my name's stephen willey.
i've been playing with processing.org recently and figured i'd share. it's been a great re-introduction to programming for me and i hope you find what's here useful.
if you've got any comments or suggestions, please drop me a line here.
processing is shipped with the PDE which is ok for your first few goes so play with that a bit.
once you're done, you'll want to move to a better IDE. i use eclipse. there were a few gotcha's installing everything and setting it up to allow processing style exports which i'll describe here. i'll also briefly go into the flickr API which i use to get images and image info.
so now eclipse is set up and you're ready to write some code. in this article, we'll cover a couple of simple starter programs building on the PDE examples.
processing's main use is to visualize data. i wanted to use it to visualize and display information from my flickr account. metadata like tags, sets, contacts, but also the images themselves as their grid-of-pixels nature gives a huge amount of raw data to play with.
in this article, we'll have another look at the flickrj library for accessing the flickr API. there won't be anything pretty, but you've got to start somewhere...
so we've got all the parts, now let's do something with them.
this tutorial will show you how to tile your flickr images onto the background. we'll export it as a java applet and then sign it so it works on the web.
you probably noticed in the last tutorial that nothing can run while the flickr API's doing it's thing.
in order to do more than one thing at once, we need threads. this article's the same as the last, but threaded so we can show a loading indicator.
now let's create something using the flickr metadata and move it into 3D.
