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.

The folks from 1scale1, a research group from Malmo University, Sweden have put together a great program of workshops this summer. They say:

Between August 18th and 29th we will run 7 simultaneous workshops in open software and hardware for designers and artists at our studio… Themes will be related to either physical computing or computer vision. There are both basic and advanced workshops that vary in length between 2 and 3 days.

The complete information is available on their website.

I’m around during the first week to give a presentation about Processing and to start work on some secret Processing-related projects. Thanks to all of the organizers and to David Cuartielles for the invitation.

From 7 to 11 July 2008, I gave a workshop at the newly inaugurated Fondazione Claudio Buziol in Venice, Italy. The Fondazione is located in the stunning Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana (built in 1751), which faces the Grand Canal. The student’s wrote software in Processing that related to the dual themes of Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” and the city of Venice. With one exception, I was working with students of Gillian Crampton Smith and Philip Tabor from the IUAV University of Venice. (Gillian is the former director of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and the Computer Related Design course at the Royal College of Art, London. I was a professor in Ivrea from 2001 to 2003 and it was wonderful to see her again.) There are more photos on Flickr.

Pixelache 2008 asked a few grassroots initiatives about their organizational strategies. They have documented survey answers Processing, Arduino, Dorkbot, and Boxwars UK on their site.

The questions were:
- What are the aims of the project you are involved in?
- How is the project organized?
- How do you support the work financially and what impact does this have on your project?
- What do you feel you have achieved, and what are the problems you face?
- Are there any past projects/models which have inspired you?
- What are your hopes for the future?

Ben Fry and I answered the questions about Processing.

The NODE08 forum for digital arts takes place in Frankfurt from 5 -12 April 2008. I’m giving a lecture called “Form + Code” on Tuesday and teaching a workshop on making prints with Processing the next day. The lecture is about a new book that I’m currently preparing with Chandler McWilliams (more about that later). Check out the complete schedule for more information.