In other news, there’s a nice write-up at Gizmodo about the Big Screens show at IAC. I should point out that three of the projects this year used openFrameworks (including “Caves of Wonder” by Matt Parker which was mistakenly attributed to Processing in the article). Six of the projects were indeed developed with Processing and three were pre-rendered videos. Here are some of the vimeo clips from Gizmodo. Hope to post more videos and photos soon. . .

Big Screens – Claptime by Vikram Tank from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Big Screens – White Sun by Mooshir Vahanvati from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Big Screens – Caves of Wonder by Matt Parker from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Big Screens – In the Shadows by Alejandro Abreu Theresa Ling from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

More info about the projects

MPE at DKDS from vorg on Vimeo.

and. . .

The Emergence Project

Just a quick note to let you know that my book, Learning Processing, is now available for purchase. If you are local to NYC, you can buy the book at the NYU bookstore.

Amazon says “out of stock”, but I’m told by the publisher that this is an error and they do, in fact, have copies. Also, at $37.00, this seems to be the cheapest option online that I can find.

All the example code will be available live online at learningprocessing.com by early next week. Feel free to contact me with comments, questions, feedback!

Who is this book for? Check out my earlier post.

I’m pleased to announce that my new programming with Processing book will be released this August (by the end of the month). You can pre-order the book from Amazon, download a sample chapter from the web site, and, yes, even become a fan of the book on facebook (since that’s what all the 35 year olds are doing these days.)

A few things I’d like to say about the book:

My goal for “Learning Processing” was to write something for the complete and total programming beginner. If you’ve never written a line of code before in your life, but want to get started creating your own digital media tools then I wrote this book for you. There are several other wonderful Processing books out there and I hope mine will complement them nicely. A special thanks to Casey, Ben, and Ira who kept encouraging and inspiring me as their books were being published.

The book is also geared towards the teacher. It’s not my belief that such a person will necessarily learn any new skills from the book (assuming they have a programming background), however, my hope is that the book will encourage and help facilitate the teaching of programming. It is structured with 10 lessons (complete with examples and exercises) and can act as a ready-made syllabus for a beginner interactive media / programming class. In fact, the book is modeled exactly on ITP’s Introduction to Computational Media course.

The first half of the book is all fundamentals: pixels, variables, conditionals, loops, functions, objects, arrays. The second half is an introduction to select advanced topics: 3D, images, video, data, sound, etc. (download full table of contents). And although the web site is currently just a splash page, it’s my intention to make available all the examples (and exercise answers) at the site. The full site should launch in the next few weeks (a big thanks to Rich Hauck who is helping to build the site.)

If anyone is interested in teaching with the book come this fall, please feel free to drop me a line and I’d be happy to answer any questions. It’s also my hope that this book can teach programming to high school students, however, I don’t have as much experience in this area. . . but if anyone is looking to try it out with younger students, please let me know and I would love to help.

I recently participated in 7 in 7, a scheme cooked up by the ITP resident researchers to do seven creative projects in seven days. The project inspired the currently running and oh so more manageable 5 in 5. The rules are:

Projects must be completed in a day.
Each project needs a name and documentation posted by the end of the day.

Although I did complete seven projects, it took me nine days, and some of the projects were arguably not creative, but rather a quick experiment or a “i’ve been meaning to do this for the last five years so let me see if I can just get it started in one hour” deal-ee-o. Code-wise I worked on adapting examples into Java from the wonderful book Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran, began the process of thinking about self-publishing a book, and developed a quick bayesian classification Processing library (which I would like to make more fully functional), among other things.

Best of luck to the five in fivers, look forward to seeing the results! And a quick plug to the ITP residents’ show, which will be this Saturday, August 2nd! Details here.

Voronoi from shiffman on Vimeo.

Download QT version (better quality)

I installed a version of my new “Voronoi” project at the Jepson Center for the Arts and gave two workshops at local community centers about programming art with Processing. In the above video, the software continuously computes a Voronoi diagram colored according to pixels seen by a video camera. The tiles reshape themselves and move into place as the camera imagery changes.

Thanks to Harry Delorme and the Telfair Museum for organizing so many great events!

About a week or so before the ITP show, my Big Screens class had their own show at the IAC Building on their rather large video wall. I’m hoping we set the world record for largest Processing sketch ever. Some photos (video coming soon):

This, as far as I know, was the first public use of the Most Pixels Ever library, which admittedly needs quite a bit of work still.

Download the example sketch.

Code snippets after the jump. . .

    Properties props = System.getProperties();
 
    props.put("mail.pop3.host", "pop.gmail.com");
 
    // These are security settings required for gmail
    // May need different code depending on the account
    props.put("mail.pop3.port", "995");
    props.put("mail.pop3.starttls.enable", "true");
    props.setProperty("mail.pop3.socketFactory.fallback", "false");
    props.setProperty("mail.pop3.socketFactory.class","javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory");
 
    // Create authentication object
    Auth auth = new Auth();
 
    // Make a session
    Session session = Session.getDefaultInstance(props, auth);
    Store store = session.getStore("pop3");
    store.connect();
 
    // Get inbox
    Folder folder = store.getFolder("INBOX");
    folder.open(Folder.READ_ONLY);
    System.out.println(folder.getMessageCount() + " total messages.");
 
    // Get array of messages and display them
    Message message[] = folder.getMessages();
    for (int i=0; i < message.length; i++) {
      System.out.println("---------------------");
      System.out.println("Message # " + (i+1));
      System.out.println("From: " + message[i].getFrom()[0]);
      System.out.println("Subject: " + message[i].getSubject());
      System.out.println("Message:");
      String content = message[i].getContent().toString(); 
      System.out.println(content);
    }
 
    // Close the session
    folder.close(false);
    store.close();

and sending:

  // Create a session
  String host="smtp.gmail.com";
  Properties props=new Properties();
 
  // SMTP Session
  props.put("mail.transport.protocol", "smtp");
  props.put("mail.smtp.host", host);
  props.put("mail.smtp.port", "25");
  props.put("mail.smtp.auth", "true");
  // We need TTLS, which gmail requires
  props.put("mail.smtp.starttls.enable","true");
 
  // Create a session
  Session session = Session.getDefaultInstance(props, new Auth());
 
  try
  {
    // Make a new message
    MimeMessage message = new MimeMessage(session);
 
    // Who is this message from
    message.setFrom(new InternetAddress("name@gmail.com", "Name"));
 
    // Who is this message to (we could do fancier things like make a list or add CC's)
    message.setRecipients(Message.RecipientType.TO, InternetAddress.parse("address@email.com", false));
 
    // Subject and body
    message.setSubject("Hello World!");
    message.setText("It's great to be here. . .");
 
    // We can do more here, set the date, the headers, etc.
    Transport.send(message);
    println("Mail sent!");
  }
  catch(Exception e)
  {
    e.printStackTrace();
  }