For the first time, we’re selling Processing t-shirts. Profits will fund Processing development. We’ve partnered with Wire & Twine to make this happen. The shirts are hand screened in Oxford, OH, the home of the Processing 1.0 launch in November 2008. The shirts are available for pre-order on a navy American Apparel 100% cotton. Order by November 30th to get your shirt by December 25th. Shirts will begin production on November 30th and ship no later than December 14th.

We have two styles: the BEAUTY, and the BEAST. The BEAUTY shirt features a network image created with the code written for the Processing web header and the cover of the Reas/Fry book. The setup() and draw() functions from this code appears on The BEAST tee. The BEAST shirt features a diagram of the iconic Processing Development Environment and a piece of the code used to create The BEAUTY tee.

I realized yesterday that the Design By Numbers (DBN) programming environment created by John Maeda is now ten years old. It was released officially some time in 1999, along with its book companion published by MIT Press. This environment came just a little too late to teach me the basics of programming (I had started the year before with C) but I had the pleasure to work with it frequently and the privilege to teach a handful of workshops with it.

For myself and Ben Fry, DBN was the catalyst for Processing. Here’s an except from an essay we wrote in 2008:

Released by John Maeda in 1999, Design By Numbers (DBN) had the most direct impact on Processing. (In fact, it’s fair to say that there would be no Processing without DBN.) This minimalist language was created to be accessible to designers and artists and it works very well to introduce ideas of programming to that audience. Two other innovative ideas were integrated in DBN. First, the programming environment could be embedded into a web page so that it could be access for free, by anyone with a Web connection. Second, a web-based courseware application was integrated into the software to allow students to upload their assignments to a server where the public could see their work and look at their source code.

Processing’s emphasis on teaching came from our experience working with Prof. Maeda on DBN. We were so impressed with how quickly a beginner could start writing programs. Initially, we were interested in melding the idea of “sketching” in code with the pedagogical aspect of DBN. While working on DBN, Ben developed several experimental versions that included other programming languages (Python and Scheme) and drawing features (color, changing the window size, magnification, movie recording, and even OpenGL support), but it was clear that these did not make sense for the DBN project because they interfered with Maeda’s intention of a simplified programming language and environment.

Because it was written for the network, it can still be used today by simply visiting the URL. This makes it simple to test drive. First, glance at the brief introduction, then check it out.

The Chrome Experiments site was launched today to feature the JavaScript potential of the new Google Chrome Web browser. A few of the projects, including my contribution called Twitch, use Processing.js. Processing.js is John Resig’s port of the 2D parts of Processing to JavaScript using the Canvas element. I developed my entire project in Processing and then basically cut and pasted it into an HTML file. And there it was, Processing code running inside a browser without a plugin. Twitch was featured at Technology Review today in the post Browser Coders Make Chrome Shine.

Here are a few developing thoughts about Chrome and Twitch:

- Chrome and its fast JavaScript capability offers a glimpse of a Web without proprietary plug-ins. This allows the code (programs) to run directly in the browser rather than loading, for example, the Shockwave Player (from Adobe) or Java (from Sun). This makes it possible to create visually exciting and interesting works without using proprietary tools (in the case of Flash) and works that are accessible to more people (in the case of Java, because many people don’t have the plug-in). This is how innovation on the Web happened back in the mid-1990s; everyone was always looking at how people did things by looking at their HTML code. It made innovation happen quickly. With Flash and Java programs, you don’t have access to the code.

- The piece I created, Twitch, focuses on the genre of one-button games. This is a game that is played with a minimal interface (just one button) and is easy to figure out. I worked to create nine complementary pieces. First, you figure out the controls and then you figure out what to do, without instructions and in a short time. It’s a light piece, meant for enjoyment.

- Technically, I think the greatest innovation of Chrome is launching each Window or Tab as a separate process. If you try to run Twitch on Firefox it starts to slow down as more windows open. Each mini-game competes for the same resources from the computer’s processor. In Chrome, because each window runs separately, the frame rate remains high.

The ART AND CODE workshops and symposium at Carnegie Mellon wrapped up today. It was an amazing event organized by Golan Levin. It was a pleasure to see old friends from vvvv, Max/MSP/Jitter, openFrameworks, Pure Data, and to meet the creators of Scratch and Hackety Hack. There were nine separate Processing workshops sessions, two from myself, Ben Fry, Ira Greenberg, and three from Dan Shiffman. The topics ranged from a “patient” introduction (me), to a focus on information visualization (Fry), advanced techniques (Shiffman), and a session for educators (Greenberg). As a result of conversations and presentations, I’m very excited about Scratch and Ruby for their potential to teach programming in alternative ways and in alternative contexts. (I’m a little late to get on that train, but better now than even later.) The presentations will hopefully be archived online and the event was intensely tweeted.

And, we made some exciting decisions about the future of Processing during the concurrent Oxford Project 3 event. Andres Colubri made great progress.

The Oxford Project is continuing in early March, but not physically in Oxford, OH this time. We’re descending upon Pittsburgh to work on the next Processing release. Ben Fry, Ira Greenberg, Dan Shiffman, Andres Colubri, and myself will work on the GStreamer integration (goodbye QuickTime) and other improvements.

Why Pittsburgh? We’re going to participate in the ART AND CODE symposium and workshops, organized by Golan Levin:

Art and Code is a symposium on programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us. The event takes place the weekend of March 7-9, 2009 on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. It features hands-on workshops and a conference showcase for eight different creative toolkits — programming languages made by artists, for artists.

This is a very exciting event with fascinating, emerging programming environments presented through workshops and lectures:

Alice, Hackety Hack, Max/MSP/Jitter, openFrameworks, Processing, Scratch, vvvv.

Giant Eagle Auditorium, here we come.

Ben Fry and I did an interview about Processing with Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte for FLOSS Weekly. It’s archived at http://twit.tv/floss52.

Processing was featured in yesterday’s International Herald Tribune. Ben Fry snipped some relevant quotes on his site. The full article is online at the IHT.

We descended upon Miami University for another Processing development workshop from 20 to 23 November. We worked on two aspects of Processing at the same time. One group (myself, Ben Fry, Ira Greenberg, and David Wicks) worked to finish the 1.0 release. This was a long sequence of debugging and testing and cleaning up atrophied documentation. The other group (Dan Shiffman, Andres Colubri, and Julio Obelleiro) worked on the future of Processing. They did more research and development toward removing QuickTime from Processing and replacing it with GStreamer. This is a bright future for performance, but there are challenges to create a simple installation, especially for Mac OS X. We’re very hopeful and look forward to this integration. And … we released Processing 1.0!

Miami University (in Oxford, Ohio) deserves special recognition for making this working session a reality.

The last six days have merged into a continuous, hazy flow of writing, programming, and traveling. After over seven years, today we launched Processing 1.0. Ben, Shannon and I wrote this announcement for the event:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

+ At New York University’s graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.

+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.

+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard.

+ Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.

+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing.

+ The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki.

+ The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project.

+ The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research.

The Processing software runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats. Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.

Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda’s students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (a Smithsonian Institution) included Processing in its National Design Triennial. Works created with Processing were featured prominently in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the Museum of Modern Art. Numerous design magazines, including Print, Eye, and Creativity, have highlighted the software.

For their work on Processing, Fry and Reas received the 2008 Muriel Cooper Prize from the Design Management Institute. The Processing community was awarded the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the 2005 Interactive Design Prize from the Tokyo Type Director’s Club.

The Processing website (www.processing.org) includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples. The Discourse forum hosts continuous community discussions and dialog with the developers.

Download images and more text about Processing:
www.processing.org/about/processing-1.0.zip

Questions and Answers:

What is new in Processing 1.0?
The most important aspect of this release is its stability. However, we have added many new features during the last few months. They include a new optimized 2D graphics engine, better integration for working with vector files, and the ability to write tools to enhance the development environment.

Who uses Processing?
Processing is used by a very diverse group of people, from children first exploring computer programming to professional artists, designers, architects, engineers, and scientists. Processing has a shallow learning curve to make writing code easier for beginners, but it also allows more experienced programmers to write sophisticated software. We’ve seen the number of people using Processing double each year for the last three years. The increased stability of the software and the publication of six related books in the last two years are the likely reasons for this increase.

What is the future of Processing?
The 1.0 version of Processing focuses on education and software sketching (prototyping). The next major release of the software will focus on professional users while retaining the simplicity that is Processing’s trademark. Specifically, future releases will increase the speed of programs that work with video and complex 3D graphics.

Books about Processing:
Fry, Ben. Visualizing Data. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2008.
Greenberg, Ira. Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art. Berkeley, CA: Friends of Ed, an Apress Co, 2007.
Igoe, Tom. Making Things Talk. Make: projects. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2007.
Reas, Casey, and Ben Fry. Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007.
Shiffman, Daniel. Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier, 2008.

Miami University is generously funding a series of Processing development workshops. The first workshop took place from 18 to 21 September. Ben Fry, Dan Shiffman, Ira Greenberg, and myself worked together to improve the examples, start a series of tutorials, and work through some conceptual issues related to adding a new PShape class. Additional topics included the future of Processing’s libraries and other implementations of Processing (C++, Ruby, Python, etc.) Ira Greenberg, an associate professor at Miami and author of “Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art”, got this started and we’re very grateful for the support of the Interactive Media Studies (IMS) program, directed by Glenn Platt. The next Oxford Project will take place from 20 to 23 November.