Blog – OpenProcessing

I wanted to give a quick plug to a great tool that allows you to see any source code on OpenProcessing in various formats:

OpenProcessing Source Reader by Emoc

This great tool allows you to see the source code of a sketch in a single page, using whether raw text, geshi or syntax highlighter formats. You can also generate the source code as a PDF file from this tool! Emoc also made it easy to use this tool through its URL: just add the visualID of the sketch to the end of the url, as in http://emoc.org/opcode/2292 or http://emoc.org/opcode/2292pdf. Check it out!

Rhizome just announced the winner of the Tiny Sketch competition, an open challenge to artists and programmers to create the most compelling creative work possible with the programming language Processing using 200 characters or less. The submission and voting phases are over and we are proud to announce that the winning sketch, as determined by Rhizome’s members, is Driving through Iceland by dotlassie.

Driving through Iceland by dotlassie

As OpenProcessing and Rhizome, we would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in Tiny Sketch — it was a real success and we couldn’t have pulled it off without your support. The collection will be on permanent display in two locations; it will exist as a closed archive containing all of the entries that were submitted to the original contest in Rhizome’s ArtBase, and as an open collection at OpenProcessing where people can continue to submit sketches that follow the Tiny Sketch rules. I will open the collection for new submissions, to be collected under Tiny Sketch concept as soon as possible (once I organize all the sketches submitted for the competition).

Phew! What an awesome experience this was!
Tiny Sketch competition that is produced in collaboration with Rhizome.org and OpenProcessing is now closed for submissions, and the voting begun at the Rhizome website for Rhizome members! If you are not already a member of Rhizome, now it is a great opportunity to be one; then as a Rhizome member, you can use Rhizome’s voting pages to vote the best Tiny Sketches!
Remember that your Rhizome membership contributions are going to support this non-profit foundation that is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology. Also, all the sketches submitted will be archived and exhibited in Rhizome Artbase.

–! VOTE NOW !–

By the way, see one of my favorite Tiny Sketches:
My Heart Will Go On by Luis Gonzalez



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Rhizome and OpenProcessing brings you a very interesting challenge to win $200?

Can you make a cool Processing sketch under 200 characters?

Recently, we "the creatives" started thinking how we can make interesting stuff out of Twitter’s famous 140 characters: some of us started Twitter Opera, some others tweeted from Mars, some babies kick-tweeted from womb, even plants started to tweet when they needed water. As challenge-loving Processing users, we thought that would have been interesting to see if we could code tweet-size sketches. These guys were already playing around with that idea, well, before you know it, Tiny Sketch Competition was born!

After some thoughts, we thought 140 would fall short for your limitless creative horizons, so keeping the limit at 200, we are inviting you to warp-speed your brain cells to see how you can fit that cool sketch in 200 characters.

Do you have some short sketches that you left aside? You think you are a master of find/replace feature? Can you find hacks to shorten some if/else statements? Show us!

Submit your sketch to Tiny Sketch Competition!

I’ve just implemented Gravatar support in OpenProcessing: Now you will be able to set your own profile picture, or simply use what you already have in Gravatar. Gravatar provides a central resource for profile images that can be used in different website frameworks including Wordpress, Movabletype, Drupal.

If you don’t have any profile picture set up with your email at Gravatar.com yet, upload one now! Once you update your profile in Gravatar, your profile image will automatically be updated on OpenProcessing, as well as other websites that uses Gravatar.

Also on another note: Golan Levin, a great individual and educator within the Processing community gave a very inspirational performance/speech on TED. In his 2004 performance, he used the application that he wrote, which translated gestural drawings into very interesting loops of music. Please check out this video from 2004 for some high-fuel inspiration for your own projects. Below is his recent talk from February 2009, with great examples of interactive art:

I recently received an email from a user who would like to use some sketches in a gallery space, on how to give attribution to the owners of these works. It made me realize that it is not necessarily clear how to do this on the website, and according to Creative Commons, anyone should attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. As OpenProcessing being the licensor in this case, I would like to provide such information in the footer/every sketch page, I thought of this text to be used for attribution:

%Title% by %fullname%, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
Work: http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=%1234%
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Of course, because the license is share-alike, any alteration, transformation, or build upon this work should be distributed only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

Please help me to refine this text by commenting on this post, if you think any additions, updates necessary. I will put a similar text to the website as soon as possible, and I will update it per your feedback/discussion under this post. Thank you, again..

Yes, I am optimistic this time! Your Swedish, Norwegian, Turkish, Greek, etc.. names should show up all OK with all the actual characters!

Because of the wrong character encoding, names and titles on the website (like Aşçıoğlu, Ilgın, Øyvind Åsane, Mayré Martínez) was being displayed in variously different ways (like A?ç?o?lu, ?lg?n, Martínez)..

If your name currently doesn’t look right (or your sketch titles), please edit it once more, so that it can be saved to database correctly! I am so sorry that you have to do these once again, because I was initially stupid enough not to realize the problem with the character encoding initially.

Please, please, let me know if you still have problems, so that I can work on it! You should be able to see all the characters fine.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to create a post in response to Charles Dietrich’s comment on the previous post, and I am taking that comment and conversation here so that we can have a more focused discussion on this issue. His comment was:

Since you brought up the license issue, I’d love it if the user could specify the license they want to use, including ‘All rights reserved’, ‘BSD’, and ‘GPL’ for code (which pretty much covers the bases, since none of these things are libraries) and the licenses that Flickr lets you choose among for content (or a subset including ‘All rights reserved’ and ‘creative commons sharealike’, since it’s a big list):

None (All rights reserved)
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons
Attribution Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons
Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons

I guess the big change that I’m asking for is the right to say ‘All rights reserved’.

Thanks for your response on this. Actually, I have been thinking about the ‘all rights reserved’ option for a while, and sincerely, couldn’t find a definite conclusion on what to do.

As you mentioned, Flickr (the website I am taking a lot of inspiration on handling of shared creativity) provides those options, and it wouldn’t be hard to do it on OpenProcessing. And providing people options to select their preferred license really make sense. However, couple of things making my feet itch:

• -> An All-rights-reserved (ARR) sketch doesn’t really make sense if it is provided with its source code option, so I think, a user who wants to ARR his/her sketch wouldn’t prefer to display the source code either. This makes sense, and I totally understand it. But as a result, I can imagine OpenProcessing becoming a deposit for interesting Java Applets, but much value being lost… From the comments, I observe that sketches really become valuable along their source code; an example comment I like seeing is “Very nice sketch with very short code!”. What makes a Processing sketch different from a flash animation is its source code approach. And I am trying to keep OpenProcessing a place to make that difference obvious, get prospective processing users interested and encourage them to learn by going through the code.
• -> Without source code being shared, I believe the website wouldn’t be any different from a Flash exhibition website, from the point of someone who doesn’t know about processing…
• -> Also, I believe this community had ever been better since Ben Fry and Casey Reas (and many supporters like Daniel Shiffman) had strictly tried to keep things open source and CC. You know, the Processing application is also under Creative Commons. They don’t restrict people to share their sketches under CC, which of course gives us a lot freedom. But at this point, if OpenProcessing allows for ARR sketches, I would feel that my efforts on this project wouldn’t return that much value other than providing a service for people to exhibit their sketches without any intention to improve the community.

Let me know what you guys think. This is definitely debatable, and can be tried; I can try to provide such a feature for testing purposes, to see how it goes. But, my worries are in the paragraph above. So let me know what you think.

Fixed some issues with embed function; so should be working fine right now. Below is an example, and let me know if you are having issues… Sorry if your previous trials on embedding your sketches didn’t quite work… All should be fine now.

How do you embed a sketch to your blog?

Click on Embed Code to see the code for the sketch, and copy/paste the embed code to you blog in HTML view.

Land is drawn with Perlin Noise. Cycle is PShape svg. Use ‘d’ to accelerate. Use ‘a’ to slow down. Press space to turn debug visualization on. This version is infinite. Below is an example:

Soo, finally I stopped drinking, headache is gone, so I can write about the recent updates. Let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, etc…

• The look: Some images, new layout, new icons, and everything centered; no more neck pain out of looking for hours at the sketches aligned to the left!
• Better interaction design/user experience: including the navigation, I updated many tiny miny parts to improve the user experience. This currently includes viewing, browsing, and uploads. Details below.
• Awesome new browse page: large thumbnails (now that you got why I was asking for 100×100 pixel thumbs, right??), default sorting by date (always hated paging navigation), crazy tag cloud focusing only the top ~100.
• Blinking “upload thumbnail” link, so that you wouldn’t forget!
• uploaded thumbnail automatically resized to 100×100 pixels, so it doesn’t matter how big it is initially… Hence less pain for you…
• Auto-recognition (we call it “regex” on this side) of the size of the sketch -> more works-when-uploaded sketches!
• Auto-recognition (regex yo!) of imported libraries, so that you don’t have to type manually.
  • These two features above uses the index.html that gets generated via Processing once you export your sketch. So, if you don’t upload an index.html, things might not end up well..
• Official Twitting Channel of OpenProcessing: follow the updates -> http://twitter.com/openprocessing
• Fullscreen source code view!
• Rss subscriptions are validated rss v2.0 right now. Not that old crappy piece of xml files..
• UTF8 native descriptions and user names. if you see that your name/description got screwed up, just retype it, then it should be fine. Some characters that used to look fine previously kind of got screwed after converting to UTF8. Sorry for this, but you might simply update it; let me know if it doesn’t work. btw, Hello Sweden!! You can type your names with your swedish characters now!
• also many other css, code, database simplification.. faster loading times, less pain for my brain..

But, besides all these updates, the big one is:

• Double license for sketches: Creative Commons Share Alike, and Creative Commons GNU-GPL.

THIS IS IMPORTANT DEAL, please read it and I would appreciate your feedback on this:

I have been doing extensive research on these open source licenses lately, and after all that browsing, talking and consulting the wise men, including Creative Commons people, I decided that just GNU GPL is not enough to license Processing sketches. GNU GPL is really focuses on source code of software, which is good fit to protect the source code of the sketches. However, it doesn’t do any good if someone wants to record the video of your sketch, or get a screenshot. Since, the outcome, product, whatever you may call it, is a piece of creative element (generative art, visualization, etc..), Creative Commons Sharealike is the best fit.

So in addition to Creative Commons GNU GPL, your sketches are also licensed with Creative Commons Sharealike. You can find the human readable forms here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/