From the early days, a 2003 printout of Processing’s source code. Photo (CC-BY) Niels Heidenreich. Processing helped bring coding to designers, artists, and creators who never thought they’d code. The beauty of it is, in a world where people often feel technology gets worse with age, Processing is getting better. Thank co-creators Ben Fry and […]

Strap in – this may be one heck of a ride. Photo (CC-BY) François Rejeté, of Coney Island’s Topspin (perhaps part inspiration)? Like the aspiring artists themselves, there’s an abundance of Web services with big dreams of stardom. Most will fall into obscurity, and wading through them is a big chore. And then, love them […]

Practical iPad Music Making: Connecting Hardware What’s this MIDI thing about? Creatively, music is about assembling a new whole out of lots of pieces. So it makes sense that in a music workspace, making connections is important. Like traditional computers before it, part of what makes the shiny, new iPad musically useful is its ability […]

Projection mapping, whether performed as intricate alignment to surfaces or simply as a way to get out of basic rectangular viewing ratios, has potential to create a range of visual effects. Now, those capabilities are available to users of the fully free and open source, omni-platform goodness that is OpenFrameworks. hvfrancesco has built a really […]

Google ups the ante. H.264, it’s on. Of course, given the entrenchment of existing videos and the Flash plug-in, many are predicting the “die tryin’” scenario is the more likely one. Time will tell. Photo (CC-BY) Linus Bohman. Today, Google announced it is omitting H.264 support from its Chrome browser, in favor of free and […]

Mobile devices are finally starting to look more like desktop devices in terms of GPU 3D capabilities, thanks to new chipsets – in this case, NVIDIA’s Tegra. In non-technical terms, think eye candy. In technical terms – well, heck, let’s use this handy copy-paste feature I have on my (ahem, desktop) computer:

Dancing, digitally, anyone? Capturing full-body motion has tended to be imprecise and primitive, expensive, complex, non-real-time, or sometimes a combination. Rapidly-paced open source development around Microsoft’s Kinect 3D depth camera is proving the future doesn’t have to be that way. The results, piping control data in real-time to any visual, music, or other software, demonstrate […]

Dancing, digitally, anyone? Capturing full-body motion has tended to be imprecise and primitive, expensive, complex, non-real-time, or sometimes a combination. Rapidly-paced open source development around Microsoft’s Kinect 3D depth camera is proving the future doesn’t have to be that way. The results, piping control data in real-time to any visual, music, or other software, demonstrate […]

Finally, Mac Java support and development is no longer stuck in an Infinite Loop. Photo (CC-BY) Roger Schultz Parts of Java’s future may still look murky, but at least you can say this: it’s Oracle’s problem, not Apple’s. My previous rants: Opinion: Apple Has Killed Mac Java; OpenJDK Just Got Way More Important for Processing […]

Finally, Mac Java support and development is no longer stuck in an Infinite Loop. Photo (CC-BY) Roger Schultz Parts of Java’s future may still look murky, but at least you can say this: it’s Oracle’s problem, not Apple’s. My previous rants: Opinion: Apple Has Killed Mac Java; OpenJDK Just Got Way More Important for Processing […]