Cows and Chickens

Pro­cessing (processing.org) is a new pro­gram­ming lan­guage and devel­op­ment envir­on­ment. It provides a sort of pro­gram­matic sketch­book for exper­i­ment­ing with graph­ics pro­gram­ming without hav­ing to write boil­er­plate code, and can export your pro­ject in many use­ful formats.

I developed a simple lib­rary to allow Pro­cessing to out­put live con­tent dir­ectly to the Blinken­lights sys­tem, and Robin Senior added it to his excel­lent BML (blinken­lights XML movie) out­put lib­rary. We now have one integ­rated pro­ject, which you can down­load from Robin’s blinken­lights page.

If you haven’t checked out Pro­cessing, you really should. It’s the most excit­ing tool for learn­ing and exper­i­ment­ing with com­puters and com­puter graph­ics that I’ve seen in a long time!