Will Knott

I like listening to thing I shouldn’t. Sometimes I get things for “overheard” posts (which I really ought to do more of) and sometimes I hear interesting things. Like Bernie Goldbach talking to his students about the work of Flight 404, who is also known as Robert Hodgin.

Image via Wikipedia

As well as the ubiquitous day-job, he also spends time playing/working with Processing. Processing is an open source, multi-platform programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is also a visualization programming language. One for creating images. However it uses Java as its base, so it might be correctly described as a programming extension library (Processing code can be exported as Java) and IDE for Java.

I know, another programming language library. Ho-hum. However this one is, well, bloody beautiful. Take a look at what you can do with it (I’d advise using full screen).

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo

The language is designed for work like this. I’d love to see it mixed with a physics engine. Robert goes through the details of how he created the above demo and it seems a little intensive, but fun. Given that unless things change I might be back at programming school soon, now is probably not the time to start a new language (or is it exactly the right time?). I would love to play with this visualization method on a couple of mashups. I’m thinking about music, but I can see it working on time related information such as relative population sizes or economic data.

What can I say, my mind moves in odd places sometimes.

take care,
Will