Re: [-empyre-] capacious processing

[Peter Luining <email@ctrlaltdel.org>]

Tuesday, February 3, 2004, 8:17:05 AM, Jim wrote:

>> Processing is perfect for introductory programming. Secondly,
>> Processing is not a "graphic app",

Probably of some relevance here. Last wednesday (januari 28th) I did a
review of Processing for netartreview.net.


"Processing is a free software program made by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. With it you can develop interactive java
applets for the net. What especially makes it tempting is that it's
available for the Windows, Mac OSX and Linux platform. Though not
vector based as Macromedia's Flash you could somehow see it as sort of
competitor, especially when you look on the creative side and want to
do for example generative art.
Although Processing is still in it's alpha developing stage there are
already a lot people experimenting with it, which let especially on
the visual site to some stunning works. Because of it's open source
character there are already a lot of demo's (+sources) available which
makes the threshold to start to work with it very low. I experimented
with it for about a week. Which made it clear that at the moment this
software is not yet attractive for me. I use a lot of sound with my
work, and if there's at the moment something still lacking it is easy
and clear soundmanipulation possibilties. Another downside is that the
program compiles to java applets that are always at least 100kb where
a lot of similar stuff can be done in Flash in 5 or 6 kb. But this
could change when the program developes further, and of course we
should not forget that this program is entirely free and totally cross
platform. What probably will decide over a wide acceptance is if
Microsoft will still standard support java in it's Windows operating
system, which is still not totally clear."


Peter