Recently I’ve had a renewed interest in Processing. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the summary from their site is :
Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.
If I had to sum it up I’d say Processing is a simple programming language targeted to visual people, with an emphasis on allowing the programmer to quickly sketch up visual results. What really excited me when it was released is that designers and developers took it and started creating wonderful visual art and interfaces with it. Check out work by Robert Hodgin and Jared Tarbell to see what I’m talking about. Processing never went away, but I did until lately. I’m going to be checking it out again though due to 2 projects that I think are really exciting.
Open Processing
Open Processing is a site dedicated to sharing your sketches (Processing projects) with the world. Your sketch is shown running and interactive with it’s code displayed below. This is all done under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License which allows people to remix the original work and share it with others as long as you attribute the work to the original author and share your sketch under the same rules. What has resulted on the site is over a year of people sharing, learning and remixing in quite a nice little community. If you’re new to Processing, I think this is a great place to start and learn from countless other examples ranging from very simple to complex.
Processing.js
The other project I found that’s got me fired up is Processing.js, which is Processing that has been ported to Javascript and will run on browsers capable of rendering HTML5. Currently this means Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and the beta of Google Chrome. If you checked out the Josh Nimoy Google Chrome Experiments version of Ball Droppings, then you’ve already seen Processing.js at work. What I like about Processing.js is that it’s going to make some of the new HTML5 Javascript functionality a lot easier for people to get into without worrying about a lot of the cross browser issues and the complexity of Javascript. From a business point of view I can imagine Processing.js could also be used to quickly sketch up DHTML prototypes to get clients excited about creative solutions. Another bonus is that it runs on the iPhone, albeit slowly on my 2nd gen. With the new iPhone and future versions having quicker processors, Processing.js could very well take off.
All in all, Processing to me has just received a new lease on life and I’m quite interested on where the future will take it.
