It's Not For Everyone.: Create Digital Motion - Field: Digital Movement and Visual Expression, a Rich Open Source, Code Visual Framework

Friday, April 24, 2009

Create Digital Motion - Field: Digital Movement and Visual Expression, a Rich Open Source, Code Visual Framework

Field is a really exciting new graphics and animation tool for the Mac that gives you both a processing-style programmatic environment for building visuals and and GUI tools for editing them. Beyond that, it actually co-exists with processing, so the two can be used together to build sketches.
(On closer inspection, what field does is provide a 'bridge' to processing's libraries- however as a coding environment it completely replaces processing's language and instead has you coding in a java implementaion of python. The documentation for field makes this sound trivial, but beyond just having cool libraries, processing is attractive to artists because it's easier to learn than most programming languages. I don't know if I'm ready to start learning python just yet. I remember how it went when I tried to learn ruby...)

Field — Processing Plugin overview from OpenEndedGroup on Vimeo.
Link

5 comments:

Al said...: That looks really cool. I'd definitely work with that, especially since the idea of learning code is as attractive as going back to trig class (shudder).

How come there's no sound?

PS: why do you dislike Flash so much? Is it because the interface is so crappy? (I agree with you there.); 12:45 PM
Wiley said...: Not only would you need to write code to use this, you'd need to write python.

Flash is ubiquitous and we all find ourselves using it now and then, but why do I hate flash? Because it's an inaccessible, unindexable, proprietary black box of kludgey suck. There's been some beautiful stuff made with flash and actionscript (a lot of the stuff on levitated is flash), but Javascript can now do everything that flash could do, and it does it faster, smoother, and more accessibly. When you're animating stuff with JQuery and someone turns off javascript, it turns into regular, usable html. If you have flash animations and you turn off flash- Phttttbbbbbt.
Don't even get me started on the mess of suck that is flash video. Let me know when they can get it to fast forward or rewind correctly without taking a big dump all over the place. They've managed to get h.264 working in flash now, but that's like like like taking your filet and rolling it in shit. That swf is a big metadata eating black hole of suck.

There's a reason why Apple hasn't been in any kind of hurry to put flash on the iPhone.; 2:54 PM
Al said...: Ick, no... no programming for me! Markup language, yes; code, no. I'm not dissing programming, I just don't like to do it myself.

I don't think Flash is really intended for programmers; it's much more of a WYSIWYG kind of thing, which is what I (mistakenly) thought the above clip was showing. Although I think with each version they sneak a little more direct coding ability in as a sop to programmers. If I were you I wouldn't be interested in it either. Plus the GUI, like most software GUIs in my experience, is kind of a drag.

Good luck with Field, etc.; 6:02 PM
Wiley said...: pussy.

No, seriously. Actionscript is programming. If you want to do anything interesting in flash, you are already programming. I count on my fingers and have been terrified of real programming until this year. You should take a look a look at the learning processing book and give it a try. It's cool to know how stuff works and to still be able to make what you want should adobe come and take all their toys away.; 7:53 PM
Al said...: Hmmm... you intrigue me, sir. Maybe I'll rethink my position.

And thanks for the mini-review of Flash. Very interesting and enlightening. Also, I award you ten bonus points for using the word "suck" as a noun -- twice!; 9:47 PM