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.

The library currently facilitates receiving single sample I/O packets in API mode, and returns an object that contains the analog values, digital values, sender’s 16-bit address and RSSI value. The next tasks will be to receive regular RX frames, issue AT commands and receive responses, issue TX frames and receive responses to those. We’d also like to support the XBee Series 2 radios, which have a similar API structure.

Here’s where you can download and learn about the library.

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.

Project credits: http:itp.nyu.edu/bigscreens/

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();
  }

My class went to test their projects on the IAC video wall this week. The works in this video are by Young Cho, Hye Ki Min, and Ji-Sun Lee. The pieces in the photos below are by Daniel Liss and Lucia Jeesun Lee. All 15 projects will be on display in December. More to come!

http://www.shiffman.net/p5/asterisk

Calling Processing again from shiffman on Vimeo.

Going to write this up and publish the code (in conjunction with my Big Screens course) in the next couple days.

1-800-Processing from shiffman on Vimeo.

I’m pleased to announce that we’re releasing the first version of The Most Pixels Ever, an open-source Java framework for spanning Processing sketches across multiple screens (developed with Chris Kairalla). This is an early version that has many limitations and needs a great deal of improvement, but it does work. The site isn’t complete, but the source is available, and there are a couple tutorials to help get your started.

I’ll be using the library in conjunction with teaching a new class at ITP starting today!