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Processing.










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Here's an extract from the processing website.

"Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach computer programming fundamentals within a visual context, Processing evolved into a development tool for professionals. Today, there are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning, prototyping, and production."









Processing is based on the programming language Java (not to be mistaken with Javascript). The aim of processing is to simplify the actual coding process by allowing designers to make their ideas come to life without needing to know an extensive amount of coding.








What can be done in Processing . . ?
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Follow the link to the right to view a huge amount of different projects created using Processing.
Open processing is a platform where users can upload their own application and also show the code that built it and share it to the world. The site shows you the large variety of things that can be achieved with only a little amount of coding.








Click here for the Open Processing Website (New Tab)








Below are a still examples of work taken from Open Processing.
These images give a sense of the quality of design that can be achieved.
My first go at making an Application . . .
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Here to the right is the code for my first application. It was created within the first half an hour of using the Processing application and while admittedly the application doesn't have much purpose it was cool how much I could create with such a little amount of knowledge.

Here's what this small amount of code does. First I setup the window size (in this case 1200x900px) and set the background colour using a grayscale number.

Next with the application setup it was time to draw. I drew a rect, ellipse and a quad and messed around with the variables.
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Click image for full size


More apps and a general improvement. . .
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Above is another small program I made along with the code. Looking at how much code there was for the results I was very happy with how it turned out but I wanted to try some different things and therefore carried on with building more apps. Luckily at this stage I didn't have many problems and everything worked smoothly.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with Hotglue..!

Final Idea. . .
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In the last week before we were going to be wrapping up with processing I came up with a slightly more complex idea. I was hoping that the idea would push me even though it may be farfetched and not quite work as planned.

As I had expected that was in fact the case. My original idea was to have squares changing colours and reacting to a music track that was playing. Unfortunately after a few attempts the program kept crashing and the idea didn't look like it'd be seeing the light of day. In a compromise I settled for a slightly more basic idea but it was still fun to implement as I had to use and import the 'minim library'. Through this I was able to synthesize some basic sounds along with my original square idea as a visualiser and I'm quite happy with how it turned out.
Link to a picture of my code
Note: Processing applications may not show
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Edit with some gif's of moving applications . . .
After coming back to this after documenting my implementation I had the idea of screen capturing my processing applications to show. Unfortunately I had serious issues with that and every time I would try and do it my computer would crash. I've decided to do the next best thing and include some gif's to show the animations.

As they are .gif files they are bad quality and only 3 seconds max (as much as I could capture) so they don't show the full story but they at least give an idea.
Fixing the Processing problem and my final App. . .
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After weeks of frustrating with processing and the applications we made not showing up in Hotglue I finally found out how to make it work. Annoyingly it was the simplest solution possible.
The picture above shows what was wrong. Unfortunately the file was hidden to the public and there was a simple option to just turn it on. Now my processing applications work on Hotglue apart from my final app.

Luckily though, I FINALLY managed to take a screen capture of my final processing application which allows you to see exactly what it does. I truly hope it's not an anti-climax!
Now with my final processing application shared to the world I feel like I can talk about it. Honestly, to me it's a bit of a disappointment, at least in comparison to what I wanted. I was plagued with the program constantly crashing on me really stalling my workflow. I had to keep making compromises to my idea and making it simpler and simpler due to the technical aspects. As I previously stated I would have loved my squares (reiterating that now you can see the visual design) to change colours depending on the frequencies of a song working like a music visualizer. I also then wanted the squares to rotate on the X or Y axis' whenever you moved your mouse over them.

View examples

The ideas I had in my head were a lot better than what I managed to produce with Processing. All in all I had extremely high expectations after watching the initial examples that we were shown and I just couldn't quite reach them. I do however understand that is completely expected given we only had a few weeks with the program (less time with how much it crashed) and being that I had never coded before in my life. Needless to say though I feel like I learnt a lot from the project and thoroughly enjoyed it past the frustrations.

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