Leave No Trace » Software

Book bargain

Alec — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:14:08 +0000

Processing, the open source programming language, seems to be a popular tool among people creating interactive installations. Flash, and more specifically Actionscript, is older however, and therefore already has a large user base. There is a special offer, open only until 7am on Friday 30th October, to buy the book Advanced Actionscript 3.0 by Keith Peters, as a digital download, for only $10 (ie a saving of 75% off the normal price).

I’ve bought myself a copy, and so should you, if you’re interested in any of the following topics:

Chapter 1 Advanced Collision Detection
Chapter 2 Steering Behaviors
Chapter 3 Isometric Projection
Chapter 4 Pathfinding
Chapter 5 Alternate Input: The Camera and Microphone
Chapter 6 Advanced Physics: Numerical Integration
Chapter 7 3D in Flash 10
Chapter 8 Flash 10 Drawing API
Chapter 9 Pixel Bender
Chapter 10 Tween Engines

New ways of drawing

Alec — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:38:26 +0000

I don’t have an iPhone, so I tend not to pay much attention to the many apps released for it or the other smartphones. There is a demo for one app, however, that caught my eye: 3D sketching using the laws of physics. That’s an interesting contrast to Rhonda, the other 3D drawing application I discovered recently, which allows you to rotate your sketches through 3D space as you draw.

Proceed with caution

Alec — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 06:49:13 +0000

Processing is a coding language, based on Java. It’s deliberately designed to be simple and powerful at the same time. It’s open source, which means it’s free, and there’s a large community developing libraries and projects. There are other approaches, however.

Max/MSP/Jitter isn’t for the faint-hearted, but those who can get their heads round the complex diagrams swear that the procedural, node-based approach is immensely powerful. There’s a huge community of developers too, producing patches for all sorts of activities. It’s expensive, though. This is the world of boxes – draw lines between components, set values for inputs and outputs, wrap them up into new boxes, provide more connections for inputs and outputs, possibly even using recursion, and you can achieve pretty well anything.

Isadora is a cheaper alternative. I don’t know much about it, but I get the impression it’s largely used in dance, presumably because it was developed by a dancer.

For Apple Mac users, there’s the little gem called Quartz Composer that comes free with every copy of the operating system, though it’s not installed by default. It, too, is procedural, and I gather that the latest version for Snow Leopard (OS 10.6) is even better.

Then there are programs such as vvvv and Visual Jockey, both of which are free and Windows only as far as I know.

Coming full circle, back to Processing, we have Field. I know nothing about Field apart from what’s in this article, but it looks very interesting.