Processing

Hello again. We've started programming in computing with Processing and Arduino. Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) to create designs and electronic or media art. For example, you can create figures which follow the mouse, stay the same, move aleatory or through your keyboard's keys, or follow orders, with different colors and shapes, and make them do something interesting.

We worked with the exercises from the Creative Technologies web, and then modified them, so in the 1st block from this webpage you can find the explanations about these exercises and how to do them.

To set the size of the window that appears we use the function void setup(). Data is inserted between {} and each line with data ends with ; .

A first exercise useful to learn is creating a figure with different shapes, sizes and colours, and place them in a coordinate or make them follow the mouse. The properties of these figures and the background colours are set with the function void draw()

Another simple exercise to learn is creating a line whose end follows the mouse and leaves a trail through his way, by making one of its ends follow the mouse with the coordinates line(0, 0, mouseX, mouseY).

Then we also made a kind of snake which follows the mouse and changes colour through the time. I changed its shape, the colours, the time in which it changes colour...

A more complicated practice was making a digital clock which was based on the computers' clock. We inserted the numbers' images, changed the shape of the clock, put it horizontally and added the colons.

To finish with Processing we made a videogame in which something moved with the keyboard keys had to catch a falling object. I set all the images, changed the time limit, set a winning objective and adjusted several things.

Programming is complicated if you have to do it from scratch, but with Versktad's webpage it's a lot easier, it explains it very well and you can manage to change already existent programs.

I hope it was useful and you liked it, in the next post I'll write about Arduino.