“Where the future is being made … today!”

You already know Processing can create wonderful visual stuff. It can output movie files, so it can be a companion to your live visual tool of choice. It also happens to be a great way to experiment with OpenGL, so you can work with shader code and other goodies to use elsewhere. But learning its ins and outs requires some skill development.

I’m doing a lot of Processing teaching and coding, so I’m pleased to bring you some of the results of that work live on our companion site, CDM Labs. Labs quietly poked its nose out earlier this spring, but starting this week, it’s the place on which I’ll be “journaling” code examples and teaching materials. You can think of it as an additional output of my sometimes-cluttered but sometimes-useful brain. I’m finding that keeping stuff on the blog also helps organize my thoughts, so I’m really looking forward to the new approach.

Regularly, I’ll also organize some specific CDM Labs projects that are more fully-formed.

For starters, you can check in on the 5-minute presentation I did of Processing (20 slides, each advancing automatically every 15 seconds), as part of Ignite NYC.

Ignite: Visual Code Literacy with Processing, in Five Minutes

Be sure to click through to the actual site so the code formatting and embedded presentation work properly!

I can also say, it is possible to learn Processing even if you’re not a programmer. It’s also possible – though probably not advisable – to cram the fundamentals of programming into 20 slides and five minutes and get the point across in a bar full of loud people drinking beer! (Full presentation with voice explanation coming soon.)

CDM Labs is here:

labs.noisepages.com

And you can add CDM Labs to your RSS feed reader:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/cdmlabs

Wondering what this “noisepages” business is about? We’ll be talking more about that soon. Don’t worry, we’re not spreading ourselves thin with more blogs – on the contrary, Labs and others are about better organizing what we’re doing, keeping you in the loop, and making us more productive. But we will have something else to share soon.

Bonus points to anyone who knows what the first line of this article is about.