Cognitive Consonance

I have been toying with Processing. Processing is..

…an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production.

Processing is actually a full blown IDE with a language based on Java (it is JVM based).

I am fascinated by its community and how most things seems to cleverly done.

Here is my first example (applet alert!). After it loads, move the mouse over the applet to see it in action (you might have to mouse click for it to start on some browsers, like Opera):

Please install Java!

The code for the above is just:

void setup() {
    size(400, 200);
}
 
color elColor = color(255,255,0);
 
void draw() {
  background(255);
  float delta = (1.0*mouseY)/height;
  if (random(10)<1) {
      elColor = color(random(255), random(255), random(255));
  }
  fill(elColor);
  ellipse(width/2, height/2, 80.0*mouseY/height, 50.0*mouseX/width);
  fill(255.0*mouseY/width,255.0*mouseX/width, 0, 255*mouseX/width);
  quad(0, 0,
      delta*width/2, (1-delta)*height/2,
      delta*width/2, height - (1-delta)*height/2,
      0, height);
  quad(width, 0,
      width - delta*width/2, (1-delta)*height/2,
      width - delta*width/2, height - (1-delta)*height/2,
      width, height);
}

The vibrant community behind seems to produce quite a lot of really neat examples. Go and check for yourself…