Sphere of Particles → ← FAIL!
A journey in visual programming
I've been avoiding this day for quite some time. Alas, some real programming challenges just presented themselves to me. The company I work for presented me with a possible music visualizer for one of our clients to run along side an ad campaign. After a bit of research, I accepted the challenge. For a long time I've been programming web languages with a lean on Flash. I've always looked at other languages and thought to myself, "These languages are crazy. People that know them are mad scientists."
For the last week or so, I've been messing around with processing thanks to a great designer/director Phil Rampulla. I love it. It is like flash, with more performance. Like flash, there is a huge open source community following it and since it is Java, it closely resembles ActionScript 3.0. This site, open processing is quite a great resource to get you started. If you navigate to the browse section, you'll find a plethora of daily sketches posted by users of processing! It's a great resource, but it is Java, so it lacks a bit of performance that you really want to get out of visualizations...
So, my options to get the job done for the music visualizer have now narrowed to c++ and OpenGL because they work on Mac and Windows both. Yikes! I have never even touched this low level stuff, that's for the engineers and super nerds at software companies in San Francisco!
So I found this: openFrameworks! It is amazing! It's just like the processing framework, but for c++! Now we are getting somewhere. There was some time spent on researching this and vimeo was definitely the best resource. Glenn Marshall and Robert Hodgin were two guys I looked at first because they are freaks of nature when it comes to visual programming. The visuals that these guys put out on video from processing and openframeworks is absolutely phenomenal!
I've started quite a few tests and I'm just getting my feet wet with syntax and setup and such, but hopefully I will get some content added to the experiments section of my site soon! As I go, I'll post little snippets of code and hopefully, it will be helpful to someone out there! Wish me luck!
