advertising, events, etc. What was more interesting, however, was a post on the the death of the interactive presentation tool Flowgram.
A week or so ago I decided to finally sit down and try out the Compass CSS framework. When I first looked at it, I was dismayed to find that it required Yet Another Language to learn, but then I quickly saw its advantages when I started using it.
In the Human-Computer Interfaces class I have been taking for the last few months, I had to write up a software prototype for a restuarant ordering system. The goal was to design a user interface that allowed a customer in the restaurant to use their iPhone or some other smart phone to quickly order food.
For this prototype, I used Squeak Smalltalk, the Seaside web framework, and the Magritted meta-description framework.
The National Film Board of Canada has decided to put up hundreds of its films online. Bravo! Excellent! Thunderous applause! However, there is a dark side to this. The films can only be viewed by streaming them which means that Adobe's Flash is in use. If you, like me, cannot properly view Flash files or wish to watch the movies later on while out in the woods with a laptop but no internet connection, you are out of luck.
And on the first day, omouse said, let the hacking begin...
First day of this Processing Hack Week got off to a rough start. Lots of development environment setup and the Maven build files were fully integrated into OhProcessing. They have also been submitted by jramsdale to the appropriate bug in the Processing bug database. We'll see how long till it becomes accepted in the main branch of Processing.
In OhProcessing I've been doing some general clean up: removing commented blocks of code that have no immediate value, refactoring a few snippets of similar code, etc. I also integrated a patch that adds support to the command-line for specifying a preferences file. This means that all text editor modes (such as processing-emacs) can now work without resorting to the workaround of copying a default preferences file to the sketch folder.
I also started coding a little tool that would have been useful for my class project last semester. It visualizes matrix transformations, so you can see how different rotations and translations affect your sketches.
Day two has begun, and the race is on to fix the bugs and code some awesome art :)
Someone over at Juice Analytics published a nifty little chart that uses Python and NodeBox. Each item in the chart is a bubble with a number. The idea is that the larger numbers have larger bubbles and are easier to see. Edward Tufte may have a thing or to say about this and would probably call it "chart junk", but let's assume it isn't.
While the visuals look cool, NodeBox only runs on Mac OS X at the moment. That just won't do! I'm running on GNU/Linux and I want some graphical goodness. I decided to convert it from the Python/NodeBox code to Processing. Processing is a visualization tool that is built on Java and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux.
The code isn't perfect and there is a lot of ugliness in terms of processing the data, but I'll be damned if this doesn't run on 3 platforms. Okay, okay, it looks a little off-center. It's close enough and it shows that Processing can handle all sorts of visuals. Since this is Processing, you can just click here to view the whole thing instead of a static image :)
In Processing Hack Week news...this past week, I've received two replies to my requests for task lists from the various Processing derivative projects. One from the Ruby-Processing developer and the other from the Clojure-Processing developer. The other news is that the GIT-repo for Processing is coming together.
For a course I was taking part-time at Ryerson University, I had to use the Processing language to create a 2d animation. I wasn't keen on Processing at first because the language looks like Java but it isn't that bad because Processing lets you avoid the Java stuff by supplying its own functions to use.
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