Changing Tides

Today I reorganised my Processing source code directory. I had mixed lots of examples from other people in with my projects.

I thought that everything needed to be in the main Processing directory, but I’ve realised that the Processing IDE is clever enough to work with sub-directories. So I’ve moved all the sample code into some ‘examples’ directories.

I used the ‘Versions’ SVN client for Mac (http://versionsapp.com) to move everything around in my repository and then update my local copy. It was very easy - even though I can still only use my right hand.

‘Versions’ has the clearest user interface of the SVN clients that I’ve tried, it makes using SVN very easy and quick.

• Gerd Arntz - Isotype signs
  Gerd Arntz designed around 4000 signs, which symbolized key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy, for the visual language Isotype.
  (tags: visualization symbols)

• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
  Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
  (tags: visualization typography)

I had a play with it using the text from the Wikipedia page about Visualization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visualization_(graphic)):

Click on the image to go to the Wordle website for the full sized version.

It was fun to play with the presentation options, and the results are decorative, but I’m not sure how useful they are in conveying information.

Today the SmashingMagazine announced that it has won the ‘Most Valuable Design Website’ category at Webinale 2008.  The magazines chief editor, Vitaly Freidman, gave a talk and has made the slides available on the SmashingMagazine freebies page (at the bottom):

On May 26-28 Vitaly Friedman, the chief-editor of Smashing Magazine, was in Karlsruhe attending the event. He has also given a talk “Designtrends 2008: What’s Next?”. You can download the slides of the talk below. 

Designtrends 2008: What’s Next? covers current trends in web-development and examples of modern web-design (.pdf, 10 Mb)

They give an interesting snapshot of current trends in web design.

• NodeBox | Home
  NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie. NodeBox is free and well-documented.
  (tags: visualization python)
• Avogadro - Molecular Editor
  Avogadro is an advanced molecular editor designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It offers flexible rendering and a powerful plugin architecture.
  (tags: chemistry visualization python)

• SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software
  SAGE: Open Source Mathematics Software.
  Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab

• Lily | Visual Programming for the Mozilla Framework
  Lily is a browser-based, visual programming environment that lets people create programs graphically, without writing code, by drawing connections between data, images, sounds, text and graphics. (interface looks a bit like Max/MSP)
  (tags: programming)

I finally decided to buy Pukka. I kept trying it out, and not quite deciding to buy it. But two things happened today that made up my mind.

One was I discovered that as well as being fantastic for posting to del.icio.us, it also gives me access to all my del.icio.us bookmarks, organised by tag!  By adding this to the Mac status bar at the top of the screen it gives me quick access to my del.icio.us bookmarks.

The other was reading the post in Justin Miller’s blog (the creator of Pukka) about “The Price of Free” which discusses the reluctance of people to pay for utility programs.  Pukka was discussed favourably on a podcast, but the announcer was saying it should be free, not shareware.

I realised that $14.95USD (which was $16.27AUD) was a reasonable price for the time Pukka will save me and it will encourage me to make better use of del.icio.us.  And hopefully paying for it will encourage Justin and others like him to keep providing great applications.