Writing

Processing 0143 and a status report

Just posted Processing 0143 to the download page. This is not yet the stable release, so please read revisions.txt, which describes the signficant changes in the releases since 0135 (the last “stable” release, and the current default download).

I’ve also posted a status report:

Some updates from the Processing Corporation’s east coast tower high rise offices in Cambridge, MA.

We’re working to finish Processing 1.0. The target date is this Fall, meaning August or September. We’d like to have it done as early as possible so that Fall classes can make use of it. In addition to the usual channels, we have a dozen or so people who are helping out with getting the release out the door. We’ll unmask these heros at some point in the future.

I’m also pleased to announce that I’m able to focus on Processing full time this Summer with the help of a stipend provided by Oblong Industries. They’re the folks behind the gesture-controlled interface you see in Minority Report. (You can find more about them with a little Google digging.) They’re funding us because of their love of open source and they feel that Processing is an important project. As in, there are no strings attached to the funding, and Processing is not being re-tooled for gesture interfaces. We owe them our enormous gratitude.

The big things for 1.0 include the Tools menu, better compile/run setup (what you see in 0136+), bringing back P2D, perhaps bringing back P3D with anti-aliasing, better OpenGL support, better library support, some major bug fixes (outstanding threading problems and more).

If you have a feature or bug that you want fixed in time for 1.0, now is the time to vote by making sure that it’s listed at http://dev.processing.org/bugs.

I’ll try to post updates more frequently over the next few weeks.

Monday, July 28, 2008 | processing  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.