Flush — A Design Blog by Ivan W. Lam at ivanwlam.com

Processing

After catching up with one of my friends from the Design Program a few weeks ago, I found out he is currently teaching a summer session course in Processing, a relatively new visual programming language. I remember reading blogs about it a year or so ago, and while I thought it seems like a cool thing to learn, especially for designers, I just didn’t have the time to take on a new language. Well, now I have more time with this type of stuff, especially after having set up a system to play with it using the Programming Experiments section.

One thing I notice pretty early on is how it’s similar to ActionScript and JavaScript in terms of syntax. But the syntax is also similar to C++ in some ways (which I’ll explain later). The process is pretty simple and relatively easy to use and learn.

I’m still doing the basic stuff, building upon each function that I had learned before. One of the things I’ve created using Processing is the July 2009 entry of WordIt, where the theme of the month is “Fly.” Instead of just drawing the piece in Photoshop (which I actually did do at first), I wrote some code that animates the flies to land randomly onto the visible area. It’s beyond the assignment and medium of WordIt, but I wanted to take this opportunity to learn more about Processing.

So far, it’s been fun, but I couldn’t really think of a practical use for it, even though the foundational interactive functions like mouse behaviors are there. Also, it requires Java to run, so it’s not completely accessible for web use. Still, I think it’s a good substitute for ActionScript scribbling/sketching, since AS is more complex in a way.

C++

Another language that I’m learning is C++. A few weeks ago, I posted an entry about my friend Alan Wells launching the iPhone app EcoFinder and how I’m sort of jumping onto the iPhone bandwagon. Well, I’m about halfway into this one book on C++, but it’s sort of difficult to fully comprehend the syntax without trying to code something yourself. I have software installed on my computer to write C++, but it’s sort of clunky and I’m still at the part in the book where it’s console-based and not window-based, so it’s sort of hard to be really interactive in my experiments if I were to create any.

Still, I’m beginning to see more potential for its use than the last time I posted about it. It’s now a matter of experimenting and time before I build something meaningful.

ivanPhone

After months of longing for it and weeks of talking about it, I’ve finally ordered an iPhone. It should arrive within two weeks, hopefully one. And when we meet, we will make sweet sweet… interactive projects together. Besides setting up the phone to my personal usage routine, one of my first projects is to fix up my entire site for mobile devices, including the iPhone.

I know, the Safari browser on the iPhone is meant to view web pages in their “original” desktop screen designs, but as I’ve “borrowed” my sister’s iPhone many times and tried to visit my site on it, I’ve found so many problems with it, a major one being loading times. Even with its advances and all that 3G technology, it’s still a mobile device with limited data transfer and therefore it’s still pretty slow.

I have to admit that this site is sort of heavy on the graphics compared to other sites, so I’m going to try to trim down my site with mobile stylesheets and improve the user experience as best as I could. No more needing to “borrow” my sister’s iPhone to test my pages.

Quote I Go By Lately

“Start small, think big.” -me, derived from learning new languages like Processing and thinking of things I could do with them.

Flush.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 22:43 and is filed under What Am I Doing?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.