Coding Visual Tools and Methods

For any visualist out there who is on the constant look out for new ideas and methods to approach his or her production, – coding tools offer an amazing supplement of options, interactivity and point of difference.

Processing
There is an obvious interests among many to pursuit the ropes of Processing.org which has risen in popularity due to its open source approach and fairly streamlined learning curve for many. The ongoing Processingblogs.org happens to be one of the most amazing blogs going on in regards of everything Processing with a serious dash of talent coming through in that direction and brilliant examples of its applications and motion. You won’t have to go far to discover many amazing opportunities this multi platform multimedia can bring as community involvement is strong, tutorials and code available is readily shared by many and libraries are plenty.

ContextFree
With this in mind sometimes you may seek additional features which can come handy such as direct Rendering or recording of your sketches. In my recent search for something of this nature I came across- this software coding visual tool environment called ContextFree.

“Context Free is a program that generates images from written instructions called a grammar. The program follows the instructions in a few seconds to create images that can contain millions of shapes.” While you can study numerous examples through its excellent Gallery, on top of that you may render your grammar into a full working motion clips which
are created with easy and to your preference. (* Note: I found ‘Animation’ to work best with Quicktime in Settings).

Fluxus 0.16
From piksel.no news blog. >> New Release: fluxus 0.16

And now for another Live Coding Visual tool: Fluxus!

Fluxus is a tool for rapid prototyping, livecoding and playing/learning environment for 3D graphics, sound and games. Extends PLT Scheme with graphical commands and can be used within it’s own livecoding environment or from within the DrScheme IDE.

“act of a flowing; a continuous moving on or passing by, as of a flowing
stream; a continuous succession of changes”

Chunky new stuff with its new release:

* New truetype font primitive, with 3D extruding and poly conversion
* Perlin and Simplex noise functions
* Tiled framedump for rendering insane resolutions
* New example games, space invaders and missile command!
* Lots of fixes and improvements, particularly in fluxa – the synth server.
* A new fluxus manual:
http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/files/fluxus-documentation.pdf
* A new website:
http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus

It’s still best to be oldskool and build it from source:
http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/files/fluxus-0.16rc1.tar.gz

But there are a few more packages and OSX apps available nowadays:
http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/packages/